Not magic?
Reform-led Kent crashes into financial reality, five Conservatives defect, and old tweets resurface once again
It’s been a rough week for Reform in Kent. A Financial Times story over the weekend broke the news that the party were planning to raise council tax by the maximum permitted amount after discovering that there weren’t huge savings to be found after all. We get into the financial reality below. Further down, we have news of five Conservative councillors defecting to the insurgent party, and - once again - some questionable social media activity from a KCC councillor.
“We’re good, but we’re not magic”
The message was clear enough when Reform took charge of Kent County Council in May. Cut the waste, balance the books, and keep bills down.
Five months later, that plan has collided with reality.
The Financial Times reported this week that Kent will likely raise council tax rates next year because Reform’s savings drive hasn’t found the significant cuts it promised. Cllr Diane Morton, the cabinet member for adult social care, told the paper that services are already “down to the bare bones.”
“We’ve got more demand than ever before, and it’s growing,” she said. “We just want more money.”
For a party that campaigned on slashing ‘wasteful spending,’ the admission was brutal. It confirmed what every council leader in the country already knows: When half your budget is tied up in adult social care and children’s services, there isn’t much left to squeeze.
Reform’s big idea at County Hall was to create its own efficiency unit, the Department of Local Government Efficiency, or DOLGE. According to the FT, it has identified around £40m of savings over four years. Most of that comes from cancelling a £30m home-energy programme and scrapping plans for an electric-vehicle fleet.
Opposition parties say those savings will cost more later. The FT quoted Liberal Democrat leader of the opposition Antony Hook, pointing out that even Reform’s debt-repayment headline wasn’t its own idea.
The council had announced that paying back £50m of debt would save about £670,000 a year in interest. Hook said the offer came directly from Barclays, which declined to comment. One Reform cabinet member was blunter about the situation they find themselves in: “Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away, but there just aren’t.”
The numbers now need to move fast. Kent’s draft budget will appear in November, but the final grant from government won’t land until December. Councils have to balance the books by March. At the reinstated Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, officials have made it plain that any council that chooses not to raise council tax by the full 5% will not qualify for emergency financial support. That policy leaves councils boxed in. Every 1% rise brings Kent roughly £10 million, but this will likely not keep pace with the cost of care. The sums make the tax rise look unavoidable.
On Tuesday, KCC leader Cllr Linden Kemkaran appeared on BBC Radio Kent to try to calm the row. She claimed the FT reporter had “overheard some banter” between councillors and DOLGE members, a claim at odds with the paper’s account, which quoted cabinet members directly. She insisted it was “way too early to be having this conversation” and “completely irresponsible to tell you now” whether council tax would go up. Finally, perhaps the closest thing to an admission of reality: “We’re good, but we’re not magic.” For a former BBC journalist, it was not a smooth interview.
The stakes here are higher than her party might care to admit. For Reform, Kent is more than another local authority, it is the first real-world test of a party built on national slogans about doing more with less. What happens here will colour perceptions of the party across the country.
Kent’s own figures show why those promises are hard to keep. Over half of the council’s £2.6bn budget goes on adults’ and children’s social care, plus education for children with special needs. Those costs keep rising, and they’re legally unavoidable. For this financial year, the county element of council tax is £1,630.32 for Band D, up 4.99% on last year. A further 5% rise would add roughly £80 a year, or about £1.50 a week, to the average bill.
In places like Thanet and Swale, where incomes are lower, that extra £80 bites harder than it does in Sevenoaks or Tunbridge Wells. Yet, all sit under the same banding system, which is still based on 1991 property values. A group of MPs called it unfair last year. They’re right. Whether they can do much about it remains to be seen.
The structure of council tax itself magnifies the gap. Because it relies on outdated valuations, councils in poorer areas often collect proportionally less, even while residents pay more relative to income. Kent’s patchwork of wealth and deprivation makes that imbalance impossible to ignore, but every government has shelved reform of the system for three decades.
The broader picture is that the funding model drives the same outcome everywhere. Councils that don’t raise to the limit risk insolvency and can’t expect help from Whitehall. Those that do raise only stand still. Reform’s Kent team insists its DOLGE plan will still deliver savings and that the council is “making progress.” But the big ideas, like an a Elon Musk-style Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at national level, have yet to do any detailed work in Kent because of tensions over data access. So far, the practical results amount to a few scrapped projects and a one-off debt deal with a bank.
The draft budget will appear in November, with the final decision coming early next year, once the government’s grant figures arrive. Few at County Hall expect generosity. If the council goes for the full 5%, Band D households will pay around £1,711 for the county share of their bill, a rise that would raise about £50m and barely cover inflation in social-care contracts.
That is the unglamorous truth behind all the talk of ‘efficiency.’ Every council in England is being forced into the same corner, just some are hitting the wall faster than others.
Five months in, Kent’s ‘shop window’ for Reform looks less like a showcase and more like a mirror. It reflects the same pressures every council faces.
The difference is that this one was built on a promise to fix the maths. But the maths, as ever, appears to be winning.
There’s always a tweet
Another Reform councillor at Kent County Council is facing scrutiny after a series of social-media posts containing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant material were uncovered this week, adding to growing national attention on the party’s conduct in Kent.
Screenshots published by Hope Not Hate yesterday and circulated by the account ReformExposed on BlueSky appear to show that Cllr Christopher Hespe, Reform’s Deputy Cabinet Member for Finance and Cross-Cabinet Activity, reposted or wrote multiple offensive tweets between June and December 2023.
The posts include:
a meme showing a man in Arab dress beside weapons and explosives with the caption “Introducing the new Bradford action man kit.”
a post reading “People who eat bacon are less likely to blow themselves up.”
a doctored image of London Mayor Sadiq Khan carrying a placard claiming “85 % of murders last year in London were carried out by immigrants & foreigners with the majority being Muslim.”
a meme comparing an immigrant to the film character E.T. with the caption “E.T. learned English and wanted to go home.”
a tweet stating that the RNLI had “sold its soul to the devil” and was “now a taxi service for illegal migrants from France.”
and a comment on a Parliamentary post about Black History Month claiming there was “very little ‘black history’ in the UK” and describing those involved as “delusional and foolish.”
a tweet from November 2023 that reads “Islam is NOT a race, but an ideology and political system, which can be questioned legitimately… [Tommy Robinson] is a national treasure.”
Hespe represents Elham Valley, between Canterbury and Folkestone, and was appointed to the county’s finance team after Reform took control of Kent County Council earlier this year. As of publication, neither Hespe nor Reform had issued a public response to the tweets raised.
The discovery comes as Reform faces renewed criticism over its behaviour elsewhere in Kent.
Only a few weeks ago, five Kent Reform councillors were photographed smiling alongside a man draped in a neo-Nazi flag at an anti-immigration protest in Maidstone. The picture circulated widely online and was reported by multiple outlets, but none of the councillors pictured issued a public response, and the party took no disciplinary action.
Earlier this week, we reported that Cllr David Wimble, another Reform UK member of Kent County Council, called a resident a “f@?kwit” in a social-media post. The message remained visible for roughly two weeks before being deleted shortly after our story.
Reform’s national office has not commented on any of the Kent controversies. Within the county, there have been no public disciplinary announcements or statements from leader Linden Kemkaran.
With the council preparing its draft budget next month, Reform’s promise of a ‘new style of politics’ in Kent is being tested on multiple fronts. The resurfaced tweets, the earlier flag photograph and the outburst from one of its councillors have added to a picture of a party full of members lacking discipline and questionable views.
For a group that came to power pledging discipline, transparency and competence, the question is no longer whether Reform can make Kent run better, but whether it can govern without tripping over its own headlines.
Five Conservative councillors defect
Five councillors in Kent have defected to Reform this week, widening the party’s reach beyond County Hall and deepening its hold on local politics.
The moves started in Gravesham, where four Conservative councillors - Emma Elliott, Aaron Elliott, Gary Harding and David Beattie - announced they were joining Reform. In a joint statement reported by Kent Online, they said that “decades of broken promises have eroded trust in the established parties” and that “they can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.” The move cuts the size of the Conservative opposition on Gravesham Borough Council and gives Reform its first organised group in the borough.
Gravesham Conservative leader of the opposition Cllr Jordan Meade said he was disappointed, but remained entirely “focused on getting on with our job of providing effective opposition on GBC.”
Shortly after, attention shifted to Medway, where Cllr Robbie Lammas, who represents Princes Park ward, also quit the Conservatives to join Reform. Lammas told our sister title Local Authority that he had been left “unsupported” by his party after disputes over the wave of flags going up and plans to house asylum seekers locally. In his public statement, he called Labour’s decision to remove flags “a disgrace” and said he wanted to ask “necessary questions” about Home Office moves that he claimed had been kept from residents. He told Local Authority that making the switch was “a very strange feeling” but that he had no plan to call a by-election, adding, “I’m still a conservative. I’m just under a banner.”
Lammas, a former parliamentary aide and special adviser, gives Reform its third seat on Medway Council. His former colleagues in the Conservative group said they were “disappointed,” while Reform figures described his move as “principled” and “a sign that the momentum is with us.”
By that evening, The Mirror focused on Lammas’s past, reporting that he had previously been accused of bullying and harassment by a colleague while working in Parliament, allegations he “strongly denied.” Clearly, someone at Conservative HQ had a file in a drawer, and they were ready to dispatch it at the right moment.
For Reform, the optics are powerful, but the risks are growing. With its administration at County Hall already under scrutiny over the likelihood of the 5% council-tax rise above, the party’s expanding footprint makes it harder to point blame elsewhere when unpopular choices land. It also raises questions about how long the party can project an image of being new and different as its ranks fill up with disgruntled Tories.
Footnotes
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