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The head of Reform’s Elon Musk-inspired cost-cutting drive at Kent county council has stood down after he told the FT that it had not made significant cuts, undermining claims by senior party figures of vast wasteful spending.
Matthew Fraser Moat, one of the KCC cabinet members in charge of its so-called Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge), had told the FT he was proud that the Reform council had “not actually made any cuts”, adding “we haven’t cut frontline services other than what the Conservatives had already planned to do”.
But in a statement released on Tuesday night, Fraser Moat said that his comments were the result of a “lapse of judgement”, and claimed that his words had been “twisted to fit what I believe to be an anti-KCC narrative”.
“It has become clear to me that continuing as Head of DOLGE is not sustainable, and now that [Kent county council] has delivered a balanced budget and stabilised the council’s finances, I have decided to step down from my role as a cabinet member,” he said, adding that he would stay on as a councillor.
Fraser Moat’s original comments had seemed to contradict claims made by Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf, party leader and former chair, that there was significant waste and fraud in local government that could be slashed.
Fraser Moat said the Reform council had even blocked some of the previous administration’s proposed cuts to services, including the closure of several libraries.
Rather than identifying large amounts of waste, he and other Reform councillors have spent the last nine months seeking to improve systems and find efficiencies in the way that the council delivers its services, which they said were already starting to bring down costs.
Fraser Moat had been speaking to the FT at a first-of-its-kind event he and colleagues had organised as part of a new commercial strategy to expand the range of companies that provide goods and services to the council.
KCC’s statement on Tuesday evening said the FT’s reporting did not accurately reflect the position at the council, noting that it was on course to deliver £100mn in savings this year, had “reprofiled £39.5mn of potential future spend” and reduced debt by £67mn with a further reduction of £16mn expected by the end of this financial year.
“Next year’s budget includes £14mn of savings secured specifically to ensure that council tax increases for residents are kept to a minimum,” the statement said.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said on Tuesday that “we have made savings of £100mn in Kent and if the Financial Times choose not to report that . . . then frankly they are just plain wrong”.
Farage also said that KCC “had to take all the so-called under-18 [asylum seekers] who come across the English channel and put them up at their own cost.” However a senior Reform councillor in Kent told the FT that this was not accurate — the Home Office covers the costs of almost all asylum seekers, which were “not in our budget at all”.
The FT reported earlier this week that the council had saved £100mn this year in large part by successfully implementing changes that had been put forward by the previous Conservative administration, and that it planned to make tens of millions in savings this year because of improvements to systems that had been put forward by the Dolge team over the past nine months.
The FT also reported that the council was targeting zero per cent council tax rises in 2027-28. This implied that the council would need to reduce spending by £52.8mn next year, according to budget documents, which it aims to do in part by improving processes for the delivery of adult social care and transport for children with special educational needs.