Reform councils blasted over £16million spent on diary managers and PAs
A former Civil Servant has blasted Reform UK-led councils for spending millions on hiring diary managers, despite pledging to axe waste.
Council taxpayers are being taken for a ride by Reform UK-led councils, a former civil servant has argued. The criticism has come following a slew of information releases which revealed that some of the local authorities led by Nigel Farage's party are spending millions on hiring diary managers and PAs despite pledging to cut waste.
Arthur Reynolds, who exposed the figures, said that the party had "swept into town halls across the nation, promising to cut waste and lower taxes." But he took aim at the pledge, which was branded a Department of Local Government Efficiency Programme (DOGE) by Reform, and slammed it as "nothing more than a populist PR stunt." He added that "every Reform-led upper-tier local authority raised council tax this year" and blasted the party's spending on secretarial support.
Read more: 'Reform's DOGE is nothing more than a populist PR stunt'
Read more: 'Whitehall splurges £50m on diary managers when AI can do the job in seconds'
Mr Reynolds, who has railed against similar expenditure in Whitehall - which spent tens of millions on hiring hundreds of PAs for Mandarins - asked: "Where are the promised savings?"
The former civil servant recently took aim at "woke waste" in Whitehall, after a research project revealed some departments where spending millions of pounds "talking to itself" with staff running a growing list of "woke" awareness workshops
At the time, Freedom of Information data revealed that, across the Government, potentially hundreds of staff work in plum internal communications jobs, with the Treasury alone employing at least 30 of them at a cost of more than £2.7million a year.
His new project, to uncover what he says is waste at local authority level, revealed that some £16million was being spent on the roles.
Mr Reynolds said: "As the private sector replaces these roles with tech and AI, the public sector gravy train rumbles on with Reform at the helm."
He warned: "If their record in local government is anything to go by, if Reform ever gets the keys to Whitehall, they’ll miss the waste that’s right under their noses while bureaucrats keep running the show."
A Reform UK spokesman said: "In just their first year, Reform-led councils have made over £700 million in efficiency savings, allowing them to deliver the lowest average council tax rises of any party.
"The results of the most recent local elections proved that voters are responding positively to the way we run councils and asking for more Reform and a more business-like, common sense approach to running local authorities."
