The 13% Councillor: Reform Durham Needs Fighters, Not Passengers

Reform UK is for workers, not passengers. Why we’re clearing out the 'Ghost Councillors' who collect an allowance while delivering barely a fraction of their ward partner’s output.

This week, a Reform UK councillor who was so back-bench we assumed he had fallen off has been busy performing for the cameras—cutting up membership cards and penning resignation letters filled with the kind of high-flown rhetoric usually reserved for people who actually do their jobs.

But behind the theatrical “disdain” and the grievances of a man who lost a leadership contest by a landslide (securing less than 18% of his peers’ support), lies a much uglier reality.

The Productivity Abyss

When you elect a Reform councillor, you expect work. You expect results. I certainly do. To be absolutely clear, I don’t hold any of my councillor colleagues in contempt. I think what we did and continue to do is nothing short of heroic. I just do not have time for petty drama when we were elected to do something so incredibly important: proving that in our County, Reform can govern the country. We are doing exactly that, and we will continue to do so. I won’t ever apologise or resile from believing that this matters above all else.

In the West Auckland ward, residents have been represented by two people. The data on their performance since May isn’t just disappointing; it’s an insult to every voter. Internal performance audits reveal a 633% productivity gap between our active Reform members and Nick Brown.

While his ward partner has been operating at 100% capacity, Nick Brown has been a “Ghost Councillor,” delivering barely 13% of the output of his colleague. For every seven residents helped by this administration, Nick Brown bothered to help exactly one.

In any other profession, showing up for 13% of your shift would result in immediate dismissal for gross negligence. In the Reform party, we call it what it is: Dead wood. We didn’t “lose” a representative this week; we finally offloaded a passenger who was happy to collect his allowance while leaving the actual work to others.

Yes Men?

It’s also worth saying this plainly: several officers have privately made clear that the tone used toward them in recent interventions with Casper the Unfriendly Councillor fell well short of the standards expected in public life. I would go as far as to say it is utterly dehumanising. That is not how we operate. Our relationship with council officers is strong because it is built on respect, candour, and professional challenge — not ideological cruelty. We are not Yes-men, and officers know that, but nor are we in the business of grandstanding at the expense of the very people tasked with delivering services to residents. That grown-up working relationship is precisely why our independent peer review of Durham County Council was such a success, why we renegotiated for the North East on our landmark waste incinerator contract— and why this year’s budget will be one of the most ambitious and disciplined the county has seen in many years, leaving the lightest of touches on hard-pressed residents.

Ego vs. Economics

Nick’s “principled” stance on the Toft Hill bypass is equally hollow. He knows the facts, but facts are inconvenient for a man nursing a bruised ego and an inferiority complex. I get the desire for this project to go ahead—an arterial road connecting us with Scotland is no laughing matter for residents—but with Brown, this is pantomime, not politics.

• The Reality: Project costs have spiralled by £30 million.

• The Choice: We can either be “Yes-men” to a central government that slashed our highways grant by £50 million and demand that you—the Durham taxpayer—pick up the tab, or we can stand our ground.

Nick Brown wants to bankrupt this county to cover for a government failure. We choose to protect your wallet. He claims we aren’t “rocking the boat.” The truth is, we are the only ones steering it away from the fiscal iceberg his “principled” ideas would hit. To that end, we have already written to both Sam Rushworth MP and the North East Combined Authority to secure the necessary funding from those who actually hold the purse strings unlike a local authority buckling under the strain of Special Educational Needs, Looked After Children, Home To School Transport and other budgetary pressures.

The “Lawfare” Smoke Screen

The media is currently obsessed with an “avalanche” of complaints against our group, and me in particular. Let’s be clear about what that “avalanche” actually is: Political Lawfare.

The opposition, unable to beat us on our policy of delivering the lowest council tax in the North East, has resorted to clogging the system with vexatious claims. To date, not a single complaint against our leadership—again, mostly aimed at me—has been upheld. They are wasting your money—tens of thousands of pounds—on a desperate attempt to silence us.

To be clear, most of these complaints feature my remarks on everything from mass migration and Net Zero to the scourge of migrant HMOs in our county. These issues matter to our residents, and I will gladly take on the burden of complaints over the complicity of silence. Nick Brown, rather than standing with his colleagues against this abuse of the taxpayer, has decided to join the circus to feel better about himself after the most embarrassing leadership election meltdown anyone in local government has ever witnessed.

And shame on the Torygraph for running a story effectively criticising ME for complaints made against me for saying the things that many of their columnists and readers agree with me on!

The Spring Clean is Non-Negotiable

We were elected to Reform Durham, not to manage its decline. That means maintaining the highest standards. If you can only manage 13% of the workload, if you can’t move past a democratic leadership defeat, and if you’d rather side with high-tax opposition activists than your own residents, then you are a poor fit for this party.

The “Spring Clean” is in full swing. We are moving ahead with exclusively dedicated, high-output warriors for this county. We retain a 92% retention rate of the hardest-working political group in Britain.

The Ghost of West Auckland has finally left the building. Now, the real work continues.