Leader of Lancashire County Council on savings

The leader of Lancashire County Council says the search for savings within the authority is designed to enable money to be reinvested in the “frontline services” on which people rely.

Stephen Atkinson was defending his new Reform UK administration’s focus on cost-cutting, which will step up a gear next week when the national party’s controversial Elon Musk-style ‘DOGE’ unit pitches up at County Hall.

The self-proclaimed waste warriors are visiting the authority for what County Cllr Atkinson says is a “scoping meeting” about the work they will be carrying out there.

The DOGE concept has been criticised by some opposition politicians, who have expressed concerns about the democratic legitimacy of bringing in a party-appointed external team – and questioned what kind of access they will have to council-held data.

Last week, the new Reform cabinet also approved an “efficiency review” to be undertaken by the authority itself, which – although not referencing DOGE – appeared to overlap in both its aims and some of its areas of focus, such as financial resilience and council contracts.

Asked by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) whether the two were entirely separate processes, County Cllr Atkinson said:   “I think they can work together, but…obviously, we seek advice and support from our national party – which is what DOGE is – like any party would…and then we have to govern the council separately to that.

“What we have got to do is take the best of DOGE and take the best of the council and bring them together so that we can deliver more money to frontline services – and that’s what this is all about in the end.”

He also said next week’s meeting would “set out all of those issues around data protection” and “find a route that respects the council’s constitution and how it operates, as well as using the benefits of the skillset within…DOGE”.

The DOGE acronym refers to the Department of Government Efficiency, set up by the Trump administration in the United States, and on which the Reform team has been modelled.

The previous Conservative administration of the county council had already established – in what it turned out to be its last budget back in February – that the authority would need to cut spending by £103m over the next two years, although it had yet to set out precisely how that would be achieved.

Reform has criticised the fact that just under half of their predecessors’ savings total is the result of a failure to deliver reductions earmarked for previous years.

Probed as to whether that fact was not simply proof of the difficulty of finding spending to slash in local government, County Cllr Atkinson said he was not in a position to judge how “achievable” the Tory savings plans had been.

He told the LDRS that it would likely be around the autumn when Reform could set out something of a medium-vision for how it will manage the finances, informed by the government’s spending review published this week.

When asked whether he was confident his group could go beyond the £103m needed just to balance the books – and so generate funding to plough back in to priority areas – he acknowledged that achieving financial balance was “the biggest priority”.

However, he insisted there was the potential for improvements in some areas, including by reducing the use of so-called ‘tier 1’ contractors, who then sub-contract work commissioned by the local authority to other providers.

County Cllr Atkinson said there was an opportunity to restructure the procurement process in order to establish “more direct relationships with local companies…[which] bring money into the local economy”.

He also championed his new cabinet – several of whom have no previous political experience and all of whom are male – as being “the strongest team I’ve ever been involved in”, declaring that their “life experiences…skillsets and…enthusiasm” are ingredients for a “formidable team”.

The men-only make-up of the cabinet has previously been attributed to the outcome of a ‘blind’ skills assessment process which selected the most suitable candidates for the job.

County Cllr Atkinson was speaking after a visit to County Hall on Thursday by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who had come to congratulate the local party on its success in the local elections, where it secured 53 of the 84 seats on the county council.

The authority’s new chief lauded the man he described as “an amazing politician – probably the greatest one we’ve had in the last 30 years”.

“I think if he gets into power, we’re going to see great things for this country.

“I think politics now is really not about left and right – it’s about the national interest versus the global interest and I think Reform are the only party that puts the national interest first, and that’s what British people want – I’m 100 percent committed to that,” he added.

The former Conservative – who led Ribble Valley Borough Council for six years until stepping down earlier this year and defecting to Reform before standing for a county council seat – said he believed his new party was serious about local government and was not just using it as a platform to achieve greater power nationally.

Like his leader, however, he believes success at the local level could breed victories elsewhere.  He also heralded the fact the party has established over 400 branches across the country.

“Local government is a great training ground for political parties in terms of allowing people to understand the processes and the separation of powers.

“So I think [it] is really important to Reform – it would be the base that supports the party.”