Reform's Zia Yusuf: My Doge-like mission on behalf of the taxpayer
Asylum seekers have been taken trampolining, bowling, to the cinema and on shopping sprees, including to a store selling luxury hair extensions, according to Reform's anti-waste council team.
Auditors styled on Elon Musk's Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) said the trips out and other spending at JD Sports and PC World cost taxpayers more than £24,000 between April 2022 and December.
The claims were made about Kent county council as part of Reform UK's drive to inspect accounts at ten local authorities of which it won control in May.
Zia Yusuf, who is running Reform's Doge unit, said he was concerned that some local authority bosses were treating taxpayers as 'their own personal piggy bank'.
He signalled a crackdown on spending on LGBT Pride events set to take place in June and vowed to make payments to contractors for filling potholes.
A team of 15 auditors has been assembled by Reform, all working nearly full-time for free. After meetings began with the council earlier in June, Yusuf said his unit had uncovered 'profligate' spending.
Up to 3,000 staff at the council can work from home, Yusuf said, but his questions about how laptops were monitored to ensure productivity were met with 'filibustering'.
An initial trawl of documents showed that 'civil servants are spending taxpayer money like it's their own personal piggy bank', Yusuf said.
Transport for children with special educational needs (Sen) was also identified by Yusuf as an inefficient system. Councils must provide payments for taxis or bus services if the child lives more than a set distance from their nearest suitable school. Costs have risen significantly for local authorities — the County Councils Network estimates that the number of children requiring transport funding has risen by a quarter since 2019.
Yusuf said: 'I've been doing some analysis already with some of the team on looking at these contracts and zooming in on how much it is costing per mile to take these kids to school. In most cases, it's somewhere between seven and 15 times the cost of an Uber ride.'
Yusuf said he wanted to 'really fight for the taxpayer here and say 'it doesn't make sense, the taxpayer shouldn't be paying seven to 12 times more'. ' He said some councils could save 'tens of millions of pounds'.
Yusuf said he recently met a mother whose three children all have Sen and go to the same school but are taken in three cars. 'She just thinks it's really wasteful,' he said.
He stressed that 'if you're a parent with a child with Sen, then you've got nothing to fear from a Reform council', adding it was an example of how he wanted to 'deliver better services for lower marginal costs'.
Action on 'vanity projects' was also signalled by Yusuf. When asked whether councils should spend money organising Pride events, he said it was up to elected representatives where to spend money — but added: 'Speaking to our councillors, I think you're going to see a lot of those things either reduced materially or cut completely … The bar for spending taxpayers' money should be ridiculously high. And those are essentially vanity projects.'
Auditors have started to ask councils for full lists of staff job titles in an attempt to avoid them 'hiding' diversity, equity and inclusion roles, Yusuf said.
Whistleblowers have also come forward to reveal spending Yusuf deemed wasteful. They included council workers who told him that when their laptop screen broke, they were told to have it repaired, which cost double that of buying a new one.
Contract competitiveness was highlighted by Yusuf as another area of concern. He said Reform's auditors were using artificial intelligence to comb through thousands of pages of successful tenders.
Too often only one firm bids and therefore automatically wins the contract, providing little in the way of competition and value for money, he said. Terms can also last for more than 20 years.
'When Nasa awarded SpaceX its space exploration contract, that was six years because you want to create accountability,' Yusuf said. 'If you give someone a 25-year contract, there's no accountability. And then you wonder why our roads are so undriveable and potholes never get repaired.'
While Yusuf admitted that some of the spending criticised by Reform's Doge team was 'relatively small' in the grand scheme of council budgets, he said it was still 'egregious' and had caused the social contract to start 'fraying at the edges'.
A pothole-filling pilot scheme will be set up at several councils. Yusuf said contracted firms were often paid a day rate with 'no specific deadline' and used 'Iron Age' pickaxes that delayed completion.
'We're going to run pilots and demonstrate we can massively reduce the marginal cost of repairing potholes, and then provide that as a blueprint for everybody,' he said.
Audits of council finances will be replicated at the national level if Reform wins the Welsh or Scottish parliament elections next year. 'We're going to bring that to every corridor of power that Reform wins,' Yusuf said.
Reform has come under criticism from political rivals for the manner of its audits. Opponents have said Nigel Farage's party will have few areas to make cuts because many council spending commitments are based on statutory requirements to deliver services.
There have also been two by-elections announced for Reform councillors elected in May, leading critics to claim they are a waste of taxpayers' money.
After a return to Reform last week 48 hours after he resigned as chairman, Yusuf confirmed he was 'very open' to standing as an MP and said being in parliament 'allows you to have greater impact'.
He left open the possibility of vying to be Farage's pick for a potential future chancellor and said he would 'leave such decisions to him'.
Yusuf was unfazed by the fact that Reform raised less than the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the first quarter of the year. He stressed that much of the party's income was from £25 membership fees and added about some perspective donors: 'Some of them are, I think, a bit deluded in thinking that the cadaver of the Conservative Party might somehow be resuscitated.'
Some Tory MPs are in discussion with Reform about potentially defecting, Yusuf said, but he warned that their time was running out.
He said the party would need some people with experience of working in government and taking on 'the blob' in Whitehall but 'the bar is extremely high … Why would we want a Johnny-come-lately in 2028-29 when we've got amazing people who are completely new to politics'.
Kent county council was contacted for comment.
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