Reform councils blasted over ยฃ16million spent on diary managers | Politics | News
Arthur Reynolds, who exposed the figures, said that the party had “swept into town halls across the nation, promising to cut waste and lower taxes.” But he took aim at the pledge, which was branded a Department of Local Government Efficiency Programme (DOGE) by Reform, and slammed it as “nothing more than a populist PR stunt.” He added that “every Reform-led upper-tier local authority raised council tax this year” and blasted the party’s spending on secretarial support.
Mr Reynolds, who has railed against similar expenditure in Whitehall – which spent tens of millions on hiring hundreds of PAs for Mandarins – asked: “Where are the promised savings?”
The former civil servant recently took aim at “woke waste” in Whitehall, after a research project revealed some departments where spending millions of pounds “talking to itself” with staff running a growing list of “woke” awareness workshops
At the time, Freedom of Information data revealed that, across the Government, potentially hundreds of staff work in plum internal communications jobs, with the Treasury alone employing at least 30 of them at a cost of more than ยฃ2.7million a year.
His new project, to uncover what he says is waste at local authority level, revealed that some ยฃ16million was being spent on the roles.
Mr Reynolds said: “As the private sector replaces these roles with tech and AI, the public sector gravy train rumbles on with Reform at the helm.”
He warned: “If their record in local government is anything to go by, if Reform ever gets the keys to Whitehall, theyโll miss the waste thatโs right under their noses while bureaucrats keep running the show.”
A Reform UK spokesman said: “In just their first year, Reform-led councils have made over ยฃ700 million in efficiency savings, allowing them to deliver the lowest average council tax rises of any party.
“The results of the most recent local elections proved that voters are responding positively to the way we run councils and asking for more Reform and a more business-like, common sense approach to running local authorities.”
