The doubters said it could not be done. They said Reform UK was all slogans and no substance, fine for a protest vote but hopeless at the unglamorous business of actually running things. A year on from our breakthrough in the local elections, that sneer is wearing very thin indeed.
A Mandate Earned
In May, the country sent a message that could not be misread. Reform UK won more than 1,350 council seats and took control of 13 councils, while Labour lost around 35 councils and more than 1,300 seats. Traditional heartlands that had returned the same parties for generations turned to Reform because they wanted something different: competence, common sense, and respect for the people who pay the bills.
That was not a fluke and it was not a tantrum. It was voters looking at the state of their towns, their council tax bills, and their public services, and deciding the old parties had run out of answers.
Delivering On The Promise
Now comes the part that matters: governing. Reform says its councils have already identified savings running into the hundreds of millions of pounds by stripping out waste, vanity projects, and bloated overheads. The party also points to delivering some of the lowest council tax rises of any administration. That is the whole argument in a sentence: you protect frontline services by cutting waste, not by reaching deeper into residents' pockets.
For too long, the default setting of local government has been to raise council tax, trim the services people actually use, and protect the bureaucracy in the middle. Reform is turning that on its head. It is asking the obvious questions that the established parties stopped asking years ago: does the council really need to spend this? Is this money serving residents, or serving the machine?
The Bigger Picture
As a Reform councillor myself, I see the difference in attitude every day. We treat public money as exactly that, the public's, not ours to fritter away. We start from the assumption that residents know how to spend their own money better than a committee does. And we believe that low tax and decent services are not opposites, but partners, if you have the discipline to cut waste first.
This is only the beginning. The work in the town halls is the proving ground. Get it right at the local level, deliver value for the people who trusted us, and the case for Reform across the whole country makes itself.