Reform’s First 100 Days in Norfolk: ‘Flag Fights, Resignations, Broken Promises’

This month marked 100 days since Norfolk voters handed Reform UK 40 seats and put it firmly in the driving seat at county hall, promising a “laser focus on value for money” and “the best possible services”.

How is that going?

In May, Reform was polling nationally at nearly 28%, with Labour a distant second at just under 20%. The results were inevitably dreadful for the governing party. Labour’s county councillors were reduced from nine to one, while Reform swept in with 40 seats – mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

I was one of those Labour winners, elected for the Hethersett division by three votes. It was the first time Labour had ever won this seat. Never let it be said that your vote doesn’t count.

I entered the chamber in late May as the only Labour representative on the most right-wing Norfolk County Council I can remember.

As our first full council meeting got underway, it became clear that a few of the higher-ups in Reform wanted to make a splash.

My first motion called on the new administration to protect Norfolk’s social safety net: the voluntary organisations, community services, and early interventions that stop vulnerable people from falling into crisis and often save taxpayers considerably more further down the line.

It voted it down.

Other opposition motions followed, including proposals to support households reliant on heating oil. Reform and its Restore Britain allies voted those down too, scrapped three political assistant posts, refused to extend the meeting to finish debating the remaining business, and all went home to sit in a dark room.

“They don’t like change, do they?” came the response from the Reform Deputy Leader here.

But change certainly came.

Reform turned its attention to the important work of deciding which flags were permitted to fly over county hall. It withdrew the Local Member Highways Fund, taking away the pot councillors used to get small but important local schemes over the line.

It was as if somebody had let Reform loose in a rage room but accidentally handed it the council’s standing orders and social media passwords instead of a sledgehammer.

Then chief executive Tom McCabe resigned.

A month into Reform’s administration, one of the most senior and experienced people in Norfolk local government had somewhere, anywhere, else to be.

Then, one of Reform’s own councillors resigned after just 25 days, citing ill health, and triggering a by-election costing taxpayers approximately £20,000.

Reform lost it to the Conservatives. Its 40 councillors became 39.

Electoral momentum, it turns out, has a reverse gear.

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Intimidation and Reorganisation

Some of what followed was considerably less funny.

On 18 June, Labour MP Terry Jermy left a Thetford Town Council meeting and was pursued through the town by a jeering group of approximately 30 protestors angry about plans to place asylum seekers in MOD Barnham. They followed him for hundreds of metres in the same week as the 10th anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox.

I called on Reform’s council leader to condemn mob rule and reassert the council’s commitment to free democratic debate and its opposition to political intimidation. My comments were dismissed as “unworthy”.

Next came local government reorganisation.

The previous Conservative administration had already started threatening legal action against the Government’s plans. Reform inherited that fight and enthusiastically picked up the baton, launching a judicial review at taxpayers’ expense.

There is something magnificently Reform about this.

A party awash nationally with money donated by the super-rich gets elected promising taxpayers value for money, picks a political fight with a Labour Government, and sends the legal bill to the residents of Norfolk.

Perhaps its “laser focus on value for money” meant its own rather than yours or mine. And let’s not pretend this is some dry dispute about the finer points of local government law.

Politically, the attraction is obvious. Reform gets to posture as Norfolk’s plucky defender against Westminster while somebody else pays for the lawyers.

The case for local government reorganisation is straightforward: maintaining eight separate councils across Norfolk means duplicated political structures, management, and back-office functions.

Reform’s answer is not a different model. It wants the whole thing scrapped and the existing two-tier system preserved.

Having been elected promising efficiency and value for money, its position is now to defend a structure in which local government remains split between a county council and seven district councils.

When the Government refused to abandon reorganisation, Reform reached for the lawyers. Because accepting that somebody else’s proposal might have merit appears to be particularly difficult.

Its politics seems increasingly built around a simple proposition: if someone else suggested it, it must be bad.

Then came the appointment of a new £215,000-a-year chief executive.

At a full council meeting called specifically to decide whether Dennis Bacon was the right person to run Norfolk County Council, I raised concerns not only about the recruitment process, but about whether his professional record demonstrated that he was the right person to lead an organisation responsible for thousands of staff, billions of pounds, and some of our most critical public services.

Those seemed fairly pertinent questions given that this was, quite literally, the meeting at which we were being asked to decide whether to give him the job. Those concerns were “unworthy” too.