On Monday 22 September, we reported that a Reform councillor suggested he should get a pay bump. While we supported the idea of fairer compensation, we questioned if Reform are best placed to make this argument. After all, Reform are running on a platform of hardcore cuts to government spending, and have even established their own ‘DOGE‘ unit.

Seeking further clarity, we contacted Durham County Council leader Andrew Husband. His response further highlighted the contradictions between Reform’s ambitions and Reform’s delivery.

The fight for fair pay – unless you’re in Reform

In our analysis from 22 September, we noted the ‘allowance’ for councillors in Durham is £13,300, and that’s all they receive. This amounts to about £10 an hour, making it around 80% of the UK Living Wage.

Husband worried this means Durham will struggle to attract anything other than ‘hobbyists’, which is something we agreed with completely. While councillors are only supposed to work 25 hours a week, they work odd hours, which makes secondary employment difficult.

Husband suggested that if Reform could deliver ‘multi-million pounds savings’, this would allow them to pay councillors more fairly. Wanting to know more, we asked Husband the following:

Do you accept there is a limit at which services are run as efficiently as possible, beyond which further cuts would prove detrimental?If ‘multi-million pound savings’ can be made at the current allowance rate, does this not suggest the rate is optimal, and that paying councillors more would constitute ‘waste’?If your answer to the above is ‘no’, would you expect councillors to justify any raise, i.e. by linking their allowance to performance or savings? Additionally, would the rate lower at the point when you had successfully enhanced performance and lowered costs to their maximum levels?Would you apply the same rationale to all the council departments which are tasked with delivering savings (i.e. would bin men / park wardens / other workers get a raise if their department made significant savings)?

Husband didn’t answer most of what we asked, but he did provide an interesting response, telling us:

In case you weren’t aware it is not in my power or interest to be involved in the remuneration of councillors. This is of course down to independent remuneration panels.

I was speaking solely about County Durham. I would suggest you compare basic allowances to that of Manchester, Kent or even Northumberland to understand why.

For reference, these are the rates in question:

Greater Manchester: £10,400 – £18,800.Kent: £17,123.Northumberland: £17,919.

These rates aren’t great either when you consider the difficulty of being a councillor alongside secondary work. And of course, this makes being a councillor difficult for anyone besides the independently wealthy.

Pay them less

Husband also told us (emphasis added):

Nobody has suggested for one moment this would be a taxpayer problem – I made it quite clear that we are challenging officers on 6 figure salaries and setting their objectives, the highlight I was making was the gap between the two sides in terms of value for money. In my view civil servants should get paid less and County Durham councillors should be on parity with other councils.

While he said “civil servants” – i.e. central government employees – he later clarified he meant council workers:

Specifically CEO’s, the senior directors and the hundreds of departmental heads. Eg DCC [Durham County Council] has around 100 managers on £96K alone.

You can see the list of CEOs, senior directors, and department heads here. There are fewer than ‘100 managers’ listed, but we can’t confirm that a band of high paid managers doesn’t exist below the ‘senior staff level’ (DCC does list its salary banding elsewhere, which is capped at £60,680).

When it comes to this topic, it’s another instance where we don’t think Reform or Husband are the best people to make this point. As we noted, Husband has previously said:

How would you entice people to come from the private sector, to take a chance in politics?

As reported by the Independent, Reform leader Nigel Farage has:

told executives he will be enlisting “top business leaders” to some of the biggest jobs in his government

The message from Reform is very much ‘business brains are the best’ and ‘politics is in competition with business for the best people’. Council workers are responsible for managing the cities, boroughs, and counties we live in; obviously there’s a strong argument for incentivising the best people to sign up. There’s an equally strong argument for remunerating them well enough to keep them in place. You wanted free labour markets, you got it, baby.

In our previous article, we highlighted that Husband said the following:

you can see a benefit of trying to keep a strong cabinet together and entice more talent into politics

How does this not also apply to council workers?

It should be noted we’re not saying it’s ideal to have ‘around 100 managers on £96k’ if the regular workforce is on significantly less than that. At the same time, Husband isn’t suggesting we shrink the gap between how much workers and managers get paid. With that being the case, obviously people are going to cry hypocrisy.

Reform’s very-own DOGE

In response to our questions, Husband also said:

Another point that may have been missed is that this year the number of councillors have dropped from 126 to 98. We are seeing record amounts of case work per councillor – a mix of constituent engagement, enthusiasm and simple mathematic. Councillors now have more to do, more constituents to manage per head.

Once again, Reform aren’t best placed to talk about cuts making things harder, because they’ve literally setup their own ‘DOGE’ unit (Department of Government Efficiency). This is based on Elon Musk’s catastrophic DOGE experiment, with Futurism reporting:

A new investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved by cancelling federal contracts through July, its actual savings were closer to a paltry $1.4 billion — which is barely two percent of what it’s boasting to the public.

They added:

The potential for blowback doesn’t end there. Hundreds of cancelled contracts have already had to be restored because they were required by law. Some of the employees DOGE axed were quickly rehired because they performed indispensable roles, like safeguarding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Speaking after the failed Musk operation, DOGE employee Sahil Lavingia said:

I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There’s minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.

That’s right: a DOGE employee said business people expect government workers to be layabouts because that’s what business people are like.

Both Lavingia and Husband discovered cuts aren’t inherently efficient. Husband only seems to have realised this in terms of councillors, but maybe he’ll expand his mind as he spends more time with the team at Durham CC.

Private VS public

If Reform want to target a bunch of overpaid underachievers who are draining public money, they should look to our privatised utilities, transport services, and health providers. As Common Wealth recently reported:

The privateers promised us a miracle. They gave us Rip-Off Britain.

Our country is in decline because of their radical experiment. People can feel it: they pay more for essentials and struggle to afford a decent life.

Putting that into numbers:

£2bn: the extra interest we pay each year because of privatisation.9% of the 2023 energy bill was paid out to shareholders and lenders through dividends and interest payments.£1.5m: the average director pay for privatised companies in 2024 — that’s 46 times the median salary.

If you don’t have a calculator to hand, £1.5m is around nine times as much as the directors at Durham CC. This is made even worse when you consider what a terrible job privatised companies are doing.

So, will Reform fully nationalise utilities, transport, and health?

No, but they have said they’ll ‘nationalise half of the water industry‘, which sounds like the neoliberal half-measures you’d get from New Labour – not the drastic ‘reform’ Britain is crying out for.

The pay depression

Let’s be real, lots of people in this country think well-paid council workers should earn less. This is because we’ve developed a self-defeating attitude in Britain, where we look at those with something we lack and think ‘they should have less’ rather than ‘I should have more‘.

In part, this is how successive governments have gotten away with the 20-year wage depression we’re living through:

Britain’s living standards slowdown has been driven by an unprecedented pay depression. In the 20 years up to 2005, average earnings grew by 68% in real terms. From 2005-25, they grew by just 6%.

Average earnings today would be £394 per week higher had they continued to grow at… pic.twitter.com/efeizdiROF

— Resolution Foundation (@resfoundation) September 18, 2025

So, how do we suggest paying for everything if not through brutal, ineffective cuts?

We’re tired of saying it, but wealth taxes.

Every year, more and more money is in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and every year things get worse. This isn’t a coincidence. And we’ve all lived through enough austerity to know it doesn’t work.

Once again, we’re in agreement with Husband that councillors should get paid more, but that’s because we think most people should get paid more. If Reform want to join the fight for fair pay, that’s great, but until they do, asking for more money will come across as an attempt to feather their own nests.

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia) / Durham County Council

By Willem Moore

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