There is an article in the FT this morning that blows apart the only known political justification for Reform, which is their claim to be able to cut the size of government by eliminating waste, a competence they have suggested no one else possesses.
The article notes:
Senior councillors at Kent county council have admitted their Elon Musk-inspired cost-cutting drive has not found any significant waste to cut, despite bombastic claims made by senior figures in Reform UK.
It continues:
Paul Chamberlain, one of the Reform UK cabinet members in charge of the so-called Department of Local Government Efficiency [Dolge], told the FT they had taken control nine months ago expecting to find vast amounts of waste but that had not materialised.
“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Elon Musk's cost-cutting vehicle] Doge found in America . . . and that was wrong, we didn't find any of that,” Chamberlain said.
As the FT notes
His admission calls into question the rationale for Reform's Dolge by Nigel Farage and the rightwing populist party's former chair Zia Yusuf, who have both argued there is vast waste and “fraud” in local government.
There is, beyond a shadow of doubt, waste and fraud in local government. Most human systems are prone to both. But the reality is that Reform's claims were always ridiculous.
Local authorities have been cut back to the bone by more than a decade of cuts.
If there was waste to eliminate, it has almost all been eliminated, and what remains will largely be due to new initiatives that are not yet bedded in. As for fraud, the systems to find it in local government are now pretty good. It is in the private sector's relations with the government where fraud is rampant: 40% of all corporate tax owed by small businesses goes unpaid.
So what is left of the reason for Reform and its absurd economic claims? Nothing at all, of course. They were always hollow, and now they have been hollowed out.
There is just racism left to justify its existence in that case, as well as all the other forms of discrimination it can bring to the table with it. That is all Reform is about now, and I think people are beginning to realise that.
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Agree. Does the MSM cover any of this – no. Perhaps it has a death wish to see Fart-rage & Deform elected?
Meanwhile, while the UK MSM and what passes for politics plays tiddly-winks with fart-rage/Deform/Mandelson, there is this: https://www.youtube.com/live/95AyrNmoEYg
There has been a coup-d’etat in China & war/invasion ref Taiwan is coming – which will start a global financial crash. The letter referred to sounds right on the number by the way.
Apologies if this is a bit off-topic for this blog – but a number of blog posts have covered the financial crash.
A village idiot could see that UK politics as-is (& for 45++ years) is unfit for purpose & needs drastic reform. Meanwhile, a typhoon in the east gathers.
(& let’s not forget – there is a lunatic at the helm in the Trump House – & I wonder how the purchase of physical gold has been developing – given the above).
“..,assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Elon Musk’s cost-cutting vehicle] Doge found in America . . . ”
also worth noting that DOGE did nothing of the kind anyway. They just raided and looted their pet bete noirs. They wielded a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
And more importantly grabbed masses of data….
The Reform Councillors in my LA came in full of zeal and then sort of petered out as reality sunk in. But they continue to harp on about immigration of course. If you also consider that they seem to have plenty of money behind them, you still cannot rule them out.
The reality is that local government has been cut far beyond the point where efficiency savings are possible. After more than a decade of shrinking grants and rising demand, most councils now spend the bulk of their budgets on statutory duties like adult social care, children’s services and homelessness, leaving little for the everyday services people expect and need. What is being lost is not frills but the basic fabric of community life.
The evidence is visible everywhere. Councils are closing libraries, youth centres and day centres for the elderly; potholes go unrepaired for months; planning and building control teams are so thin that developments stall; home-care visits are reduced to ten-minute slots; special-needs transport is rationed. Several authorities have issued effective bankruptcy notices, selling assets simply to keep social care running. Residents experience this as missed bin collections, parks left unmanaged, and vulnerable neighbours waiting months for assessments.
To have suggested there remains a large reservoir of waste to cut is, forgive me, utter bollocks. Services are failing not because councils are profligate, but because the funding base has been dismantled.
Thanks
Thank you, Richard.
Mrs Smithers, aka mum, oversees local government expenditure in the Thames valley and suggests cutting waste by scrapping outsourcing and rebuilding local authority expertise and capability and cutting senior manager salaries. For example, one home county CEO works largely from home in Yorkshire and is paid twice what the PM earns. Other examples include most of the fees paid for care go to investment firm intermediaries and investment firm owned medical practices charging hundreds of pounds for assessments that cost £50 before covid.
One home county refuses to build schools in the county town and spends millions annually on ferrying children to and fro schools an hour away by private sector transport.
One hopes PSR, in particular, pipes up.
Thanks
So as not to disappoint………….The Colonel’s mum is spot on. My LA is now all about contracting out having hollowed out any internal capacity to do ‘owt about anything. Contracting is a long process, it also gets mixed results, the team I work with having followed the LA’s procurement rules (schedules of services etc) to the dot, but do nothing but moan about who they have got. In my better world, the best contractors would be earning the same money in the public sector – they are worth it.
We have heads of service living in Liverpool and the far north west of Scotland and elsewhere who seem to have no time to go and look at what they are managing. Local government is still in the grip of the centrifugal forces of Nicholas Ridley – it / we in it are being forced further apart. It’s more like working with a bunch of consultants these days.
And as nature abhors a vacuum, expect business and the markets to fill the voids. And my LA is actually not a bad one, but it will be absorbed into a combined authority (bribed to do so by this government with a few extra quid) and then we’ll see won’t we?
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Depressing.
Private companies charge councils a quarter of a million per child, per year, for children in carehomes. They actively seek out children to fill their homes, sometimes moving them from one region to another. Cut that, and you are cutting waste, and more importantly, cruelty.
Also I know of all the work and huge successes that John Seddon’s Vanguard Consulting have achieved in eliminating waste in many LAs, in the NHS and in private corporations using their Vanguard Methodology based on the Toyota Production System. And the methodology focuses on eliminating failure demand – the failure to do the right thing for the customer – from the end-to-end flow of the work, and it’s not about IT or AI, far from it!