The party promised US‑style efficiency squads to slash waste in the English councils it won in May. By late summer, the brutal overhaul had barely begun.

The promise was headline‑ready. Fresh from sweeping into town halls across England this spring, Reform UK said it would deploy a US‑style “Doge” unit—an external efficiency squad of engineers, auditors and deal‑makers—to tear through council ledgers and root out waste. The vision was cinematic: rapid‑fire audits, renegotiated contracts, and rows of scrapped pet projects translating into quick, bankable savings for taxpayers.

Three months on, the summer verdict is more prosaic. Beyond one pilot and a handful of exploratory engagements, the brutal overhauls largely failed to materialise. Instead of the promised blitz, most councils saw a season of scoping documents, confidentiality paperwork and governance hurdles. The gap between campaign slogans and municipal plumbing turned out to be wide.

The pitch—and the fine print

Reform’s Doge pitch borrowed the language of tech turnarounds: short sprints, aggressive targets and a preference for unorthodox fixes. The unit was billed as a composite team—software specialists to cleanse data and spot anomalies; forensic accountants to dig through invoices; commercial negotiators to squeeze better terms from suppliers. Savings would come quickly, the party argued, from obvious seams of inefficiency: duplicated software, under‑used office estates, leisure contracts that no longer fit local demand, and climate‑related capital that could be paused without harming essential services.

But English local government is built for diligence, not drama. Councils operate under dense statutory duties—adult social care, children’s services, transport, waste—and are policed by powerful internal guardians: monitoring officers, section 151 finance leads and external auditors. An efficiency lens can be valuable; it cannot be bolted on without navigating procurement law, data protection and union consultation. The very features that make councils slower than start‑ups also make them harder to yank around by executive fiat.

A summer of pilots, pauses and pushback

The Doge pilot launched with fanfare in early June, and for a few days it appeared to set a template: a rapid data‑gathering exercise, interviews with budget holders, and a short menu of options for cabinet. Replicating that approach across multiple authorities proved elusive. Some councils balked at granting a private external unit access to granular financial and HR data. Others insisted on competitive procurement rather than sole‑source appointments, and on publishing methodologies before any savings‑share deal could be signed. Where political control is narrow, opposition groups demanded scrutiny panels and formal call‑in rights for any contract.

Capacity bit too. After a decade of austerity, many town halls have thin transformation teams and patchy management information. You cannot build a target operating model if the underlying data is inconsistent or missing. Reconstructing it—cataloguing contracts, standardising cost centres, and reconciling supplier files—takes months. By August, several authorities were still cleaning datasets that Doge analysts had hoped to mine in week one.

What did happen

The most visible steps were political rather than technocratic. Councils made symbolic moves on flags and cultural programming, reviewed diversity roles, paused elements of climate plans and froze some hiring. Savings did register, but mostly by stopping planned activity: deferring office moves, cancelling building retrofits or trimming grant‑funded pilots. Those choices change cashflows and priorities; they are not the process improvements Doge evangelists implied. Residents noticed a change of direction more than a change in productivity.

Where Doge secured a foothold, the work was largely diagnostic. Teams mapped procurement spend, consolidated overlapping software licences, inventoried property assets and benchmarked agency‑staff usage. These are sensible foundations and often overdue. They are also slow‑burn tasks that rarely produce headline numbers in a single quarter.

The numbers—and the pressures they do not touch

Party figures trumpet early “savings” in the tens of millions by shelving net‑zero capital and delaying office rationalisations. Critics argue that cancelling green projects can raise lifecycle costs and sacrifice central grants, trading a short‑term revenue boost for long‑term liability. Both points carry weight. What neither side claims is that the biggest drivers of council deficits—adult social care and special educational needs—have been tamed. Provider inflation, complex placements and tribunal‑led demand dwarf the gains available from software rationalisation and office consolidation.

Inside the machine

Conversations with senior officers suggest a pattern. Where the Doge offer was framed as partnership—external analysts embedded alongside internal transformation teams—staff engagement held up, and progress continued, if slowly. Where the pitch sounded like a takeover—“step aside and let the experts rip”—trust evaporated. Officers who must live with the consequences pushed back on data access, procurement routes and the implied transfer of decision rights. A combative media strategy, while energising supporters, hardened scepticism among the finance directors and lawyers needed to sign things off.

There were reputational headwinds too. Councillors who campaigned on sweeping out “woke waste” discovered that finance managers, contract leads and heads of legal are unmoved by culture‑war framing. They respond to business cases and risk registers. What plays well at a rally can paralyse an organisation on Monday morning.

Law, procurement and the clock

Two recurring choke points slowed Doge’s rollout. The first was data: analysts need deep access to invoices, HR records and supplier files to find anomalies; councils must be certain that sharing is lawful and proportionate. The second was procurement: if an external unit delivers change, or takes a cut of savings, it is hard to justify skipping competition. Both are solvable, but neither is fast—and summer is a short runway in which to draft specifications, publish tenders and let contracts.

The national context hardly helped. Central oversight panels, designed to stabilise failing authorities, push councils toward caution and incrementalism. After a spate of local government failures, few senior officers are keen to bet their reputations on an untested external model that promises speed over process. The cultural tide is running the other way.

The autumn test

Summer is a poor season to judge any programme. The test arrives with the autumn and winter budget cycles, when cabinets publish draft medium‑term financial plans. If Doge has bite, we should see concrete proposals: renegotiated waste contracts with volumetric pricing; joint ventures on leisure services; shared‑service agreements for revenues and benefits; revised brokerage in adult social care; and credible asset disposals. Those are the sorts of changes that move a budget line rather than a news cycle.

Absent that, the danger is that Doge remains a brand rather than a delivery engine—good for rallies and hostile interviews, weak at the ledger line where budgets must balance. Reform’s local breakthroughs gave the party a valuable proving ground. This summer shows that converting a theory of change into delivery requires patience, paperwork and allies inside the system.

What would make Doge work

Three shifts would improve the odds. First, transparency: publish the playbook—data fields, savings categories, delivery plans and KPIs—so councillors and residents can track progress and call out spin. Second, partnership: embed Doge analysts into existing transformation offices and treat monitoring officers and section 151 leads as clients, not obstacles. Third, sequencing: bank the prosaic wins first—software rationalisation, telephony consolidation, agency‑worker controls, energy‑procurement hedges—before moving to riskier restructures and revenue‑share arrangements.

The verdict

Reform UK asked to be judged on results. On that test, summer delivers a mixed picture. The commitment to expose waste has surfaced overdue housekeeping in some places and may yet yield worthwhile savings. But speed was oversold, legal and cultural resistance was underestimated, and the external unit has not, so far, demonstrated anything that a well‑run internal transformation office could not achieve with the same political cover. The next quarter will decide whether Doge becomes a handbook for urgent municipal reform—or a cautionary tale about importing tech‑bro swagger into a sector that runs on statutory duties, not sprints.