Reform UK’s Doge Efforts “Save More Than £100 Million in Council Spending in 100 Days” Since Local Elections As Nigel Farage’s Party “Rolls Back Net Zero”
Reform UK says its Musk-inspired “DOGE” unit has clawed back £110 million in council savings just 100 days after winning 650 seats in May’s local elections. The Mail has the details.
This has included scrapping Net Zero initiatives within local councils, “streamlining and modernising” services and focusing on pay and allowances, the party added.
Mr Farage said: “On May 1st, we showed that if you vote Reform, you get Reform. …
“From rolling back the devastating Net Zero agenda on a local level to cutting wasteful spending, Reform councils are standing up for the priorities of local people, not the whims of bureaucrats or the entrenched elite.” …
In Durham, the Reform-led council last month rescinded a formal declaration of a “climate emergency” and claims to have saved £25 million.
This included not upgrading to a fleet of electric vehicles, scrapping the installation of a heat pump in the new county hall and scaling back investment in solar panels.
In Kent, Reform said it had saved £32 million in spending over four years, which had been earmarked to make buildings more energy efficient.
In Staffordshire, the party claimed to have saved £4.5 million by halting the roll out of electric vehicle charging in areas where there is little to no customer demand.
Worth reading in full.
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Hip Hip…..Hooray!
‘Both models and experience suggest that CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial [Chapters 9, 10, Section 11.1]. Social Cost of Carbon estimates, which attempt to quantify the economic damage of CO2 emissions, are highly sensitive to their underlying assumptions and so provide limited independent information [Section 11.2]. U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.’
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf
Ergo ‘net zero’ = Nut Zero
The hypothesis “CO2 controls warming” is very straightforward
Yet there is no formal proof whatsoever. We are simply told to believe those whose jobs depends on it being so. Yet real world data shows otherwise; indeed the Eemian era was 2 to 3 degrees C warmer than now, with CO2 levels one third less, at 280ppm.
Indeed, the Holocene alone has had warmer periods. The current warming, less than 1.5 degrees C since we left the Little Ice Age is simply what one would expect – leaving an Ice Age
Not hypothesis, lie.
“ Social Cost of Carbon estimates, which attempt to quantify the economic damage of CO2 emissions…”
These estimates never consider the cost of implementing Net Zero, nor the economic gain from increased warming – fewer deaths from cold – and plant-growth stimulating (food crops particularly) increased CO2 levels.
We do of course get the evidence-free: “But the cost of not implementing Net Zero would be higher”.
I can well believe that these savings are legitimate and are but the tip of some very large icebergs. If every council did the same and nothing more we would be looking at billions. Next up mass sackings of the DIE wasters for further billions in savings. And then time to start on the council “Directors” which needs a cull of 50% immediately and a further 50% six months later. Savings will be enormous and morale boosted exponentially.
Get stuck in.
Indeed. Three years ago my local council (Somerset) had no fewer than 53 employees on salaries of over £100,000, three of whom were getting over £250,000. The council is close to bankruptcy.
The usual excuse for these sort of salaries is that “we need to attract the best people” – which quite obviously hasn’t worked, has it?
£100m is drop in the channel (sorry, ocean) compared with: “Home Office figures cited by the Financial Times in August last year showed that the annual asylum cost reached £3.96 billion in the year up to 2023—double that of the previous year and six times higher than 2018”.
Reform councillors and their leaders talk a lot about illegal immigrants (and doing nothing about it), who are a fraction of the total, thus diverting the gullible from the mass legal invasion.
It took me two years to see through Nigel. Some smart ones gauged him much earlier but I fell for his siren voices. For others will take much longer before they realise that he is part of the New Establishment (Sir Sadiq, Lord Ali, Lord Ahmed…one only has to draw a graph of the number of muslim lords, baronesses, dames and knights of the realm over the last two decades to recognise our new masters).
At any rate, does anyone seriously believe that the Mail and DT will offer Farage free commercials if he was out to change the status quo?
Absolutely right.
Fair points but from what I know of Reform there is something of a disconnect between the Branch membership and the leadership. If branches obtain some electoral weight it is not going to be easy for Farage and the rest to rein them back.
No one talks about family reunification. The majority of migrants come via Heathrow, not the channel. Easy to see when one is queuing at customs to avoid stupid machines.
Yeh. Just why Tories didn’t bother saving at council or government level. Hardly worth the effort.
And think how upset all the luvvies would be.
There isn’t anything Reform councils can do about immigrants, legal or otherwise, so there’s no point comparing the savings they’ve made with central government spending.
If people don’t give Farage a chance in No 10 to prove he’s genuinely different to the uniparty what else can we do to rescue this country?
I hope they did that because it failed a cost-benefit analysis
More energy efficient does not mean more cost efficient.
The goonsquad has finally had to admit that “more energy efficient” heat pumps cost more to operate compared to what they replace – gas boilers – because the retail price of 1kWh of electricity is about four times more than the retail price for 1kWh equivalent of gas.
That is why there is much desperate talk about shifting the cost of subsidising wind/solar from electricity to gas so that gas will cost more than electricity so heat pumps will then be “cheaper” to run than gas boilers.
And if in order to make a building “more energy efficient” it requires extensive work to be carried out on insulation, heat reclamation units, etc then that capital cost will most certainly be higher than the annual savings from energy use it will bring for some years to come.
Any conservative minded government that (please god) takes power in the future must just cut and cancel laws and legislation. Afuera! to piles of strangulating laws and regulations. It is easy to destroy communist legislation and really hard to re-establish it. So cut, cut, cut. Be brave. Do not flinch. Destroy the Trotsky bastard Blair’s evil laws. Do away with the supreme court, etc. Cancel. Remove.
And remigrate, repatriate and deport all illegals and many, many recent immigrants.
£100 million is an absolute drop in the ocean. Reform doesn’t seem to have a clue about genuinely effective cuts to public spending.
I am happy to receive that drop in the ocean – how do I get it?
Its a start.
Its also more than any other councils being
rundestroyed by other parties.I would also imagine they are getting resistance and given the runaround by incumbents who don’t want them to succeed, and may even have something to hide!
It might be enough to get more people to vote Reform at council elections and help build up a local strength that can deal with Farage in due course as we still wait for Nigel Farage Limited to become a political party run by the members.
I wonder how much the Church of England has wasted on net zero initiatives – such as equipping every vicarage with an electric car charger, for the electric car which the vicar cannot afford to buy.
Reform controls 10 Councils, so that averages out at £10 million per council …. so far. But the DOGE Unit hasn’t been to all of them yet, so the savings are likely to increase significantly.
It’s early days.
“The Liberal Democrat opposition in Durham claimed Reform’s actions would cost the council money in the long run.“
Ah… the famous “long run” the future (like in the climate hoax) is the realm of the unfalsifiable claim requiring no evidence, and “in the long run” nobody will remember the claim made, nobody punished when it doesn’t materialise.
“They argued that investments made in solar panels and heat pumps had so far saved the council more than £9million and attracted central government grants.”
Since the cost of heat pumps and solar was an outlay, it cannot have been a “saving”. Owners of solar panels get paid for the electricity generated plus a feed-in payment if they send surplus electricity to the grid. It’s a “nice little earner”, and purchase costs for heat pumps and solar are subsidised, so there are overall no “savings” just shifting costs from council tax payers to general taxpayers, and consumers who have to pay for these subsidy via their energy bills.