“Nobody needs 14 councils”

As part of our series of interviews with political group leaders on Kent County Council, Steven met Cllr Harry Rayner, leader of the Conservative Group. They discussed his route to becoming a county councillor and group leader, how Maidstone and Malling is different to Tonbridge and Malling, and that time he was arrested in North Korea...

What is your official occupation? 
I am a county councillor for Malling West, and I'm the leader of the Conservative Group at Kent County Council. 

Do you have any other additional roles, paid or unpaid? 
Well, I'm a self-employed residential landlord and also work as a letting agent in the background. I'm on the Kent Association of Local Councils executive. I'm vice president of the Kent Association of Local Councils. That's the trade group, if you like, of all the parish and town councils in Kent. There are 321 of them, of which 318 are members of KALC. And I sit on the KALC executive as the KCC member, as KCC make a donation to KALC. Even under Reform, I’m still the nominated member for the county. I'm a director of Phoenix Parc. I mentioned to you that I was a residential landlord, and I have companies which own leaseholds on Phoenix Parc. In fact, I think the largest, or the second largest, private landlord on Phoenix Parc. I am on the parish council in Wrotham. I'm the finance director of Kent Downs Dairy. In fact, it's today that we're wrapping the operation up. The family decided to get out of dairy farming, and they are now going in a different direction, keeping the farm. I remain as a director of A L Betts Ltd, which is the parent company of Kent Downs Dairy. I'll be honest with you, I'm not the chap who goes and milks the cows. I know virtually nothing about farming. 

Why are you the councillor for Malling West? 
I'm the councillor for Malling West because, prior to that, I was the Tonbridge and Malling borough councillor for Wrotham. They asked me when I finished that, and was doing my parish council work. I actually became the chairman of the parish councils. There's 27 of them, and I became the chairman of the committee group. And as a result of that, they then said, Valerie Dagger, my predecessor, is retiring in 2016, would you like to take over? And I was then the Conservative nominee in the election.

It's fair to say in that 2017 election, you won by quite a margin. 
Yeah, you would expect that given my long experience. I've been a borough councillor for Wrotham since 1985. I had a tremendous following in the area, and they were kind enough to turn out and vote for me. 

Even in the most recent election, when Reform did better than expected, you still held on by quite a margin. Why do you think that you were able to resist that Reform surge? 
As my wife said, “It would be unusual for you to lose because you are so well known.”

How would you describe Malling?
Well, in fact, Malling West has nothing to do with the East or West Malling as such. It's the villages of Stansted, Wrotham, Borough Green, Ightham, St Mary's Platt, Plaxtol, Shipbourne, and Hildenborough. There's eight parishes. It's quite a well-to-do area, but with pockets of poverty. But having said that, it's a long, thin north-south division. When local government reform comes, it will present some issues, I think, for whatever the unitary council is in due course.

How is Maidstone and Malling different to Tonbridge and Malling?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'll be perfectly frank with you. I always felt that Tonbridge and Malling was never an homogenous operation. If you actually go back to how it was formed, in 1974, as a result of a commission formed by Harold Wilson's Labour government in the late 60s. The man who wrote the report was called Redcliffe-Maud, and he is a distant relation of mine through my mother. He was an Oxford professor, wrote the paper, the Local Government Act 1972 brought in the 1974 Local Government Act under which the Kent districts and boroughs were formed as we know them now. Tonbridge and Malling were the bits that were left over once everybody else had actually decided what was going on. Sevenoaks district, Tunbridge Wells was to the south, and the bits that were left over were the old Tonbridge Urban District Council and the old Malling Rural District Council. When they stuck those two together, you ended up with Tonbridge and Malling, but it never was a homogenous body. 

From a constituency point of view, where are you?
Tonbridge. There's two things you've got to bear in mind. If you're talking about the parliamentary constituency, it's Maidstone and Malling. If you're talking about the borough council, it's Tonbridge and Malling. The constituency is Tonbridge, whereas others who used to be in Tonbridge and Malling are now in Maidstone and Malling.

Do you have a working relationship with Tom Tugendhat?
I do. I have a splendid working relationship with him. He was kind enough to write a note for my election address, and that was no small part, I feel, part of the reason I was elected. 

Which political parties have you been a member of? 
I've only ever been a member of the Conservative Party, but if you follow my career back far enough to the 1960s when I was at school, I stood in the 1964 and 66 general elections at school, one of them as a Labour candidate because I couldn't get the nomination for Conservatives and subsequently I stood for the Conservatives in the 1966 election and I still have the school magazine with me standing for Labour. However, I was never a member of the Labour Party because I was only 16 at the time. 

What was it about the Conservative Party that you joined?
Realistically, I joined in 1984. I joined because I had an organiser in the village who heard through the village bell ringers at the time that I was doing extremely well in business as a result of the miners' strike. The company that I was the operations director of at the time had a fleet of small ships. We ran it out of Rochester. The operational base was here at the Acorn Shipyard, and I was fleet operational manager working from Bromley. What we had was an operation bringing in coal. We were already well known in the coal trade in the UK, importing coal from the big coal merchants. As a result of the miners’ strike and the operation of bringing in the amount of coal we did, we were doing extremely well out of the miners’ strike with Mrs Thatcher in charge. I was asked to join the Conservative Party. I've been a member ever since. Within about 12 months of that, so that would be in 1984, in 1985, the borough councillor at the time, George Childs, unfortunately contracted cancer, and in August of that year he died, and in the autumn of '85 I was asked by a couple of the guys at the parish council to stand for the parish council, so I stood to take George's place on the parish council, and then subsequently, a few months later, took it on as the borough councillor.

You've been a councillor in one form or another for 40 years. Do you foresee that you will stand again after local government reorganisation, or do you feel you've done your service? 
I've put my application in already to the Conservatives. They asked a few months back who was interested in standing, and to the best of my knowledge, I was certainly the first to put in for an application within the Tonbridge constituency to stand for whatever the Minister decides is going to be the makeup of the Kent unitary authorities. 

Since 1984, who has been the best leader of the Conservative Party? 
Mrs Thatcher, by a country mile, no question. There's no comparison with anyone else. 

What was it about her? 
Tremendous moral courage, tremendous resilience, exhibited in the Falklands War, and stood up to the EU in a way that no one else ever has, in my honest opinion. If you said to me, what was the one thing that Mrs Thatcher really made an impact in your borough or division? I will tell you, it was the sale of council houses. The number of residents who were able to buy their council houses that I think owed a lot to Mrs Thatcher, and returned that with a degree of voting loyalty that we haven't seen since.

You've been a member of Kent County Council since 2017. In that time, who has been the best leader of Kent County Council? 
It's difficult to be hard and fast on that. I would say both Sir Paul Carter and Roger Gough have both had the skills to undertake it, but they were different skills. Paul was very assertive, very incisive and decisive in what he wanted and how he wanted to go about it. Roger was more collegiate in his approach and certainly, to be fair to Roger, he gave me a degree of promotion in terms of deputy cabinet member for finance, and he was kind enough also to bring me into the cabinet as the senior deputy cabinet member. I sat in for most of the last two years on full cabinet, and I have to say it's been very advantageous from my point of view to be able to become leader, having sat in cabinet as a deputy cabinet member. It has proved to be really advantageous, but one is in a position to productively oppose Reform in a way that would not have been available had Roger not decided that there was a suitable candidate for promotion. 

Was there any truth to the story that you tried to replace Roger as leader? 
Yeah, absolutely. I put myself forward as a candidate. Unfortunately, insufficient of my colleagues saw the qualities of my leadership at the time. It was apparent that I wasn't going to win against Roger, and I subsequently withdrew. And in fact, Peter Oakford, who was the Cabinet Member for Finance, who actually got cheesed off with me asking difficult questions in the Governance and Audit Committee actually went to Roger subsequently and said, 'I'd like you to invite him to be my deputy because I think he would be better inside the tent than out.'

What are your thoughts on local government reorganisation? 
I've actually campaigned quietly over the years in terms of bringing about a degree of unitary authorities. It's quite clear that the current arrangements for 14 councils in Kent, 12 districts or boroughs, KCC and Medway, the unitary council, is far too many. Nobody needs 14 councils. I think it's high time it went. However, I would say that the speed with which the Labour government are pushing this through is not conducive to bringing about what is required, giving value for money. The difficulty is the speed with which it's being put through means that decisions are being taken very late in the day. We know what the Kent districts and councils have put forward. There are something like five options. They're ranging from one council, which is what Reform at KCC, putting forward to up to four or five others. The sheer costs of undertaking it in the way that it's being proposed at the moment, again, is... ill-conducive, it's expensive, in particular the costs and speed of disaggregation. By the May of 2027, which is only 14 months away, we're supposed to be going to election on unitary authorities. 

Medway is an absolute basket case

Are you concerned about what will happen to the current debts of the council?