Reform UK leader visits Staffordshire County Council
Nigel Farage says Reform UK’s DOGE team will help find ‘significant’ savings at Staffordshire County Council
Nigel Farage says Reform UK’s DOGE team will help find ‘significant’ savings at Staffordshire County Council. The Reform leader visited County Buildings in Stafford on Tuesday to meet the council’s new cabinet, following his party’s landslide election victory in Staffordshire last month.
Mr Farage spoke about Reform’s plans to send a team of software engineers, data analysts and forensic auditors to comb through the county council’s finances in order to identify savings. The unit, led by 28-year-old tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried, has been labelled DOGE after the American Department of Government Efficiency, previously headed by Elon Musk.
While Mr Farage believes there are ‘significant savings’ to be made in areas such as climate change policy, he declined to predict how much DOGE would achieve. The DOGE team, which Reform says will be working for free, started work at Kent County Council this week and will be visiting all 10 authorities controlled by Reform over the course of this year.
Mr Farage believes the team will be able to bring expertise and a fresh perspective to the county council.
He said: “Marking your own homework is very difficult. If you ask people who are here already to look at what they’ve done over the past four years, that perhaps puts them in an impossible position. Many of these spending decisions are political, and to have an independent unit with no particular emotional ties to the county or the administration, is good. And the fact that we’ve got people doing it for free is even better.
“Taxpayers are on the hook for massive consultancy fees at all levels of government. These are very, very bright, entrepreneurial young people, who have done incredibly well in life and want to put something back as a form of public service. We should all be very grateful.
“Great though are our councillors are here in Staffordshire I’ve yet to meet a tech entrepreneur amongst them, or someone who understands how to use AI and much else to deliver very fast results. If you want to deeply analyse some of this expenditure it might take a huge team of people six months to do – we believe that through these people can bring us significant short cuts.”
A council by-election is due to be held in Eccleshall and Gnosall following the resignation of Reform councillor Wayne Titley after just two weeks, which is set to cost taxpayers around £27,000. Mr Farage said this was ‘unfortunate’, but said the resignation of former Conservative Tamworth MP Chris Pincher in 2023 had cost taxpayers more.
During his visit to County Buildings, Mr Farage was introduced to council leader Ian Cooper and his cabinet, along with chief executive Pat Flaherty, and then gave a speech to the wider Reform group. He urged the Reform councillors to ‘stick to the plan’ that got them elected, and to keep the group’s internal disagreements ‘behind closed doors’.
Cllr Cooper said the county council was preparing for the arrival of the DOGE team, and gave assurances that its work would align with council rules.
He said: “I’ve already had conversations with our chief executive and also the county solicitor, because obviously we want to do it properly. We don’t just want to come in like a bull in the china shop. We want to have a conversation with the council, and Pat has been very receptive to that. So we’re drawing up a set of protocols to make sure everyone is happy with that.
“At some point in time, the DOGE team will interface with the council and ask for the required information. It’s not looking for individual people. We’re looking at departments – what works and what doesn’t work, the granular detail. Without that detail it’s hard to make good business decisions.
“I think a lot of savings will be found. We’ll be coming at it from a different perspective. A lot of our people are from a business background, so they’ll take a fresh look at it. We’re not here to frighten people, we’re not here to make people redundant or anything like that. We’re just here to ask how we make better use of the funds available.”
But political opponents have questioned the legality and ethics of the DOGE unit, and described it as a ‘political stunt’.
Lib Dem Stafford borough councillor Alex Sandiford says commercially sensitive documents will have to be redacted before being handed over to the team, at enormous cost to the council.
He said: “This will be hugely expensive, totally impractical, and ultimately pointless. It’s a distraction tactic. Reform’s councillors clearly don’t understand local government and need a headline to cover up the fact they have no serious plan.”