'I know one thing Lancashire County Council can cut straight away'
Nigel Farage says he believes the new Reform UK administration at Lancashire County Council will be able to find financial savings – and reduce what he described as its “quite excessive” level of debt.
The party leader was speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) during a visit to the new team running the authority.
It was revealed during the trip that the party’s controversial ‘DOGE’ team – modelled on the United States’ cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, originally run by Elon Musk – would be arriving in Lancashire next week.
Quizzed by the LDRS as to why he believed there was waste to be found within the walls of County Hall after years of austerity during the 2010s and spiralling demand for services since the pandemic, Mr. Farage acknowledged: “We don’t fully know [what we will find] until we go in and look.”
However, he added: “We believe we will find savings, we will find efficiencies and we’re going to do our best to tackle these serious problems.”
Mr. Farage said while the overarching aim was to balance the books – by at least achieving the £103m in savings the previous Tory administration had already stated would be need over the next two years – he also wanted to “establish some trust with council taxpayers”.
“If you look at the cumulative rise in council tax over the last decade or so, it’s very significant. It’s a big part of household bills and if we can show them that actually the money is being spent where it really should be spent…they’ll be pleased.”
He and the local party had made the county council’s finances a key aspect of the local election campaign in the run-up to last month’s poll, which saw Reform win control.
In a previous interview with the LDRS during a visit to West Lancashire in April, Mr. Farage had claimed the county council’s £1.2bn of debt – and the resultant interest payments which it has since been established amount to around £100,000 a day – had taken the authority to the brink of “bankruptcy”.
At the time, that claim not only generated a furious political rebuttal from the then Conservative administration – which noted that the debt incurred was not for day-to-day spending, but for investing in and maintaining assets like schools and roads – but was also branded “incorrect” by a non-political council spokesperson.
Questioned during his visit to County Hall on Thursday about how an authority with £188m of usable reserves – and which only needed £1.5m of them to balance its budget this year – could constitute a council close the financial edge, Mr. Farage said:
“It depends where the reserves are and…how liquid those reserves are. There is clearly a very serious debt problem here.
“There are assets as well [and] we’ve got to look very seriously at those assets, how realizable they are, and [whether they] could be used to reduce some of the debt.
“We’ve got our feet under the table, we know what the challenges are. We’re looking at the service contracts that have been signed [and] working out whether we’ve got the best companies.
“We’re going to bring a fresh, different approach to this – and we’re determined to succeed.”
The Reform leader said the “first saving” should be the scrapping of a £520,000 contract to provide “ergonomic chairs” for Lancashire County Council staff, most of whom, he claimed, work from home.
It was an issue he brought to a national audience during the local election campaign, often quoting it during interviews and speeches as proof of what were characterised as the excesses of council spending.
The LDRS has since discovered that while the maximum value of the contract is £520,000, over the course of four years, only around £20,000 has so far been spent – and there is no guarantee how much will ultimately be shelled out on the seating.
Asked whether it was Reform policy to have “uncomfortable staff”, he said a “sense of perspective” was required.
Meanwhile, probed as to whether his heart really lay in the minutiae of local government after so many years operating on a higher political plane on the European and national stages, Nigel Farage said he was “working in reverse”.
On the issues he was now contending with, he said: “This matters to ordinary folk – this matters to council taxpayers. This matters to people without much money, who hit a pothole and face a huge bill.
“It matters to people who’ve got kids that really do have bad educational problems. It matters to elderly people who need social care. So, interestingly, the impact of a county council on a family and on everyday life is probably greater than the impact of national government.”