Reform’s Elon Musk-Style ‘DOLGE’ Team Accused of Making ‘False and Misleading’ Claims About Flagship Council

The team appointed by Nigel Farage to slash spending at Reform’s new flagship local authority Kent County Council (KCC) has submitted a progress report based on inaccurate and misleading information derived from the party’s own former chairman’s social media account, opposition councillors claim.

The ‘Progress of the Kent Department of Local Government Efficiency’ report, released on July 16, was delivered with the stated aim of providing “an introduction to the work of the Kent DOLGE and the priorities of the administration”, and followed an announcement by the new leader of KCC, Linden Kemkaran, about proposed savings to the council budget. 

However, the appendix, issued as a “reply from Reform Head Office to some questions” asked of DOLGE by the local authority scrutiny committee are simply references to tweets sent by former Reform chair Zia Yusuf between 4 June and 16 June 2025. 

Many of them have been found to contain inaccuracies and distortions of the truth, and the appendix – which appears to try and counter some of the backlash the tweets received – fails to address the core concerns.

The three-page report came under heavy opposition scrutiny at a council meeting the day it was released, with members stating that “never has a committee waited so long, for so little”.

Reform members were also asked by committee members if any of them would be willing to distance themselves from Yusuf’s tweets, which were accused of causing reputational damage to the council.

Central to the complaints were four widely circulated assertions from Yusuf cited in the appendix, relating to the work of DOLGE since the May election.

Firstly, he claimed on 15 June that: “Kent County Council is using taxpayer money to pay for TV licences for asylum seekers. Remember that next time you are asked to pay for yours.” The tweet was not backed up by evidence.

The DOLGE document refers to his post as evidence of a “national scandal”.

Yusuf’s claims were later reported on by a number of media outlets, which appeared to take at face-value, the idea that ‘illegal migrants’ were not only being given free TV licences but treated to taxpayer-funded activities like bowling, cinema trips and trampolining.

In response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request sent to KCC on 14 July 2025, the council confirmed it “does not have a policy or scheme to fund TV licences for asylum seekers”. 

This first allegation hinges on a conflation of two legally distinct groups; adult asylum seekers (the responsibility of the Home Office) and Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC) – individuals under the age of 18 in the care system, who arrive in the UK seeking asylum and who have been separated from parents or guardians.

Every local authority has a legal duty to protect both British nationals and UAS children in care, and to provide basic amenities for them. This includes access to activities crucial to a child’s development like recreational activities (swimming, the cinema, etc). The money for UASCs comes from the central Government, and is not paid for by council taxpayers.

It’s also inaccurate to state that the money is exclusively for individual TV licences. The council receives a Home Office grant to cover the costs of licences in care homes, to UAS Children in reception centres in Kent, as well as providing licences for local young people, some of whom are UASCs making the transition to living independently from the care system.

Between 2024-25, the council funded TV licences of 22 ‘Kent Care Leavers’, only seven of which were previous UAS children in care, costing just over £1,100. The annual budget of KCC exceeds £2,500,000,000 for providing essential local services. 

Yusuf also claimed that the “asylum budget” had been used to pay for the trips, prompting a scathing response on social media from the Liberal Democrat MP for Tunbridge Wells, Mike Martin, who wrote: “Clown show. Kent County Council doesn’t have an ‘asylum budget’ so it looks like you’re talking nonsense.”

He added: “I *think* what you’re saying is that unaccompanied children are put into the care system, where they are treated like other children in the care system. 

“Not sure what change you’d like to make to this system? What would you like the UK to do to children who literally wash up on our shores?” 

The DOLGE report then cites another Yusuf tweet from 16 June, claiming: “If you’re furious about the way Kent County Council are spending your money, take solace in the fact that their ‘external auditors’ charged the taxpayer £450k for their services”. Yusuf then describes this as “a racket”. 

While the top line figures are broadly accurate, Yusuf fails to mention that this is a mandatory requirement for all local authorities, one for which fees aren’t subject to open market negotiation. The fee is calculated using a national scale, taking into account the size and complexity of the authority being audited by the independent Public Sector Audit Appointments (PSAA). The PSAA chooses the auditor. 

Paying for an external audit is something every public body and major corporation does as standard practice to ensure transparency and accountability. 

When pressed by the committee on the claims that KCC’s auditor fees are “a racket”, Reform member Christopher Hespe said: “I don’t think Mr Fraser Moat nor I can speak on behalf of Mr Yusuf, and may I say through the Chairman that if any member has a beef with Mr Yusuf they should raise that with him.”

In response, committee member Councillor Antony Hook pointed out that “the leader of this council [Reform councillor Linden Kemkaran], who heads the executive, published a letter jointly signed with him, launching the Kent DOGE. She did that in her capacity as head of the executive of this council.” 

Another apparent “racket” for Yusuf was the supposed revelation that “Kent County Council tendered a contract for recruitment services for £350 million over 4 years”, which he claimed was a “staggering 22% of their annual payroll”.

This claim showed a concerning lack of understanding about how basic procurement processes within Government work, as what was being described is a ‘national framework agreement’, not a contract. 

Essentially, this means that the described £350 million relates to an agreed list of pre-approved and vetted suppliers, on a procurement process hosted by Kent, that any public body in the UK – including other councils, NHS trusts, schools, housing associations and others – can bid on should they need to access the services offered. In other words, KCC is just a host organisation for a plethora of other public bodies. 

The figure does not represent any actual spend because it is the maximum framework value ceiling across four years, across all participating organisations, of which there could be hundreds during the time period. 

That means that the “22%” figure used by Yusuf appears to be misleading. For it to be correct, you’d have to assume that all of this money was being spent by KCC, which is not the case. The report appendix claims this is an example of “concerning spending”, while admitting that “after Zia queried the spend it was revealed that it was nuanced”. 

Committee chair Richard Streatfeild noted during the sitting that the word “nuanced”, seemed to be doing “some quite heavy lifting in that context”.

Cabinet head of DOLGE, Matthew Fraser Moat admitted in the meeting that “everything in the appendix has come from head office. They are not my comments.”

Yusuf also made claims relating to Kent’s supposed uncovering of “fraud and waste” since the party took over. Yusuf tweeted that, “Kent Council has already admitted to £2.8 million of confirmed fraud last year alone”. The DOLGE report appendix notes it is “grateful to Zia for uncovering”. 

Posts made on Reform-affiliated social media accounts ran with this, claiming that “Reform UK’s DOGE team has already revealed [£2.8 million in] waste in Kent Council”. That same £2.8 million had been in the public domain a year prior to Reform taking control of the council in May 2024. 

The figures were released by KCC’s ‘Counter Fraud Annual Report 2023-24’. So, rather they being “uncovered” by DOGE, they were simply lifted from the Internal Audit and Counter Fraud Team. 

Hook highlighted that the social media posts contained “information that is wrong and has seriously damaged the reputation of KCC and the experience of our front-line public facing staff in particular”.

When pressed, Moat struggled to answer questions relating to the tweets in any detail, saying that he had “no personal knowledge of anything” in them, and asked to be judged on his own record.

Asking whether any Reform member would disassociate themselves with Yusuf’s false claims, Hook stated: “I think it’s important for the public of Kent to establish what is correct about KCC and what is not correct.”

When asked to defend the content of any of the tweets, not a single Reform member present did so. It was pointed out during the session that some Reform members had “enthusiastically” shared the posts on social media.

A spokesperson for the KCC Green Group told Byline Times that while “cost efficiency is vitally important to Kent residents, Mr Yusef and DOLGE has reduced it all to bit of a joke”.

The spokesperson continued: “At the recent Scrutiny Committee we were told that Reform were carrying out the work a consultancy has already done in a previous administration for free, yet the extra Cabinet Member for DOLGE is paid £38,000.”

“If the Reform UK administration were serious about saving money for Kent residents instead of creating soundbites, they would sack the DOLGE cabinet member and stop paying the generous extra allowance to their nine deputy cabinet members who have no decision-making powers and mostly do very little.”