'Doge will bring our finances back from the brink'

John Lawson, a finance director by trade, has been given the special position of Reform Derbyshire's cabinet member for "Doge"

Reform UK's new efficiency chief in Derbyshire says the party's flagship anti-waste agenda will pull the council's finances "back from the brink", despite admitting there is "limited scope" for savings in the short-term.

Derbyshire County Council has a net budget spend of roughly £770m and debt levels in the region of £400m.

Its current budget plans - formed under the previous Conservative leaders - include a deficit of well over £30m, largely due to pressures on adult and children's social care and special educational needs.

Derbyshire is one of only a few of Reform's new councils that has made its efficiency drive into a formal cabinet position.

John Lawson, the newly elected Breaston councillor who has a background in finance, will be leading the county's "Doge" drive, modelled after the Department of Government Efficiency previously overseen by Elon Musk in the US.

He says formalising the position in Derbyshire is part of a "concerted effort" to stop the council from going into special measures, which would be the "direction of travel" without their efforts.

"[The council] is in significant debt... but debt's not really the problem. The problem we see is the increase in runaway expenditure. The operating expenses of running the council," he said.

"The position we inherited was a council spending beyond its means."

Rather than making cuts and slashing expenditure, the party's focus will be on making spending more efficient and effective with existing resources.

Improving efficiency by 10% is seen as an achievable target over the course of the next few years, and while it is unclear how exactly this will be measured, attempting to maintain existing levels of spending against a backdrop of rising costs and demand will be the broad aim.

Lawson says that in the past two years, the council has spent £238m more than it anticipated it would have to, roughly a 15% to 20% overspend, which he says cannot be wholly explained by rising costs and other external pressures.

The council has said that the figure does not sufficiently represent the actual cash expenditure incurred in a particular financial year.

Procurement and assessing council contracts, as well as combing through the council's operating costs, are seen as a prime target for where efficiencies can be found.

County Hall has been struggling with spiralling costs and demands on front-line services

However, the former administration's budget plans passed by the council in February will be adhered to for the rest of the financial year.

"We're not looking to make any savings over and above that, other than the small savings that we've already made, because we're just still understanding where we are," Lawson said.

"Hopefully we can make more savings but I can't promise anything at the moment.

"If you come back in six months'' time hopefully we've managed to find £10m we can save, but I doubt that will be the case simply because we know that there have been cost pressures.

"Having said that, we know that over the last two years the Conservative administration massively overspent, so if we can rein some of that in then possibly we can make some savings."

He rejected any suggestion the party had underestimated the scale of the difficulty in finding efficiencies.

"Seventy per cent of the council's spend is spent on very vulnerable people... so there's very limited scope for reducing spend, but that doesn't mean it can't be done," he said.

However, the finance director admitted the party had overestimated figures put out recently claiming to have made about £88,000 of savings in its first two weeks in power, or £6,000 a day.

"We'll hold our hands up - we made a mistake there, definitely... it was just a miscalculation," says Lawson, claiming the figure is more like £4,000 a day and about £60,000 worth of savings on councillor allowances and other small scale changes.

Opposition parties have used the "minute" figures to claim that the party's Doge agenda has been "discredited", according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

"I'm grateful that our colleagues in the Tories and the Greens have actually pointed out we are saving money," Lawson said.

Morale concern

While job cuts are not being ruled out, Lawson says employee headcount will not be reduced in the short-term with the potential exception of "small teams".

However, it is possible staff pension schemes will be looked at, which the deputy leader of the party Richard Tice has criticised for being "unaffordable".

"There's no doubt that defined benefit pension schemes have unfortunately become very expensive to operate," Lawson said.

"Ultimately, we haven't got a magic money tree, and we have to bear that in mind with future contracts."

Leaders also think productivity can be tackled by "improving staff morale", which Lawson says is "on the floor".

But the emphasis will be an ongoing mindset shift to the council's approach to its spending, rather than a "slash and cut" mentality in order to achieve the party's aims.

"We're very focused. We were elected on a ticket of change," Lawson says, rejecting the idea that recent turmoil at the top of the party will hinder their efforts for delivering Doge on the ground.

"We were elected by the people of Derbyshire to try to essentially instil some common sense into the management of council services. Failure is not an option."

The leader of Derbyshire Conservatives Alex Dale predicts Reform UK will fail to "live up to their own hype" and says the Conservatives had left the council's budget "in a far stronger position than it was two years ago".

"It's becoming increasingly clear that running a council of this scale and with these challenges is far more complex than Reform UK claimed during the election campaign and so it's little wonder they're getting their excuses in early now," he said.

"We'll be holding them to account for every promise they made and every decision they now take, on behalf of Derbyshire residents."