Rows, racism claims and tax rises: The truth about Reform councils

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30and we calibrate every component of your furnace. So call today. For all the right reasons, call 866-4SEASONS. Hi, this is Dave Musial, owner of 4Seasons Heating, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, and Electric. When emergencies happen, who do you call? Broken pipe? Power outage? Furnace failure? No hot water? The answer's always the same. Call 4Seasons. We guarantee same-day service and installation on all heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical needs with no extra charge for nights, weekends, or holidays. That's why over 30 ,000 customers have given us a five-star Google review. For all the right reasons, call 866-4-SEASONS.

1:15After his historic win in local elections, Nigel Farage said, if you want to know how reform will run Britain, look at your local council. Critics say it's all rouse, racism and tax rises, but we did a deep dive to find out the truth. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominey.

1:44Tim, it was not quite a year ago now. As we look forward to the next local elections, it's perhaps also worthwhile reflecting on the last set and how well reform did. Now, do you remember on that jubilant night how happy Nigel Farage was with his party? This is reform quake. That's what's going on across the country today. There's a silent majority that believes in the things that we believe in. Westminster, and dare I say it, much of the media, is out of touch with where this country is moving. I think that's what today's election results prove. Nobody in Westminster will learn any lessons from this in the short term.

2:19But I tell you what, this is happening. And Faraj went so far as to say if he want to know what reform will be like in number 10, watch what it does in local government. And that was after reform had won control. OK, some councils are majorities, some councils are minorities, but they won control of 12 different councils. Now, nowhere have they been more successful than in Staffordshire when reform won 49 of 62 seats. I just cite that as the first example because that was a Tory stronghold for years and years. There were 16 years of unbroken Conservative rule in Staffordshire. And you remember the rhetoric around what they were going to do to these councils.

3:00So they were going to bring in their own version of DOGE, President Trump's government efficiency saving drive. They were calling it DOLGE, the Department of Local Government Efficiencies. They were going to scrap all DEI. They were going to scrap what they described as woke spending. They were going to axe any net zero policies. And they were also going to do things like banning council workers from working from home. OK, but I think it's just worth just focusing on Staffordshire for just a moment. It's had a few issues over the last 12 months, and we're going to use this episode to analyse just how well or badly have these different reform councils done.

3:38as we look into May 7th with some degree of trepidation and excitement because obviously they are going to be quite seminal, not just for reform, but possibly for the future of the Prime Minister's tenure. And clearly he knows that too because he used PMQs last week as an opportunity to go after reform's record in local government. Well, can I extend my sympathy to residents in Lancashire who have been utterly failed by their reform county council? And, Mr Speaker, it's the same picture across the country. In Kent, reform are cutting social care. In Worcestershire, they're hiking council tax by 9%, despite promising lower taxes.

4:18In Staffordshire, the scandals and infighting have been so bad, the reform are on their fourth leader in 11 months. It's a warning to the whole country. Reform have nothing to offer but chaos, grievance and division. in Staffordshire let me just give you a few examples to kind of counter the promise well stability not so much they've had four different leaders in 11 months you'll remember that Farage launched that campaign in Staffordshire he was in a JCB he was at JCB's headquarters because Bamford Lord Bamford who owns JCB had been a Tory donor remember when we went to the reform conference and there were tractors everywhere yeah and suddenly there was a kind of split allegiances.

5:01So he's in this JCB doing a little bit of a kind of Boris piece of performance art where he says, you know, we're going to smash the system apart and change everything. Well, as all reform councillors have found, there is a massive gulf between what you can campaign on and how you govern. And what's happened in many of these areas, and we'll go into more granular detail in just a moment, for instance, in Staffordshire, well, actually, they haven't really been able to make many changes along DEI or net zero lines. No people haven't been banned from working from home. What they've come up against is the reality of the statutory duties they have to perform as councillors.

5:43And that is to ring fence and protect adult social care and ring fence and protect children's social care. This is stuff that central government has farmed out to local government at the same time during the 14 years of Tory government, that local government has been limited in how much money it could raise and has been starved of funds from central government. So they've inherited the reality of austerity at a local level. Now, the Financial Times, journalists there good at maths, totted it up and tried to work out how much had reform-run councils promised in efficiency savings since they took power.

6:18And they calculated that the figure was around 365 million. Now, the automatic assumption, Tim, would be if you've made these councils leaner and meaner, council tax must come down. That would be the conclusion. It hasn't happened. In fact, the reverse has happened as reform has met reality. So let's have a look at some of the reform majority councils and how much council tax has gone up. Derbyshire, 4.9%, Kent, 3.99%, Lancashire, 3.8%, Lincolnshire, 2.9%, Nottinghamshire, 3.99%, Staffordshire, 3.99%, Durham, 1.99%, North Northamptonshire, 4.99%, West Northamptonshire, 4.95%. And of its minority-run councils, Leicestershire, 2.99%, Warwickshire, 4.4%.

7:16And then there is the case of Worcestershire Reform Minority-Run Council, which has raised its tax by the highest amount in the entire country. The figure there is 8.99%. And to do that, you need special permission to raise it above the official limit of 4.99%. It should also be noted that the Reform Council there was pushing for a 10 % rise. Right. And it was settled on 9%. Now, to be fair to Reform Tim, they did not say before they took control of these councils that they would bring the council tax down. Nigel Farage is always at pains to repeat that line because people have suggested, oh, well, in the contract with the people that you published ahead of the general election, you were making all sorts of tax-cutting promises that you've since abandoned, and that was on a national level.

8:08So there was always this assumption, well, if you're claiming to make these councils more efficient and get rid of so-called woke spending, then obviously bills are going to come down. And in fact, the reform leader even had a row with Beth Rigby at Sky News about it. You're pledging to cut fuel duty and pressing the government to do so, but you also pledged, or some of your candidates did, to cut council tax when they were trying to win elections at local level and that's gone up. So how can anyone trust anything you say? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Never once last year in the county campaign, including here in Derbyshire, did I ever say that we cut council.

8:47But some of your candidates did and they haven't. No, no, no, no, no. Our literature... It's like what the people in Kent said, because they're putting it up. You can listen if you want to, or we can jack it in now. It's entirely up to you. I'm listening. We sent out literature with national messaging, which said, end net zero, appropriately. Stop the boats and cut taxes. That was national messaging. On individual county messaging, we said nothing of the kind. I also think some of these tax rises, although every penny feels like a pint of my own blood drawn from my body, Some of these are in line with inflation and are not historically very high.

9:30But they highlight the problem for reform. That at every turn they're promising a revolution and yet reality dictates that they need to just have a degree of continuity. Well, isn't it the case that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose? Yes. And the reality is, as you've said, is they have certain obligations they have to meet. They only have a certain amount of money. But I guess they would say what they have done is said what they absolutely won't do, which is spend money on wacky diversity stuff or the environment. Sure. But then when you ask them to list their successes so far, and this is on a national level, they come out with this kind of stuff.

10:10We've got a strategic roadmap. We've identified 15 million for repairs. We've got a library campaign. We're going to put more staff into children's services. And I make that point because of the statutory duty to protect that adult and child care spending, actually they're very limited in what they can do. So this whole notion of, well, if you fill in more potholes, then Nigel Farage is more likely to become prime minister. To a certain extent, that may be true. But this is the other problem for reform. We're scrutinizing them. The left is scrutinizing them. the right to scrutinising them, not least the Tories, because they're so angry that they've lost control of these councils to councillors they consider to be amateurs.

10:56Much has been made of the lack of experience of a lot of these councillors. That's obviously one of Nigel Farage's key pledges, right? We're going to transform things because look at the current incumbents. They can't run a bath. We're going to get captains of industry in and have them run things. Well, no, the other problem for some of these reform councils is that they've been mired in controversy. Well, let's talk about that amateur. because I am going to interview later on Lyndon Kemkaren, who runs Kent County Council, and they've had some very public blow-ups. There was a famous telephone conference in which she told someone to effing suck it up.

11:30Right. Sounds like one of our news conferences. Five of their councillors were expelled and have joined a sort of embryonic restore group, although it's a drop in the ocean because they control the vast majority of councillors. In West Northamptonshire, two councillors resigned this month, leaving reform with the minimum number of councillors needed to maintain overall control there. Leicestershire has gone through two full cabinet reshuffles in five months. And George Finch, the boy who, remember, we went to interview. He's 19, but he, yeah. He's 20 now. OK, fine. So he's a man. He's a man. We interviewed him as a teenager.

12:04He's become a man. He narrowly survived a no confidence vote by just one vote after opposition councillors said he had, quote, abused the office of leader. Now, I want to offer a contrary interpretation of this, which is that actually, given that the vast, vast majority of a very large number of reform councillors were elected and had never been in office before, I actually regard this turnover as surprisingly low. Yes. I'm surprised there aren't more splits and divisions. And there's a case for saying that actually reform has done better, particularly in minority control councils, of keeping its stuff together than we might otherwise have expected an entirely new right wing party to do.

12:44Yes. Also, one always has to be wary when picking up on local stories of council spats that local politics is bitter, unpleasant. And opposition parties will always tell you that the person running the council at the moment is the worst council I've ever known. Yes, I know. I suppose that happens all the time. I remember from my local reporting days that some of the japes and hijinks that occurred at the decorum borough council planning control meeting and all that. I mean, I went to parish council meetings as a young cub reporter, looking at these people thinking they're all absolutely balmy.

13:20They're having hour and a half long debates about the bus stop in Burkhamstead. County Council recently declared in the chamber an emergency in asylums, in people coming across the channel, which is a nonsense policy. There's nothing they can do about it. It's a national question, not a Kent question. So it was pure grandstanding, but equally grandstanding was the opposition parties got up and marched out of the chamber. And it's that old thing of why is it so bitter? Because the stakes are so low. But normally those stories would be confined to local reporting, right? They might appear on a Facebook page somewhere on the local newspaper.

13:56Whereas now national journalists are searching them out, amplifying them and using them as evidence that this is why you can't trust the country with Nigel Farage. OK, so in Staffordshire alone, there's been a series of so-called controversies, Tim. We've had Ian Cooper, who was initially the first leader, resigning in December for a comment on his social media that said, quote, no foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in Parliament. Chris Large, who was leader for just seven days, was investigated over racist posts made on his TikTok account. He denied posting them, saying his account had been hacked.

14:32Then in November, Peter Mason, the cabinet member for Strategic Highways, was found to have made several offensive posts on X in 2023 and 24, including one about, quote, a statue of a fat-arsed black woman. The council's standards team received 134 complaints about reform councillors, the vast majority of which were made by the public and related to media, social media conduct. The Tories received 14 between 2024 and 2025. So that looks at the scale of it. Look, it could be as well, and we've seen this a lot, play out on a local level and national level, that obviously opponents to reform will be trying to dig dirt wherever they can.

15:12But other areas have also been plagued by a degree of controversy. Is it just that we're shining a greater spotlight on these councils and finding stuff out? Or as has ever been the case with reform, they've still got serious deficiencies in their vetting programme. I just think a party of right-wing amateurs is likely to contain a lot of controversy. In the same way, a party of far left-wing amateurs, the Green Party, contains a lot of controversy. The kind of people who go into politics via the Conservatives or the Lib Dems are people who have been doing it since the age of 14 and exercise this incredible degree of self-restraint because they're all thinking, someday I could be prime minister.

15:47I know. So they don't ever go on Twitter. Whereas Reform, they've just elected accidentally Bill Blox from Medway, who's a real man who said things are stupid stuff online because he's 60 and he just hasn't thought he was ever going to be councillor. Fair enough. Let me give you some other examples. In Nottinghamshire last August, the county council leader Mick Barton was heavily criticised after he barred Nottinghamshire live journalists from council events. Can I just say those local journalists should be grateful? to never have to sit in a local council meeting ever again. Goodness me. In West Northamptonshire, two reform councillors resigned, one citing safeguarding concerns, the other claiming unfair treatment.

16:31In North Northamptonshire, we've got reform accused by the Conservatives of pursuing a, quote, socialist agenda by introducing a 100 % council tax premium on second homes, a policy Nigel Farage himself had called madness an extortion. But it's not all doom and gloom because there has also been a war on woke. Warwickshire reform won a battle to ban all flags other than the county, union and St. George's flag outside the council headquarters. And the same policy has been introduced in Kent, where even the Ukrainian flag was taken down. And also in Kent, the council said it has removed all transgender related books from the children's section of its libraries.

17:10Some of these victories are small, but symbolic. Crucially, though, they're cheap. taking down a flag and putting up a county one is very cheap. But I think when reform sold us on war on woke and DEI, whether I can find the precise quote of them saying this or not, I intuited, I inferred that they were saying that vast sums of money were being wasted by woke liberals, and that you could balance the budget, spend more on good stuff, and maybe even in the long run cut some of our taxes by ending this nonsense. And I think it probably turns out that it's just not there. Tim, you're about to jump on a train to go to Kent to see your own council leader.

17:54Let's be honest, this is personal for you. It is. And you're going to interrogate Lyndon Kamkaren on why your council tax bill has gone up.

18:05Lyndon, thank you very much for joining us on The Daily Tea. So this is a very personal interview for me because I have received my tax bill for this year, my council tax bill. I hope you're pleased with it. Have you noticed a slight lowering since last year? Has it really gone down? Yes, it has gone down, Tim. OK, you have to talk me through that because I am paying for a two-bed basement flat,£1 ,700 a year to live in West Kent. And that's after a reduction because I live alone. I also, I will add, for our older listeners, pay my mother's council tax. And I can tell you that's very, very high because she's in a detached house.

18:43Now, outside on the road, there are potholes. What the hell's going on? What am I paying for? Why are my bills up? And why are you raising tax this year by 3.99 %? So two things. Firstly, aren't you a very good boy to be paying your mother's council tax? I think so. Very good. Secondly, you live in the most expensive part of Kent. Right. Any other questions? Right. So that's my district and town which are screwing me over, right, rather than KCC. But it is true that after you were elected, landside election last year, you raised tax by the maximum amount last year. And this year you're raising it under the maximum amount of 4.99%, but still 3.9%.

19:21That is a tax rise. Well, the Conservatives raised it last year by the maximum amount, 4.99%. You're absolutely right. We took over in May, so the council tax had already been decided for that year. This year we got to make our own decisions. and do you know what was interesting when we took over obviously there was a horrendous financial mess left behind by the conservatives here and they had baked in a maximum rise of 4.99 percent again this year so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to keep that 4.99 percent the maximum we're legally allowed to raise it without going um to the to the people um but we decided not to do that tim because i was absolutely determined to manage this council in a different way from how it had been managed 28 years before our time here.

20:06So we approached the council tax rise from not assuming we tax to the max and spend accordingly. We thought, no, I want to get that 1 % off, crucial 1 % off the maximum rise to go for 3.99 if I possibly could. How did you pull it off? Well, I pulled it off in a number of ways. So every 1 % that we put on the flat council tax rate is 10 million pounds in our budget. So I knew we'd have to find an extra 10 million pounds of in-year savings to allow us to knock off that 1%. So I tasked my DOLE team, my Department of Local Government Efficiency, I said, go through this council and find me that money.

20:46And they did. They didn't find me 10 million, they found me 14 million of extra savings. That's on top of the 100 million in-year savings that we had to find to balance the budget. And we found an extra 14, which allowed me to make your council tax less expensive than it would have been if the Tories had still been in power. And where have those savings come from? Did you find it in DEI or in what? We found savings from everywhere. So the biggest ones, we scrapped the climate emergency that had been declared in 2019. That has allowed us to do several things. But on the money front, it's allowed us to not spend nearly 40 million that was budgeted in over the next few years on net zero initiatives.

21:29So that was 40 million that was no longer going to be spent. And you're not cutting things here that in the long run may have saved money, like, I don't know, cladding or solar panels or something like that. So what was it that they were spending to tackle the climate emergency? Oh, it's a whole raft of things like replacing the entire fleet of KCC vehicles with electric vehicles all in one fell swoop. That's expensive. We've just said we're not doing that. We'll replace vehicles as and when they need replacing. Making modifications to buildings that we own. We don't need to do those things either.

21:57We're not moving house either because this building we're sitting in now is due to be sold. And we were meant to move into the red brick building that's just behind you out of that window over there. That was going to cost about 14 million. And I just thought, well, we've got local government reorganisation coming down the track. Who knows if we're even going to exist in a couple of years time? What a waste of money. adult social care now we inherited an adult social care budget that was spiraling wildly out of control it's quite frightening we only got our first um our first figures in august so we took the reins in may we had to wait until the q1 figures came out in august and we almost fainted you know adult social care was was a problem it was already i think it was heading for it was 20 something million overspent and that was the first quarter so predicting you know the end of the year It could have been£80 million overspent.

22:44So we had to get a grip of that immediately because that could have sunk this entire council. I don't know what the Tories were doing, but they had not got a grip of adult social care. Now, it's a problem for all councils. It's not just Kent. It's a service you're obliged to provide. That's right. And this is an important one. We're not talking here about DEI. This is a serious thing one wouldn't want to see. This is really serious. These are our most elderly and vulnerable residents in Kent. However, 50 % of our Kent County Council budget is spent on 4 % of the population. Right. Adult social care.

23:1650 % of the budget on 4 % of the population. That's not right, is it? We discovered, by pulling apart adult social care in a way that it's never been done before, we discovered that Kent, the costs in Kent had risen by 80 % in the last few years of what we were paying the providers of our adult social care. Right. 80%. So we're paying more in Kent for the same services that Surrey, Sussex, all the neighboring counties are paying. But we're paying way, way more in Kent. Why is that? So in January this year, I had to have a very difficult conversation with the adult social care providers. We got them all around the table.

23:52And we did that very weird British thing where we didn't really want to talk about the money. But we had to talk about the money because we had to tell them, really, that the KCC gravy train has shrunk. Right. Because they were giving us invoices and we were paying them. So I'm not blaming anybody for this situation. Right. It just spiraled. This is a private contractor who you're using. Lots of different contractors. Lots of different contractors who provide in-home nursing, nursing and care homes, care home providers. It had just been allowed to spiral out of control. But KCC kept paying the bills.

24:24So we had to have that very awkward conversation where I had to inform them that they were very welcome to stay working with us. And we really hoped they would. but we were now operating within a completely different framework and we would decide what we were going to pay for the care. Once you have made these sorts of savings what do you do next because even if you even if you find a cheaper way in the short term of doing something you're still obliged to provide very expensive services to people so there are some local critics who've suggested this is it you have found the savings you can find and from now on you're just going have to provide those services and that might mean raising taxes.

25:04No, they're wrong, I'm afraid. So in this council, we award, I think it's about£1.5 billion worth of contracts every year. So all that has been happening up until now in a very sort of patchwork way. You know, contracts are awarded here and there and there with not much cross-checking. There was a lot of duplication going on. So we have introduced a commercial strategy to KCC. The first time it's ever been done in this building. That commercial strategy now means that every single contract needs to go through a series of checks and measures. Just today, one of my Dolge team came in and said, great news.

25:39I've just stopped. I think it was 76 million pound contract that was going to be awarded for an eight year service. Adult social care again. He said it's been flagged up because it's now going through the commercial strategy. We're not going to be awarding that contract. So 76 million pounds over the next eight years that we have stopped going out of the door. We're going to renegotiate that contract now and have a look at it in more detail to see if we can do it cheaper, maybe with a different provider. You know, maybe we don't need to award it over eight years. Maybe we can just do it over the next one year.

26:08It's things like that that have been going on again and again and again. You can see how the money flows out the door, can't you? How have you found managing a large team of people who've been elected for the first time? Now, I think you know what I'm referring to here. A video leaked of you conducting a council meeting in which you told people to effing suck it up. What was the background to that? And is this a glimpse into the reality of trying to herd reform cats? Good question. No, I think that was a glimpse into the reality that I was facing on that particular afternoon back in August, whenever it was.

26:45OK, what had been happening was somebody had got their wires crossed. Somebody on my team thought they knew something about local government reorganisation that they needed to be telling everybody about on the team. Sadly, that person had their facts wrong. So behind the scenes, I was trying to quietly correct that person and say, no, no, no. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, but it's not correct. Local government reorganisation has to happen because of this, this and this. I don't agree with it, but we have to follow the path the government has set for us. Because if we opt out, then we haven't got a seat at the table and the government will impose something on Kent and we won't have had a say in it.

27:21So I've got to play along with the government and put forward proposals. Sadly, this person wouldn't listen. They kept insisting they were right and I was wrong. So they then spent a lot of time talking to the group, trying to say the leaders got it wrong. I hadn't got it wrong. I double, double, treble, quadruple checked that I hadn't missed something. I hadn't. But sadly, when it came to that meeting, the Teams meeting, I had to call there and then. I think I was trying to have a few days off at the end of August, you know, before September got going. But I had to call a Teams meeting because you know what the WhatsApp groups are like.

27:53It was going mad. Everybody was asking questions about LGR, saying, have we got it wrong? Have we got it wrong? Because one person had been very effectively whipping everybody up behind the scenes. So I called the meeting to set a few things straight to say, look, no, this person is misguided. This is this is the law. This is what we have to do. Blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, a few people were very exercised that afternoon. One person wouldn't stop speaking. and you know what Tim I make no apologies for leading meetings in a very structured way that keeps an eye on the clock I cannot bear meetings where everybody's just allowed to waffle on yes and nobody welcome to local government not on my watch though I've got I haven't got tolerance for it as you probably gather from that meeting if somebody's being rude and they keep speaking over the chair and they won't be quiet when they're asked to be quiet once they've made their point, then yes, I'm afraid I will threaten to mute people.

28:45I will mute people, in fact. I will hit that mute button if I need to, and I make no apologies for that. On that afternoon, yes, it was unfortunate. It was unfortunate. I had to get my point across. When you're trying to control a large group, this is 56 people of virtual strangers, because none of us really knew each other before we got elected. It was a difficult situation to manage. Some reform councillors have subsequently left slash been expelled from the party and have formed their own group of independent slash restore party councillors. I believe the figure is now up to seven. What in your experience are the restore aligned councillors like to deal with?

29:26Who are these people who couldn't find a home in reform? Who are these people? Well, it's difficult to know, isn't it? Because if you judge people by how they behave in public and how they vote in the chamber, we've seen a completely inconsistent approach so far. Well to give an example, flags. Reform councils have made a big deal about insisting upon we only fly national or county flags. We don't fly political flags like Pride. And I believe there was a row over your attempts to get a Pride flag taken down from fire stations. Yes, yes. Because we own, well we, yes. In Kent, we have the Kent Fire and Rescue Service that comes under KCC.

30:06So you're right, it is our flag policy. We believe that we should fly the flag of Kent, the flag of St George and the Union flag because then everybody is included, nobody's excluded. That's the beauty of it. So the same should apply to our fire stations as well. So yes, we put forward that that policy should be applied to fire stations and one of the new restore members voted against it and voted that the pride flag should be flown on Kent fire and rescue stations. Right. I believe they said it's because they want the staff to be able to make the decision rather than having the decision imposed upon them.

30:40But that does seem to contradict the impression nationally that Restore is a party that doesn't like the bright flag. It does. It sends out a few confused signals, I think. I don't know what was going through that person's mind. I don't know. They also walked out of a debate over declaring a migration emergency in Kent. They did. That was interesting last week. The opposition decided, because they couldn't kill the motion, I think, beforehand, they decided to walk out when the motion was presented. So they did. And interestingly, the Restore group walked out alongside the Greens, the Lib Dems, the Tories and Labour.

31:17They all walked out together. And what does that tell you about what they stand for as a party? I suppose some may say that a motion on declaring a migration emergency is itself just political stunt, that you're just using the chamber. No, Tim, it's not. It's not at all. We have an emergency here in Kent. But what could passing that motion do to address it? What it does, it becomes council policy. Once we pass that motion in the chamber, once it's been democratically voted through, which it is now, I'm pleased to say, what it does, it allows me as leader to shine a spotlight on all the ways that Kent residents are having to pay disproportionately for the fact that these boats rock up on our shores.

31:51It's placing an enormous strain on our children's social services, our partner agencies like police, NHS, on our schools, on our care system. And it's extraordinary. We worked it out that Kent households are being charged£600 per household per year to pay for the associated costs of asylum seekers migrant benefits. £600, that's a lot of money. Nobody voted for this. Who else is going to speak up for the residents of Kent if I don't? Last time you spoke to us, you said you would stop the council from paying for migrants to learn English as a second language. Have you succeeded in that? I believe I have, yes.

32:28right really that's definitely happened that's no longer being i need to check right before somebody goes away and finds me finds me lacking in that but yes that was absolutely my intention i remember i had a bit of a ding dong with camilla over that didn't i because she said well how dare you why can't you teach these people english well why can't they learn english for themselves well i suppose because the argument is is it's about helping them to integrate and if the party is saying we demand the policy of integration but it won't help people to do it by paying for the lessons then that's contradictory personal responsibility tim i know but it's something we need more of in this country.

32:58Right. But a young migrant who's turned up on our shores and doesn't have much money and, of course, isn't even allowed to work if they're banned from working while they're going through an asylum. Why are they here? Why have they left France in the first place? Well, France isn't at war, is it, the last time I looked? Right. OK. They don't just have to come from there. Anyone who has a normal asylum route into this country. What is a normal asylum route into this country? Well, Ukraine or Hong Kong would be. Right. OK. But they are automatically recognized as being asylum seekers. But this is a circular argument because part of the problem is that there aren't other routes available to them, which is why they end up coming across the channel.

33:36Does this county council personally finance, for instance, the lifeboats? What, you mean the RNLI lifeboats? Yeah. Well, no, it's a charity, isn't it? The RNLI. Right. So again, there is people who are choosing to spend their money to help people who are trying to seek asylum in this country. Have you spoken to any RNLI people recently? No, I have not, no. I would suggest you take the daily tea, maybe, somewhere, and get someone anonymously to speak to you about how they really feel about being used as a taxi service for migrants. I'm sure a lot of them are not very happy. I'm sure they're very happy to rescue people at sea.

34:09Well, at least they're talking to rescue people at sea. I don't know if taxi service is quite the right way of describing pulling someone out of the waves. But anyway... Well, let's talk about that just for a moment, if you don't mind, because the RNLI is run by volunteers who have to fit in being an RNLI person around their lives and their families and their jobs. They're not designed to be called out day after day after day after day after day to pick up 50-odd people. That's not what they're there for. They're designed to go and help the odd fisherman or the odd yachtsperson who's got into trouble.

34:35What do you think that's doing to the morale of the people who volunteer for that fine, fine charity? Because it really is a fine charity. As of November 2025, you were looking at an overspend of 46.5 million up from 27.9 million in the first quarter. You've given some examples have how you reduced waste and how you've kept taxes below the maximum spend. Nonetheless, that overspend does imply there's still work to do for the future. This is still a council which is spending big money. Yeah, of course there is. Of course. We need government, central government, to sort out adult social care because that has the potential to sink every single local authority in the country.

35:12Do you mean pay for it or reorganise it or what do you mean by sort it out? Well, it needs to be properly aligned with the health service. How is it fair that an elderly person, if they've got cancer, is treated in hospital bed and paid for by the NHS? If they've got dementia, which again is a medical condition, they're not entitled to any kind of help from the NHS. You know, they have to be privately funded in a nursing home. Yes. It's just not fair, is it? Yes. And that's what we pay our politicians, our central government politicians, to grapple with, you know, these hard decisions. And is this an example, perhaps, of where Reform's experiment in local government sends it messages at the top about what it should be looking at if it enters government nationally?

35:53Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, this is something we absolutely need to get a handle on because it's not going to get any better, is it? We're an ageing population. More and more of us are going to be in this awful situation. And it's horrendous. You know, it's horrendous for anybody who's dealt with an ageing parent who's got dementia. you have to sell their home, you have to get the right nursing home, you have to pay the extortionate fees, and they really are extortionate. And then what happens when the money runs out? Will the local authority pick up the tab and keep your mum or dad in the home where they've been very happy for the last X many years?

36:24Or do they have to move somewhere cheaper? These are awful decisions that we're asking families to make. Ultimately, you've identified a problem of policy in terms of bad contracting. One might pin the responsibility for some of this upon austerity under the Tories. for local governments and just not being given enough money. If reform does form a government, and if you're not in that government or in Parliament, you're still running KCC, will you go to a reformed government and say, we need more money? Yes. I mean, I really hope when reform get into government, we have some really sensible policies.

36:59One thing I think we need to do is incentivise people to look after our elderly people within the family, be that through tax breaks, through making planning laws easier if you want to convert your garage into a granny annex or something like that. I think that is the way forward. It cannot just fall on the health service and all local authorities to pick up the slack. We need to rethink how we operate as a society. Final question. Because local government has become reforms laboratory, you have faced an extraordinary amount of scrutiny, which I'm not sure local government has in my adult lifetime.

37:36Have you felt some of that? Do you feel people are watching you to see how you do here and judge reform on the basis of what happens in Kent? Yes, it got to the point where if I had a prawn sandwich instead of an egg sandwich at lunch, that was in danger of making the national news. I am being facetious. But it's been ridiculous, Tim. I expected it at the beginning, absolutely, because we made history. Something changed fundamentally in the country in May last year. I was aware of that. You know, I'm a former journalist. I know how the news cycle works. But the scrutiny that we've come under here at Kent County Council is absolutely ridiculous.

38:13It's unprecedented. It's unfair because the council simply isn't set up to deal with the level of press intrusion and inquiries. The number of FOIs that have gone in about the most ridiculous of subjects, the complaints that have gone in. You know, it has threatened to swamp this council. It's not, local authorities are not set up to cope with this level of interest. So it's been a faintly ridiculous situation and it's just gone on and on. But do you think Nigel Farage is happy with how you've handled it so far? Well, I hope he is. Do you speak to him? Do you speak to him? I do speak to him, yes.

38:50Not in a fangirl kind of way. He is a maid of Kent himself. Man of Kent. He's a man of Kent himself. Well, Linton Kim-Karen, thank you very much. Thank you.

39:05Hello, I'm William Sitwell, and as a proud ambassador of the Telegraph Save Our Pubs campaign, I'm here to tell you about our nationwide competition. Nominate your favourite pub and tell us in 250 words what it means to you and your community. Five winning pubs will win a£5 ,000 round for punters like you to enjoy on our National Pub Day on the 16th of May. Entries close on the 11th of April, so mark your calendars and get nominated. Visit telegraph.co.uk slash pubs today.

39:42Mission not accomplished. I didn't get any money off my tax bill. Funny you should say that, Tim. I spoke to an expert in local governance and he said this. Tony Travers, Associate Dean of the LSC School of Public Policy, You research regional and local government. I do. Tony, and so you can give us an overview. Let's be perfectly honest here. Nigel Farage has been making big promises on the back of reform-led councils and their apparent successes as to how he might be the next prime minister. So we are watching them closely. We're scrutinising them. In the round, how well are they actually doing in reality?

40:22Well, it's interesting. After almost a year, certainly nine months in office, The most interesting things in many ways about the reform councils is how little they have varied from the norm for councils run by the Conservatives or Labour or the Lib Dems. So in a curious way, the thing that's most striking about them is that they're not that different. So what they've discovered, I think, is that in the end, a lot of what these counties, particularly the counties they're running, what they're doing is running social care for older people and for children. and you just don't want to get that wrong.

40:57By the way, many of the Conservative councils that ran these services before had run them relatively tightly so there wasn't a lot of fat to trim. Now, that could be both a benefit and a disadvantage to Farage. The benefit could be we're all untried and untested but we haven't run these councils any worse than anyone else. So that could be a positive. Actually, unknowns have taken over councils and these councils haven't completely collapsed. So that's a tick in the Farage box. They are called reform for a reason. They're not meant to be the conservatives and conserving what went before. They're meant to be mounting some kind of local government revolution that then translates to the national stage.

41:40There's no evidence that they've actually done that. I think it's fair to say so far there's not much evidence of a revolution, which, as you rightly say, could be a strength or a weakness. On the one hand, Faraj and his leadership can point to these councils and say, well, everything didn't fall to bits. On the other hand, the Conservative and Labour parties can point at them and say, hang on, this isn't any different than we ran these places before. So there's a sort of paradox in all of this as to the fact that reform is elected because it looks different. But in these cases, it's surprisingly less different than I think all the noise that was made when they got in would have suggested.

42:20We expected big cuts, perhaps council tax cuts. What we've ended up with, something that isn't quite what they would call the uniparty. That's the Conservatives and Labour together. but it's not as far as one might have expected. Yes. When they were talking about their own version of Doge, I mean, on an anecdotal basis, somebody like Zia Youssef has been speaking to me and other journalists about discovering pothole refilling contracts that don't seem to stand the test of time. You know, these criticisms that are made by the general public of like, does the council just tender contracts and give them away to the highest bidder rather than lowest?

42:58Is there any evidence of them tearing this sort of stuff up? Not in the first year of budgets. After all, we're just living through the first year of Reform Council set budgets. So we'd expect to see the results of any radical change appearing now in terms of significantly lower council tax increases. Overall, there's no evidence that Reform Councils have discovered a treasure trove of inefficiency, that they've been able to make more efficient and thus deliver a substantial reduction. I think Nigel Farage has made it clear he didn't promise cuts and he might say that slightly lower increases was a step in the right direction.

43:38But the truth is many of these councils were run relatively efficiently beforehand, remembering local government as a whole is spending less in real terms today than it was in 2010. That's so interesting because I think people look at the council system point out that many have gone bankrupt and feel that they have for years been living beyond their means. Comparisons were often made between Wandsworth when it was under Tory rule and Wandsworth when it fell under Labour rule and the idea that Wandsworth was once super efficient and now is much more profligate. But maybe that's not actually representative of the truth.

44:14Well, the fact is that Wandsworth and indeed Westminster, when they fell to Labour back in 2022, the Labour administrations that took over have kept the council tax very low there too, because they know council tax is the most obvious tax most people pay. And in fact, the challenge for councils is that successive governments have cut central government funding to councils and then required them to put up the council tax in real terms. And that's going to happen again this year. So if you compare council funding with the NHS's funding, for example, NHS funding is 30-40 % higher in real terms than it was in 2010, whereas council spending is lower than it was in 2010.

44:56Hard to believe. Yeah, that is hard to believe when you look at your own bill. Well, that's because council tax has gone up in part to replace cuts in central government grants. Yes. So the bills have gone up in real terms and spending's gone down. And that is very hard for anybody to understand. Also, is it all this kind of an early reflection of the difference for reform between campaigning on issues and actually governing on them? I mean, I remember speaking to a couple of reform councillors that were expressing surprise, for instance, at the transport to school bill for their local area. Like their eyes were kind of wide, like you will not believe what we're spending on taxis.

45:40And then I also had a conversation with Richard Tice in the past. Remember, he courted some controversy for suggesting that some parents were, quote, gaming the system when it came to claiming for children with special educational needs. But actually, it's all very well saying that on a platform to turn around to a mother or father with a child suffering from dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD or what have you, and say, well, actually, what you once had, we're taking away. That's a different thing. And that appears exactly to be what's happened, that many reform voters rely on public services. This is one of the curiosities of their voter base, really, because they will rely on older people's social care and some will rely on children's care, home to school transport and the rise in spending on special educational needs.

46:28These are things which it's very hard for any political party to make a change because it seems very abrupt, very hard to individuals at the point they do it. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but at the point the change is made, the council concern gets all the blame. And of course, a lot of what reform has been doing, I believe, has sort of had quite a lot of control from the centre. that is reform nationally, don't want their councils to go off too far and sort of get bad publicity. So they wanted to ensure that the messaging that comes out of councils is reasonably controlled and doesn't look as if somehow it's going to lead to significant changes to local public provision.

47:10Looking ahead to May the 7th, Emtoni, Nigel Farage is setting so much store by these locals. I know it's hard to make predictions, but with this being your area of expertise, what are your predictions for the locals? Interestingly, reform seem to be talking up these elections in the way that political parties normally talk their expectations down. Certainly Labour and the Conservatives are talking them down a lot. So reform has sort of set quite a high benchmark here. So I think Norfolk and Suffolk, they're expecting to do well. There are four districts in West Yorkshire which are all out because they've got new wards and I think they'll be expecting to do well there.

47:52The outer parts of Greater Manchester, but they're up in thirds. Again, these are places where, let's put it this way, reform are expecting to do well. Some parts of outer London, Haver and Bexley. And if they don't do as well as last year, yes, then it will look like a bit of a retreat. and if you add that to the slight falling off in the poll ratings at the national level, these are a big test for reform, the round of elections this May. And then playing some kind of 3D chess, is Nigel Farage better off the worse Labour does or the worse the Conservatives do? That is a 3D chess question, so thank you for that.

48:38I mean, there are many more Labour council laws up for election this time. So of the nearly 5 ,000 councils up for election, just under half are Labour. So they've got to make big inroads into Labour in particularly northern and Midlands metropolitan areas outside the city centre. So they really need to do well there. I think for the Conservatives, it won't be quite as bad a year this year. They have fewer seats up for election. Yeah. And they're just a little bit further away from the general election. And if you strip everything else out of it compared to when these elections were last contested, there's a slight swing from Labour to the Conservatives.

49:21Yes. Underneath everything else. Because everyone in reform is saying these elections will prove the Conservatives are dead. No, I think the Conservatives almost inevitably will win one or two councils because you mentioned Wandsworth earlier. You know, Wandsworth and Westminster and Barnett in London are places which are straight as if it were the 1950s. Labour to Conservative struggles. So if Labour do badly, the Conservatives do well and vice versa. So in those boroughs, I think there's a reasonable chance the Conservatives do well. Question well enough to win, we'll see. So the Conservatives could win the odd council here and there, whereas I think for Labour the sheer numbers of losses of councillors will be itself revealing.

50:08Also I feel like we're putting much more store by these particular local elections because of the changing dynamic of the national political picture and the fact that you've now got reform in the Greens very very sort of steadily in the race and because we think it might create an existential crisis for Keir Starmer. so is it right to say that normally you shouldn't set too much store by the locals when it comes to the nationals not least if there's a general election years away but this is a bit unique oh totally i mean these are local elections they should be about refuse collection and street lighting and all the local stuff the stuff outside your front door you know local government delivers almost everything you meet immediately outside your front door you know that so they should be local.

50:53And yet, I think what's really interesting about this set of local elections, these are a real test for the reality that in this set of local elections, in England, it's a five-way split between the different parties, and in Scotland and Wales, a six-way split. And what we're going to learn about this is what happens in different places where people vote tactically to keep reform out, tactically to keep Labour out, tactically to keep the Greens out, whatever it is, tactically to keep the Conservatives out. Actually, of course, we know again from the large amount of polling that is out there, there's quite a lot of tactical voting against reform, including from Conservative and Labour voters.

51:34But there will be tactical voting by people in all parties to keep other parties out. So we'll learn a lot more about that from place to place. So we're going to find something out in East Anglia, something else out in West Yorkshire, and something different again in different parts of London. Reform will do reasonably well this year, 2026. They did very well in 2025. But of course, by the time these elections come up again in 2029 and 2030, they'll start to lose because they'll be the incumbent party. So for every good year, a bad year beckons in future. And then people will start to ask, was this a flash in the pan?

52:18But it's true, that will be after the next election. all right so it is a local elections to watch that's what we're concluding here Tony they're like American midterms but you know in a very British way Tony Travers thank you very much indeed for joining us on the Daily Tea thank you

52:49well let's go back to what we opened with which is Nigel Farage saying if you want to judge us nationally look at what we're doing locally and other parties are jumping on that to say when we were raising taxes. But you could have a different interpretation, which is not judge us locally because we have cut taxes and thrown the woke in jail and et cetera, et cetera. It could be judge us locally because we actually did an okay job. Yeah, we haven't copped anything up. Of providing you your necessary adult and child services. Yes. And this is what Faraj is trying to do. He is stuck in the polls.

53:24The polls don't look quite so good as they once did, but he's stuck around 25 to 30 percent. And focus groups consistently say, I like him, the people who do like him, I can't see him as prime minister. They don't think he's got a plan. They don't think he's got a team. So the experiment with the locals is perhaps not about proving that we are a populist right-wing party. It's actually about proving we could run a country. Yes. And in that sense, maybe reform isn't doing quite as badly as some of the negative press suggests. Also, isn't there a strength in numbers argument that the more support they get at these local elections, the more it might encourage people to vote for them nationally, simply because it doesn't seem like a protest vote.

54:08It seems like something that could actually lead to him becoming prime minister. And local government is a feeder for national government. He will be looking at the county councillors right now and saying, you're doing a good job. I can see Kem Karen being in a future reform government. Yes, of course. She's going to run to become an MP. Yeah. And it means also if you've got 60 councillors, there's 60 people who will knock on doors. And that's 60 people that right now the Tories and Labour don't have. Absolutely. The other thing about local government is building up a very formidable activist base.

54:40Also, not just picking the Chem Cairns of this world. Let's not forget he's got a massive recruitment exercise on his hands. He's got to find hundreds of people to credibly stand as MPs. And the only way you really do that is by going back to the grassroots. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm. In the meantime, if you have any questions for us about reform councils or the local elections, get in touch and we'll do our best to answer. It's at Daily Tea Podcast on Instagram, TikTok and X, or for the email address, thedailytea at telegraph.co.uk. Ahead of May's critical local elections, we're taking the daily tea on the road, visiting key battlegrounds across Britain and answering your questions with four special live events.

55:30Join me and Camilla, plus special guests, in London on April 27th, Cardiff on April 28th, Warwick on April 29th, and Worthing on April 30th. You can buy tickets now at telegraph.co.uk forward slash Daily Tea Live.

56:12any competitor's price by up to$1 ,000. With an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and over 30 ,000 five-star reviews, we are Chicago's trusted local experts. For all the right reasons, call 866-4-SEASONS.