According to the newspaper article, Fraser Moat claimed the council “had not actually made any cuts” since Reform UK took over and pledged to open the books to find where waste might lie.
The councillor, head of Reform’s Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge) initiative in Kent, reportedly said: “We haven’t cut front-line services other than what the Conservatives had already planned to do.”
Paul Chamberlain, a deputy cabinet member, was quoted in the article saying: “We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness found in America and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”
Dolge launched in June with the backing of former party chairman Zia Yusuf, who quit the role shortly afterwards. It was modelled on billionaire Elon Musk’s Doge advisory group as part of Donald Trump’s second term as US president.
“I wish we could have found those big savings for Zia, it would have been a better story, but we didn’t,” Chamberlain reportedly told the Financial Times.