Reform UK: Kent local authority poised to hike council tax
Reform UK-run Kent County Council is likely to raise council tax next year, with a cabinet member suggesting that a five per cent hike is on the cards.
Diane Morton, the council lead for adult social care, told the Financial Times: “We’ve got more demand than ever before and it’s growing.”
“We just want more money,” said Morton, adding that local services are already “down to the bare bones”.
Morton appeared to confirm a ballpark figure for tax hikes, saying “I think it’s going to be five per cent” to raise an estimated £50m.
A fellow Kent council cabinet member told the broadsheet: “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 Reform-run local authority currently handles a £2.5bn annual budget, with around half of this figure allocated to social care and children with special educational needs (SEN).
The interview runs counter to Reform’s flagship ‘Dolge’ initiative – a “department of local government efficiency” – to find local council savings, in a play on Elon Musk’s ‘Doge’ within the Trump Administration.
Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran has previously bigged up the local authority as a “shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform government might look like”.
Kemkaran, a former BBC journalist, declined to confirm a council tax hike.
During the local election campaign, Farage had slammed Conservative spending in Kent as “beyond belief”, and Reform has previously claimed to have found £40m in savings.
Reform policy chief Zia Yusuf has claimed that wasteful spending included TV licences for asylum seekers.
A new political dividing line?
Nigel Farage’s party won a barnstorming victory in previously-Tory Kent in May’s local elections, alongside nine other county councils, in part over promises to slash spending.
Now, Conservatives are looking to use the spending figures as a wedge to differentiate from Reform.
Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, used much of his party conference speech to frame the Tories as the party of fiscal prudence with Labour and Reform as the parties of profligate spending.
Stride said that Reform is “the party of more spending and more debt”, claiming that Nigel Farage is “marching to the left”.
He added that Reform would spend “billions more on welfare and they want you to pay for it”, in reference to Farage’s support for scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
Meanwhile, Kemkaran has remained publicly bullish, resharing a post from Reform UK’s page on X which declared: “The Conservative Party is finished. Only Reform UK can beat Labour at the next General Election.”