Reform UK ran a council for a year. Things went badly

After Reform UK seized control of Staffordshire county council last May, new leader Ian Cooper made a promise.

His mission was to “keep under the radar” by demonstrating “professionalism and competence”.

By December, Cooper had quit as leader and been expelled from the party following allegations of racism. His replacement was also accused of racism and quit within days of being chosen.

The council had no permanent leader for a third of the year.

The reality of Reform UK rule has been even bumpier than many critics expected.

Staffordshire, a rural county in the centre of England, was one of several areas in which Nigel Farage’s populist rightwingers overturned substantial Conservative majorities in a single swoop last year.

With Reform expected to win more councils in England’s elections next week, it provides a case study in the party’s experience of local power.

Reform’s victory, on the back of a campaign promising to cut taxes, drum out waste and cut immigration, ushered in a new army of councillors. Most had no experience of local government or even each other.

Since then, complaints about the behaviour of councillors have rocketed. Security measures at the town hall have been dramatically increased following anti-racism protests.

Councillors on all sides blame one another for an increasingly combative atmosphere.

“It’s been like a nightmare,” said Jill Hood, an independent who has represented the market town of Stone since 2013. “I dread going into the full council meetings.”

“We came [into] a very frozen — I mean permafrost frozen — start,” said Martin Murray, a Reform councillor who is now council leader. “We had no handover from the previous administration. Nothing given to us. We all had to get up to speed.”

Hood, too, recalled Reform’s first days at the helm.

She described being accidentally ushered into a private gathering of councillors, moments before the council’s first public meeting of the year was due to begin.

“I was told to hurry up and sit down. The door was closed and a big bald guy said ‘no one is to speak, do not put your hands up, today is purely theatre — no one answers questions’,” she said. (The bald man was Cooper, Reform’s council leader.)

“At this point I realised I was in a room full of Reform members.”

Reform inherited a council which, like all other English local authorities, was struggling to balance its books. The council needed to find substantial annual savings, primarily because of rising demand for social care.

Chris Large, Reform’s initial finance chief, said that pressures in children’s social care, coupled with inflation and central government changes to National Insurance and the minimum wage, had ultimately made it impossible to hold down or cut tax, as the party had promised.

The resulting 3.9 per cent tax rise was, he added, still “well below” the national average of 4.9 per cent.

Reform had also promised an Elon Musk-style Department of Local Government Efficiency to end waste.

“Because I’ve done transformation and change before, we didn’t need Reform’s Doge to come in here because we did our own,” said Large, a self-described “transformation” expert.

Large had previously been director of several failed companies. He attributed this to his role working with start-ups. “Some of them go, some of them don’t go,” he said of helping struggling firms.

A council spokesperson said just shy of £14.5mn in savings had been identified during this financial year.

That figure was in fact less than the £15.6mn in savings forecast by the Tories before Reform took over, said Conservative leader Philip White.

“Reform want to give voters the impression they have ‘found’ savings,” said White. “But all that has actually happened is the council’s finance team have updated the five-year plan agreed in February 2025, before Reform took office.”

Reform’s 2025 local election campaign had also prioritised the slashing of climate change targets and diversity initiatives. Farage had called Staffordshire “one of the wokest” councils in England. He warned officials working on climate change policy to “go look for a different job”.

A Freedom of Information request by local newspaper the Express and Star showed no council officers working on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives, while four carried out climate change work as part of their brief.

Their salaries amounted to £153,000 a year out of a total revenue budget of £735mn. The officers remain in post.

The council confirmed “no savings” had been made in EDI. It has, however, rescinded its declaration of a climate change emergency, originally declared by its Tory predecessor in 2019.

Green councillor Jack Rose, who opposed the lifting of the climate change declaration, said that he “took his hat off” to new Reform councillors “who have tried to get their head down and impact things” while simultaneously learning the ropes of local government.

But he said he would struggle to identify any substantive changes to policy in the last year. 

“They’ve not really done that much,” he said, adding that council officers had just been doing “what they would normally do”.

“Chaos” had defined Reform’s year in charge, he said.

Cooper, the initial council leader, quit after the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate exposed previous allegedly racist online comments. He now sits as an independent backbencher.

He said that it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the matter until a protracted internal council investigation into the comments has concluded. He has recently donated to Restore, the far-right party founded by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe.

Even before Cooper’s expulsion, another Reform councillor and cabinet member Peter Mason had apologised for a series of X posts including one criticising a statue of “a fat-arsed black woman”. He remains in post.

In the 10 months up to March 6, the council received 162 complaints about the behaviour of councillors, a 15-fold increase on the same period last year, according to data released to the FT under freedom of information laws. The vast majority were from members of the public.

Some 88 per cent of the complaints were about Reform councillors.

The council has drafted in external legal help to sift through complaints, as part of investigations that are often taking months to complete.

The allegations against Cooper also prompted an anti-racism protest at December’s council meeting.

Reform’s national deputy leader Richard Tice later accused demonstrators of “storming” the council meeting and making councillors fear for their lives. Police are still investigating whether the protesters should be charged with disrupting a meeting and “assault by beating”, following an accusation from Reform.

Former Conservative councillor Mark Sutton, a retired police officer who oversaw security at football matches during his 30-year career, questioned Reform’s version of events.

Sutton was sitting in the public gallery during the protest. Demonstrators did disrupt the meeting by shouting and initially refused to leave, he said.

“I saw nothing that constituted assault or common assault,” he said, adding that what he had witnessed was “no threats in their behaviour”.

A subsequent increase of security at the council had been “completely over the top”, said Sutton.

More than £6,000 has since been spent on new body-worn cameras for security guards at Staffordshire, according to a further FOI response to the FT.

At some meetings there is now one security guard for every member of the public. Coats are banned from the public gallery of the town hall’s 19th-century chamber on security grounds.

Scandals continued to plague the authority even after Cooper’s departure in December.

Days later it emerged that a TikTok account linked to Large had liked and replied to various offensive posts, including one stating that “anyone who’s not actually white English should never be trusted to work within our government”.

Large said his account had been hacked.

The following month Reform elected him as their new leader but Large stood down six days later, citing bereavement, before being officially sworn in. He has since left the party.

In March, backbench councillor Lynn Dean left Reform after further alleged racist posts surfaced. Reform said she had failed to disclose personal social media accounts and suspended her. Dean, who said she chose to quit the party, now sits as an independent.

Such scandals have raised the temperature in the council chamber, which at February’s budget meeting descended into vitriolic claims and counterclaims of racism, “bile” and “libel”.

Reform blames the fraught political atmosphere on its opponents, both on the left and right.

“How we speak about things matters. It can be dangerous when you push things too far. The opposition have done that,” said Murray, the Reform councillor.

Murray was eventually sworn in as leader in March, after four months without anyone in the permanent post.

He defended the party’s record in its first year, saying it had protected frontline services and “balanced the books”.

“On May 1, it will be the tenth anniversary of Staffordshire Day and a year to the day, too, that Staffordshire people put their faith in us,” he said.

“As the newly elected leader of this council, my priority now is to get on with the job, delivering even more for this council and this county.”