Kent's local authority is likely to raise council tax rates next year as Reform UK has struggled to find big savings under an Elon Musk-inspired cost-cutting drive.
Kent was one of 10 English councils that Nigel Farage's rightwing populist party seized in a swath of victories at local elections in May this year. He vowed to save "a lot of money" by abolishing "wasteful" spending.
But Diane Morton, Reform's cabinet member for adult social care on Kent county council, told the Financial Times that services in Kent were already "down to the bare bones".
"We've got more demand than ever before and it's growing," she said, stressing she did not believe access to those services should be limited. "We just want more money."
As with many local authorities in England, the bulk of Kent's budget is spent on adult and children's social care, as well as on children with special education needs, which together accounted for about 50 per cent of its £2.5bn annual expenditure.
All councils have a legal duty to balance their books and will set next year's budgets in February or March. Ahead of that, most councils in England are expected to increase council tax by 5 per cent, the maximum allowed.
"I think it's going to be 5 per cent," Morton said of where Kent county council would land on tax rises, adding that every 1 per cent increase would equate to an extra £10mn raised.
Council leader Linden Kemkaran, a former BBC journalist, said Kent was a test bed for the party's national policies and the "shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform government might look like". She declined to say whether council tax would be raised, but other Reform councillors said they wanted to avoid hitting the full 5 per cent.
Reform's experience in Kent highlights some of the obstacles it may face in national government if it won the next general election and attempted to follow through on its pledge to slash taxes and public spending.
"Everyone thought we'd come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away but there just aren't," said a third senior Reform cabinet member in Kent. They said the priority was improving services.
Farage has set up a Reform Department of Government Efficiency team, -- modelled on Musk's "Doge" initiative in the Trump administration, to find savings at Kent and other councils the party controls.
The team, run by the party's head of policy Zia Yusuf, has not yet done detailed work in Kent in part because of tensions over unelected party members gaining access to sensitive council information.
Instead, Kent has set up "Dolge" -- a "department of local government efficiency" run by several cabinet members -- that they say is independent from Reform head office.
"If and when we get a legal framework in place that allows [Doge] to come in, and if I need them, I can pick up the phone and say, we found this, we need your help," Kemkaran said.
But she added: "We're making such great progress anyway, I don't think we need it."
Dolge claims to have so far identified £40mn in savings to be achieved over four years. This includes abandoning a £30mn programme to make homes more energy efficient and scrapping a new fleet of electric cars.
Opposition leaders say the housing upgrades would save money in the long run and the council's current fleet of cars are not fit for service.
Over the summer Yusuf said wasteful spending at Kent council, which was previously run by the Conservatives, included paying for TV licences for asylum seekers. The council has said it has a duty to support unaccompanied asylum seeking children.
A fourth senior Reform cabinet member in Kent said the asylum system was not an area they were looking to make cost savings, not least because those expenditures are all covered by the Home Office.
"We're not looking at asylum at all . . . it isn't in our budget," they said.
The cabinet member added that challenging the use of local hotels to house asylum seekers "is not on our radar", despite Farage saying Reform councils would seek to do so after the High Court granted a temporary injunction on an asylum hotel in Epping in August. The injunction in that case, which was brought by the local council, was overturned on appeal.
The person said a big focus for Kent's Dolge unit was bringing down the council's £700mn debt pile by avoiding spending on major capital projects in the future. Last week, the council announced it had taken the "brave and significant" decision to pay back £50mm of its debt, saving £670,000 on interest payments per year over the next 40 years.
But Antony Hook, leader of the Liberal Democrats in Kent, said Barclays had approached the council directly suggesting it pay off the loan, offering a 10 per cent discount. "It was not a result of any Reform policy," he said. Barclays declined to comment.
"During the election they said vote for us to fix asylum and now they've discovered . . . that the county has no role in asylum and won't be able to cut council tax," he said. "They came into power thinking they would find lots of waste to cut, and they haven't identified any."