Reform UK is beginning to think about changing tack on council tax (Alamy)
3 min read
Reform UK councillors have told PoliticsHome that the party should not repeat the 2025 error of promising tax cuts heading into the May local elections.
One Reform councillor said there are “lessons to be learned” for Nigel Farage’s party in how local authorities it won last year have struggled to match the rhetoric of lowering council tax.
Earlier this month, a Reform UK source admitted to PoliticsHome that the party’s struggle to lower taxes at the local level up to now should be seen as “a learning curve” and a lesson for the party about the dangers of “overpromising and underdelivering”.
Reform UK, which continues to lead national opinion polls, made a significant electoral breakthrough at last year’s local elections, winning control of 12 local authorities nationwide.
Many of its candidates went into polling day pledging council tax cuts. However, since entering office, they have encountered local government finances under severe strain, and a majority of councils controlled by Farage’s party have now formally proposed potential council tax rises.
PoliticsHome analysis in June found that councils won by Reform in May spent up to 78 per cent of their service spending on social care and homelessness in 2024.
Reform said the party would improve council finances through a cost-cutting unit inspired by X owner Elon Musk’s efforts to reduce waste in the US government.
Barry Dunning, a Reform County Councillor in Hampshire, where elections are set to go ahead this May, said “[there are] absolutely lessons to be learned in terms of council tax promises”.
In Surrey, Reform councillor Andy Lynch said: “I’m no economist, but you can’t just cut council tax.”
Lynch told PoliticsHome: “If you want to keep frontline services in your first year, cutting council tax is probably not going to happen. You’ve got to plug the wastage, you’ve got to try and make savings somewhere else along the line before you can boldly go, ‘Do you know what? We’re going to cut your council tax’.”
Asked by PoliticsHome if lessons could be learned from how other Reform councils have performed so far, Lynch said, “Yeah, I would say there should be caution.”
Lynch, who is the Reform Group Leader in Surrey, also warned: “Do not boast about things you can’t deliver.”
He later said: “Going in there, gung-ho, from day one saying, ‘Right, well, we won’t be raising the council tax, and we won’t be doing this’… without actually sitting down and looking at all the finances, is dangerous.”
Lynch said it is “difficult to speak on behalf” of Reform councillors elsewhere in the country, but stressed that he personally would not take the “really daft” step of promising tax cuts before being able to see the true state of the finances he had inherited.
“For me, there’s no way I’d be saying that if we take over the East Surrey unitary authority, we’ll be cutting council tax, because that’s a really daft thing to say when I haven’t got my hands on all the figures,” he said.
Lynch added that a “deep dive” on the figures would be necessary before making statements that you would not be raising council tax.
“But until you’ve done that, it would be almost suicidal for me and Reform to start saying we can make cuts here, there and everywhere, when we’ve not even looked at the figures yet.”
In Hampshire, Dunning said it was important to “keep council tax levels up so we can do things”.
Local authorities have “cut things to the bone,” he said, adding: “I think that was a mistake of Reform to promise that they would just be going into councils looking for waste.”
“I think that is a false promise.”
