{"id":182188,"date":"2025-10-06T19:33:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/182188\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T19:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:33:08","slug":"reform-uk-likely-to-raise-council-tax-in-kent-despite-promise-to-cut-costs-reform-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/182188\/","title":{"rendered":"Reform UK likely to raise council tax in Kent despite promise to cut costs | Reform UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Reform UK-run council where the party sought to pilot drastic cost-cutting plans is going to have to raise council tax, a cabinet member has admitted.<\/p>\n

Services at Kent<\/a> county council were already \u201cdown to the bare bones\u201d, said Reform\u2019s cabinet member for adult social care, Diane Morton. It makes Kent the latest local authority controlled by Nigel Farage\u2019s party to signal its intention to raise council tax.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got more demand than ever before and it\u2019s growing,\u201d Morton told the Financial Times<\/a>. \u201cWe just want more money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morton said she believed the local authority would raise council tax by 5% \u2013 the maximum permitted \u2013 as councils try to honour their legal duty to make sure spending adds up before budgets are set for next year.<\/p>\n

Reform\u2019s leader of West Northamptonshire council said last month<\/a> that council tax was \u201chighly likely\u201d to go up next year.<\/p>\n

The Reform leader of Durham county council has also said<\/a> that without additional funding from central government it will have to make \u201cstark choices between council tax increases and cuts to vital local services\u201d.<\/p>\n

Staffordshire county council\u2019s Reform leader, Ian Cooper, said last month<\/a> he hoped to reduce a 5% council tax rise, but added: \u201cWhether we can deliver that based on inflation \u2026 we\u2019ll just have to wait and see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morton\u2019s comments are particularly pertinent because in Kent Reform had been seeking to pilot an Elon Musk-style \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d (Doge) unit to examine all council spending in areas it controls and cut costs.<\/p>\n

Instead, a \u201cUK Doge\u201d team led by Reform\u2019s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, appears to have run into difficulty in accessing sensitive council data at Kent and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Polly Billington, the Labour MP for East Thanet in Kent, said: \u201cReform\u2019s leader in Kent said that Reform councils were \u2018the biggest advert\u2019 for what a Nigel Farage government would look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the admission of a looming council tax rise in Kent was a \u201cspectacular failure\u201d for which Yusuf must \u201cpersonally apologise\u201d.<\/p>\n

Reform UK said its councillors on Kent county council had been working \u201cto clean up the mess\u201d left by the Conservatives, reducing the authority\u2019s debt by \u00a366m in their first five months in office.<\/p>\n

The party said most of the savings came from a cost-cutting efficiency team made up of several cabinet members.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson added that the council had also introduced a \u201cno more borrowing\u201d policy, aimed at reducing debt by a further \u00a333m by March 2026, and scrapped its net zero renewable energy programme, which they said would save \u00a332m over four years.<\/p>\n

Kent county council is one of the largest local authorities in England by population and has a \u00a32.5bn annual budget. Half of spending goes to social care and children with special educational needs (SEN). It has already announced it is facing a shortfall of \u00a350m for the next financial year.<\/p>\n

Farage has suggested Kent could make savings by cutting the amount it spends on school transport.<\/p>\n

However, independent experts such as the Institute for Government have said <\/a>that Reform-run local councils face \u201cthe same brutal arithmetic\u201d as those its political opponents control.<\/p>\n

While the party has suggested it could look at spending in areas it regards as wasteful, such as diversity and equality programmes, the IFG said this year that the numbers did not stack up and previous councils that had been tempted to make short-term spending cuts had only stored problems for the future.<\/p>\n

For example, the thinktank said that diverting funding for Kent\u2019s family hub \u2013 a network aimed at assisting children and young people, including those with SEN \u2013 would be a false economy in terms of the long-term savings it produces, and would also face legal challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Reform UK-run council where the party sought to pilot drastic cost-cutting plans is going to have to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-182188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}