Campaigning is the easy bit. You can promise to slash waste, freeze taxes, fix the potholes, sweep away bureaucracy and generally make the whole creaking machine work by applying a little common sense. It fits nicely on a leaflet.
Governing is rather less obliging. Social care still has to be provided on Monday morning. Children with special educational needs still need support. Roads still deteriorate. Staff still need paying. And council finance, annoyingly, does not disappear because somebody has denounced it as “waste”.
That is what makes Reform UK’s record in local government worth examining. The party’s breakthrough in the May 2025 elections gave it real power over substantial public services. A year later, it expanded again: Reform itself says it took another 14 English councils in May 2026, while UNISON noted that it also won seats in both the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd.
For a party that has sold itself as the great disruptor, local government has provided something unusually useful: evidence.
And the evidence is considerably messier than the sales pitch.
HOPE not hate’s Reform in Power investigation put the charge starkly. It said residents in Reform-run areas were experiencing “rising council tax, cuts to vital services, and a stream of scandals and resignations”, while the allegedly vast reservoir of waste waiting to be eliminated had proved rather harder to locate.
That is the central problem. Reform’s politics is built around the suggestion that Britain’s difficulties persist because nobody has been ruthless enough. Send in the auditors. Root out the woke spending. Find the diversity officers. Apply a DOGE-style efficiency drive and watch the savings tumble out.
Then came the awkward encounter with arithmetic.
The great council-tax revolt — followed by higher council tax
Take Worcestershire.
Reform had campaigned against high council tax and critics, including UNISON, highlighted the contradiction when its administration ended up pursuing an increase approaching 9%. The final budget set the rise at 8.98%, lifting the Band D county precept to £1,760.80.
There was, to be fair, a serious inherited financial crisis. Worcestershire’s own documents describe intense pressures in adult and children’s social care and a huge SEND deficit. Its chief financial officer advised councillors that the maximum increase permitted by government was required to avoid the risk of a Section 114 notice — local-government language for a council effectively admitting that it cannot balance its books.
That context matters. But it also rather destroys the fantasy politics.
It turns out you cannot simply march into County Hall, shout “waste” three times and produce a balanced budget. The bills are real. The legal duties are real. The elderly person requiring residential care is not a line of woke expenditure that can be deleted from a spreadsheet.
The Reform administration argued that it had inherited the mess from its Conservative predecessors. There is force in that defence. But there is also an obvious lesson: promising tax freezes before examining the books is a great deal easier than delivering them afterwards.
Campaign rhetoric met municipal finance. Municipal finance won.
Durham: cuts, charges and 88 posts
County Durham provides another useful case study.
By late 2025 the Reform-led council was facing a projected funding gap which had grown from £71 million to £82 million in two months. The council cited inflation, children’s social-care costs and school transport among the pressures. Its response included a package of roughly £10 million in savings proposals, involving 88 full-time-equivalent posts, about a third then vacant.
There were proposed reductions in grass cutting and litter picking, changes to bus provision and higher parking charges. Residents’ parking permits were subsequently increased by 40%. The administration defended that particular increase by pointing out that permit prices had not risen since 2015 and saying that the additional cost amounted to about four pence a day per permit.
Again, there are explanations. There always are when you actually govern.
But compare the dull reality — higher charges, fewer posts, reduced services — with the swagger of the original proposition that supposedly unnecessary spending could simply be hunted down and eliminated.
That contrast is precisely why public-service unions are paying such close attention.
UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan said in April that “the millionaires calling the shots in Reform don’t think those putting in a hard day’s graft deserve basic rights or fair pay.” Its report argued that Reform’s first eleven months running councils had produced broken promises over tax, internal turmoil and efficiency exercises that ran into the reality that local authority services had already endured years of cuts.
Whether one accepts every part of UNISON’s political analysis or not, the local-government numbers cannot simply be wished away.
SEND: an experiment that parents stopped
Perhaps the most telling cases are where proposed savings collided directly with public resistance.
In Leicestershire, the Reform administration proposed changing early-years SEND provision so that the council would no longer commission places at four specialist nurseries. Instead, it intended to direct additional money and specialist support towards mainstream nursery provision, with the existing arrangements potentially phased out by April 2027.
Parents were not impressed.
More than 2,500 consultation responses were received and a petition attracted about 2,000 signatures. In February the council abandoned the proposal.
There is nothing dishonourable about changing course after consultation. Indeed, that is what consultation is supposed to be for.
But it is worth remembering how this episode began. Reform was not rescuing a service from faceless bureaucrats. Its own administration was proposing a change affecting specialist provision for some of the county’s most vulnerable children, and organised public opposition persuaded it to retreat.
UNISON later cited Leicestershire alongside care-home controversies elsewhere, saying local campaigns had helped save the nurseries.
The neat story in which Reform arrives to protect ordinary people from an uncaring state becomes rather less neat when ordinary people find themselves campaigning to protect services from Reform.
Lancashire and the care-home row
Something similar happened in Lancashire.
The council launched a strategic review examining five residential care homes and five day centres. Its case was that several buildings were old, expensive to maintain and potentially unsuitable for future care needs. That was not an invented problem: the council published detailed reasons for the review, including maintenance backlogs, outdated layouts and changing patterns of demand.
But the proposals generated fierce resistance. The consultation drew 1,622 responses, with about 76% disagreeing with the reprovision proposals. By February, council leader Stephen Atkinson announced that there was no intention to close the five residential homes, and later council material confirmed that the day centres would also remain open while a new care model was developed.
Again, the reversal deserves to be recorded alongside the proposal.
Yet it also demonstrates something rather important. When political rhetoric about efficiency reaches the front door of a care home, things become complicated remarkably quickly.
There are residents. Families. Staff. Buildings. Transport arrangements. Medical needs. Human attachments accumulated over years.
Not everything in public expenditure is an inefficiency simply because it costs money.
And then there are the flags
While some Reform councils wrestled with social care and SEND, considerable political energy was also being expended on symbols. Their interest in Pride flags borders on the obsessive.
In Lancashire, the council formally revised its flag policy to remove a number of campaign flags, including the Pride, White Ribbon and NHS flags. Interestingly, the council’s own equality assessment acknowledged that removing the Pride flag could be perceived as reducing visibility for people sharing protected characteristics, though it characterised the impact as symbolic rather than a direct change in services.
In Durham, council support for Pride was withdrawn. Trade unions then stepped in. The Durham Miners’ Association, TUC, Aslef, CWU and others helped assemble more than £25,000, and the 2026 event went ahead with what organisers described as its largest turnout. Reform defended the decision on financial grounds, arguing that the success of private and union fundraising demonstrated that council funding was unnecessary.
Then there is Nottinghamshire.
The Reform-led county council allocated £75,000 to a programme of Union flag banners. Council documentation says the expenditure came from corporate contingencies and that the authority regarded the scheme as promoting civic identity. It also insisted the money had not been taken from a frontline service budget.
The original expectation was that sponsorship would help cover the cost. An FOI response in March said that although some organisations had expressed interest, no sponsorship agreements had yet been entered into. By July, reporting indicated that no sponsors had been secured.
There is something wonderfully circular about a movement promising to interrogate every penny of public expenditure and then finding itself explaining why £75,000 on flags represents good value.
The National Education Union’s Daniel Kebede gave the union movement’s view rather neatly, describing Reform as “adept at stoking culture wars and performative actions about flags, Pride marches and the like.”
Harsh? Certainly.
But not conjured from thin air.
The revolving door of councillors
There has also been the problem of personnel.
HOPE not hate tracked a remarkable churn among the councillors elected in Reform’s 2025 breakthrough. By spring 2026, roughly one in ten of that cohort had resigned, defected, been removed or otherwise left the party. Other reporting put the figure at between 65 and 74 of the approximately 677 councillors elected in 2025, depending on the date and definition used.
Some departures were mundane political defections. Others followed allegations or controversies involving offensive remarks or conduct.
HOPE not hate’s broader conclusion was that the gap between outsider rhetoric and the disciplines of office had become increasingly visible. Its own summary said that “the simple answers offered on the campaign trail have quickly unravelled in office.”
That is probably the most significant criticism because Reform has always benefited from not being responsible for very much.
Once responsibility arrives, protest politics loses one of its great advantages: somebody can check what you actually did.
Workers’ rights: the national argument behind the council fights
For trade unions, the argument does not stop at County Hall.
The TUC has launched its Stop the Steal campaign in response to Reform’s proposed “Great Repeal Bill”. According to the TUC, the proposal would remove provisions contained in the Employment Rights Act, potentially affecting day-one sick pay, fire-and-rehire protections, regulation of exploitative zero-hours arrangements and other employment rights. The TUC also says Reform has proposed repealing the Equality Act.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak says Reform wants to “strip working people of essentials like day-one sick pay and a fairer minimum wage.”
Reform disputes the unions’ wider characterisation of its politics. Nigel Farage has argued that his party is the real defender of working people, pointing to proposals to cut taxes on employment and overtime and insisting that Reform-controlled councils have delivered savings. In May he claimed nine Reform councils had saved more than £300 million and had kept council-tax increases below those of comparable authorities. Those are Reform’s own figures and claims.
That competing account should be heard.
But so should the evidence from the councils themselves.
Higher tax in Worcestershire. Job reductions and service cuts in Durham. Specialist SEND nursery proposals in Leicestershire, abandoned after mass opposition. Care-home proposals in Lancashire, also pulled back following consultation. Pride funding withdrawn in Durham. £75,000 found for Union flag banners in Nottinghamshire.
These are not theoretical objections dreamed up by Westminster opponents. They are decisions, budgets and consultations.
Governing is harder than raging
There is a wider point here.
Britain’s councils are in genuine trouble. Years of austerity, rising demand for adult and children’s social care, SEND pressures, inflation and an ageing population have produced structural problems that no political party can honestly pretend are painless to solve. Worcestershire’s official figures make that painfully clear.
Reform did not create all those problems. In many places it inherited them.
What it did do was suggest that the answers were much easier than they really are.
That is where the acid should bite.
Because once the slogans have been printed, the flags raised and the offending bits of “woke” bureaucracy identified, somebody still has to decide what happens to the care home, the nursery, the bus route, the pothole budget and the council-tax bill.
Local government has a brutal way of separating rhetoric from administration.
For years Reform could tell voters that somebody else was failing.
Now, increasingly, it has its own budgets, its own councillors and its own decisions to explain.
And that makes the record much more interesting than the rhetoric.
By Pat Harrington
