Reform UK won 25 of the 55 seats on Leicestershire County Council on 1 May and has now formed a minority administration.
What will they do with this power? It's hard to know. They didn't produce a local manifesto for the elections, and I'm not sure things are much clearer after the new council leader's interview with the Leicester Mercury.
A few extracts...
Q: Reform UK has promised an audit of the county council’s finances to identify waste and efficiencies. How are you going to fund the audit given the council’s difficult financial position?
A: We'll find that sort of money because it's vital. It's vital. We'll be able to do that, don't worry.
The Mercury could have pointed out the council's finances are audited internally and externally every year. So this sounds like a firm commitment to unnecessary extra spending.
On flooding, they want to solve the problems in the county, but don't seem to know what needs to be done or how much it will cost.
There will be not cuts in social care: apparently these new auditors are going to be "an external company of experts" and will tell them what to do.
This sounds very like the practice among Conservative councils of spending a fortune on consultants because you don't trust your own officers for ideological reasons.
Reform UK's clearest commitment seems to be cuts to bus services:
Q: What will you do to ensure rural communities have access to public transport?
A: If we've got efficiency and if we've got savings, we can then do something. But, we've got to review the buses because the problem was we had buses driving around with two or three people in and there was no take-up.
So when it suddenly goes, everybody wants to join a petition to say ‘yes we want it back’. So it's one of those, if you're not using it, you could lose it.
We've just had a major review of bus services in Leicestershire under the last Conservative administration, but, sure, let's have another consultants' bonanza. It's only taxpayers money.
The real test of what Reform UK are about will come when they discover there's not millions of pounds of wasteful spending to be cut or reallocated. But the early signs are not promising.
Yes, they are the same as MAGA, they want access to the funds, which they will they relocate into their own pockets instead name of efficiency
ReplyDeleteIn my corner of Kent we never really saw the benefit of the £2 bus fare because services that had been running for the best part of 50 years got axed entirely or subject to swingeing cuts. We were really hoping they'd come back when the world returned to normal. Now we have a Reform controlled county council I'm not optimistic of anything. It really shouldn't be an unaffordable luxury to get a bus from a train station only 40 minutes from London Victoria in the evening rush hour! I know a lot of ppl voted Reform despite the fact they have little or no ground game and they're just sending a message to Westminster, but actions have consequences.
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