When Reform UK swept to power at Kent County Council last May, ending nearly 30 years of Conservative control, Nigel Farage promised a “new dawn” in British politics. Council leader Linden Kemkaran declared Kent would be the “shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform government might look like.” One year later, residents say nothing has improved, the party’s flagship efficiency drive found almost nothing to cut, more than ten councillors have quit or been expelled, and council tax has gone up.
With Reform now expected to make significant gains across England at the May 7 local elections – and positioning itself as a government-in-waiting – Kent County Council was supposed to provide the proof of concept. The evidence gathered from residents, charities and local politicians paints a rather different picture.
What residents say
The Mirror spoke to half a dozen people on the high street in Maidstone last week. Not a single one could identify a meaningful improvement to their area since Reform took over.
Eileen, 88, said: “Since Reform took over Kent County Council, it’s not been so good. Nothing gets done properly. The roads don’t get swept, all things like that.”
Frank, 60, was equally unimpressed: “Nothing has changed. Nothing’s got worse. Nothing’s got better.”
Paul, 70, added: “I can’t say I’ve seen a great deal of difference between the previous council – the Conservatives – to what it is now.”
That last observation is particularly damaging for a party that campaigned explicitly on the premise that the previous Conservative administration was riddled with waste, corruption and incompetence. If the difference is invisible to voters on the ground, the central Reform narrative about local government has a problem.
The DOGE disaster
The centrepiece of Reform’s arrival at Kent County Council was the creation of a local version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – branded “Dolge” in Kent, the “L” standing for “local.” It was launched with considerable fanfare in June 2025, with Zia Yusuf – then Reform’s national chairman – travelling to Maidstone and posing on the council stairs for photographs. Yusuf accused officials of having their “snouts in the trough for too long” and promised the unit would uncover “waste and in some cases corruption” that was “off the charts.”
What Reform’s own councillors subsequently found was considerably less dramatic. Paul Chamberlain, the cabinet member responsible for Dolge, admitted that the expectations upon taking power had not been met, saying: “We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that Doge found in America and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”
A third senior Reform cabinet member told the Financial Times simply: “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 reason is structural rather than political – and it was one that anyone with knowledge of local government could have predicted. Kent, like many councils, has effectively become a care home provider that also collects the bins. Services are already “down to the bare bones,” according to Reform’s own cabinet member for adult social care. The largest budget items – adult social care, children’s services, education, and support for children with special educational needs – are statutory obligations that no council, however ideologically motivated, can simply cut away.
The councillor in charge of Dolge, Matthew Fraser Moat, resigned in February, having admitted the council “had not actually made any cuts” since Reform took control. Alister Brady, a Labour councillor at Kent County Council, was withering in his assessment: “When Reform – the ‘Dolge’ people from Reform – rolled into Kent County Council, it was like a circus. They posed on the stairs. They said they’ll find all this waste, all this corruption. It was nonsense. What Reform do is they do things to get headlines and then you look at their actions and nothing really happens.”
The broken promise on council tax
One of the most striking broken promises concerns council tax itself. During last year’s election campaign, Reform distributed leaflets in Kent promising to “reduce waste and cut your taxes.” Farage, challenged on this in February, denied he had made that promise – saying the tax pledge was “national” policy and that “I never promised cuts in council tax.”
In January 2026, the council approved a 3.99% increase in council tax. Not a cut. Not even a freeze. An increase – albeit described by Reform as “the lowest council tax increase in over a decade.”
Brady told The Mirror: “They misled residents and I’m hearing on the doorstep that they see that lie.”
The chaos within
Beyond the policy failures, Reform’s management of Kent County Council has been marked by internal turmoil that has significantly undermined the party’s claim to offer competent governance.
The most damaging episode came in October 2025, when leaked video footage showed Kemkaran swearing at her own councillors during an internal group meeting and telling them to “f*cking suck it up” if they disagreed with her decisions. When a councillor tried to raise concerns, she muted his microphone.
The controversy prompted seven MPs with Kent constituencies to write to Farage describing the council as “ridden with chaos and in-fighting” and calling for Kemkaran’s replacement. Between 25 and 27 October, five councillors were expelled from the Reform party.
The defections continued into 2026. Seven former Reform councillors subsequently joined Restore Britain – the far-right party founded by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Reform’s councillor total, which stood at 57 after the May 2025 election, fell to 47. If Reform loses just six more seats, it would lose control of the council entirely.
Tory councillor Dan Watkins, who was unseated by Reform at county level but remains a councillor at Canterbury city council, said Reform’s management is the worst he has seen in seven years in local politics. “Debate is being shut down. Individuals are being personally criticised in the chamber and the whole thing seems just performative for national politics and I think that’s a real loss to local democracy,” he said. “What we have at County Hall in Maidstone is Reform just engaging in gesture politics and fomenting an aggressive atmosphere where the whole thing is set up to be about doing down your opponents and scoring some national political points.”
He drew an explicit conclusion about what this means for the wider political stakes: “This is how they run local government. Imagine the horror story that will materialise if they run national government. If it’s a shop window, it’s a shop window to a horror show, isn’t it?”
Labour’s Brady echoed the assessment: “Since Reform took over at Kent County Council, there’s just been chaos. It shouldn’t be KCC, it’s Kent Chaos Council.”
The impact on ordinary people
For those who depend on council services, the chaos at the top has had real-world consequences. Rob Foley, charity manager at Making a Difference to Maidstone, said pressure on his foodbank services has not eased since Reform took over. “Since Reform have been in, the strain on our services has been the same,” he said, adding that he hoped the party would eventually deliver but noting simply: “Pressure keeps building. People keep needing it and we just keep trying to provide that.”
On whether Kent was living up to its billing as a shop window for Reform governance, Foley was clear: “If he’s saying that Kent is going to be a shop window, then he really needs to sort that display out. Because at the moment, Kent hasn’t changed.”
Reform’s response
A Reform UK spokesman pushed back on the criticism, saying: “The comments from opposition councillors are entirely predictable. They are far more focused on personality and political theatre than on the reality of delivering for the residents of Kent.”
The party pointed to what it characterised as positive achievements: a balanced budget of £1.6 billion, what it described as the lowest council tax increase in over a decade, a £66 million reduction in council debt in the first five months, the scrapping of the Net Zero Renewable Energy Programme saving £32 million over four years, and the cancellation of a planned office move.
Whether those measures justify the turbulence, broken promises and operational chaos of the past year is a question voters – in Kent and across England – will be entitled to weigh on 7 May.
What it means for May
The timing of this reckoning is significant. Reform is expected to win control of additional councils on 7 May, potentially including Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. In each case, the party will make the same promises about waste, efficiency and lower taxes that it made in Kent. The Kent experience suggests that the collision between that rhetoric and the reality of governing complex, under-resourced councils is unlikely to go smoothly.
Farage himself has retreated from the “shop window” framing when pressed about Kent’s record, a tacit acknowledgement that the display is not as attractive as advertised. But with Reform’s national polling slipping from its highs and the Greens now tied with the party for first place, the pressure to demonstrate competence in government – not just opposition – has never been greater.
As one Maidstone resident summed it up: nothing has changed. That may be Reform’s most damaging verdict of all.