Last summer, Reform swept into town halls across the nation, promising to cut waste and lower taxes. But their much hyped Department of Local Government Efficiency Programme (DOGE) has proven to be nothing more than a populist PR stunt.

Every Reform-led upper-tier local authority raised council tax this year: in North Northamptonshire it went up by the full 4.99 per cent; Worcestershire slapped families with an eye-watering 8.98 per cent rise, increasing average Band D bills by £145 per year.

Where are the promised savings? Matthew Fraser Moat was forced out as head of Kent’s DOGE team after admitting it “had not made any cuts”. In Doncaster, Reform councillors promised to block a £57 million loan to reopen Doncaster Sheffield Airport, only to cave at the last minute and saddle the council with more debt.

And new FOI data reveals the scale of waste Reform has missed. Councils they run or control are spending more than £16 million a year on diary managers and PAs. As the private sector replaces these roles with tech and AI, the public sector gravy train rumbles on with Reform at the helm.

In Kent, 33 PAs are employed at a cost of £1.5 million a year. But this is far from the worst example. Worcestershire County Council spends a staggering £7.7 million a year on 257 diary managers, with every one of their 58 councillors receiving assistance.

When she hiked council tax by record levels, Reform’s Jo Monk said she was making the “responsible choice” to save Worcestershire from “financial collapse”. In reality, she was picking the public’s pockets to pay for a bloated bureaucracy. Axing these pen pushers would have saved enough to cover more than a fifth of the money raised by her tax increase.

Worcestershire spends more on secretaries than some Whitehall departments – they are taking the public for a ride. Before they lost control of the authority a few weeks ago, Reform were considering cutting 100 jobs, but this looks like a classic case of too little, too late. A new Green-led administration could abandon these plans altogether.

If their record in local government is anything to go by, if Reform ever gets the keys to Whitehall, they’ll miss the waste that’s right under their noses while bureaucrats keep running the show.