This blog, plus additional exclusive content, was published last Friday on my free Mobility Matters newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter by clicking here.

---

The local elections in May 2025 marked the first instance in which the right-wing populist party Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) secured outright control of local councils. Capitalising on widespread electorate disenchantment, a highly publicised national campaign led by Nigel Farage, and the systemic collapse of the incumbent Conservative vote, Reform UK captured 677 council seats, representing 41% of all local government seats contested during the local elections. This electoral surge granted the party outright majority control of ten upper-tier and unitary councils: Kent, County Durham, Lancashire, Doncaster, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, North Northamptonshire, and West Northamptonshire. Concurrently, the party secured control over two newly established regional mayoralties, with Andrea Jenkyns winning the Greater Lincolnshire Combined Authority and Luke Campbell securing the Hull and East Yorkshire mayoralty.

The transition from an insurgent, populist opposition into governing is a test for Reform UK’s policy platform. In transport, the party has positioned itself as a combatant in the “war on the motorist.” Operating as a staunch critic of Net Zero, an opponent of urban traffic management schemes, and prioritising the movement of traffic. The party’s national manifesto at the 2024 General Election explicitly linked environmental policies to the impoverishment of the public, asserting that global carbon dioxide reduction targets push up bills, damage industrial competitiveness, and threaten national security. Advocating instead for continued fossil fuel extraction and basic environmental mitigations such as tree planting.

However, translating this ideologically rigid manifesto into running a local council presents severe challenges. Operating a local transport network in the United Kingdom requires navigating a highly complex ecosystem of statutory obligations, navigating convoluted, often ring-fenced funding settlements from the Department for Transport (DfT), and managing multi-million-pound financial deficits driven by the escalating costs of statutory social care and home-to-school transport.

The public statements issued by Reform UK council leaders and transport portfolio holders over the 2025–2026 period reveal one thing: a deep skepticism toward active travel and a rhetorical pivot toward traditional, heavy infrastructure and industrial history. But much in the same way that boxers have a plan until they get punched in the face, such rhetoric can come apart when reality hits.

In Derbyshire, the party’s ideological stance on transport hierarchy was articulated very clearly during a council transport committee meeting in late 2025. Reform Councillor David Harvey explicitly diminished the value of the council’s active travel infrastructure, branding walking and cycling routes traversing the Peak District as merely “tinkering around with pleasantries.” Harvey argued that the council’s transport policy should pivot entirely toward heavy rail infrastructure and industrial manufacturing to “make Britain great once again.” Though he conceded that cycling infrastructure could theoretically be integrated alongside railway tracks. Non-motorised users are sidelined as an economic irrelevance.

Conversely, the pragmatic requirements of economic development have forced some Reform leaders to adopt pro-connectivity stances that occasionally mirror the environmental rhetoric they oppose. In Kent, Council Leader Linden KemKaran has been highly vocal in her support for international rail transport, specifically lobbying central government and private operators for the return of Eurostar services to the Ashford and Ebbsfleet international stations. KemKaran publicly stated that restoring these links would bring “immense economic benefits” to the county. Notably, she also explicitly championed the environmental benefits of the project, stating that the restoration of international rail links would provide “climate-friendly travel for Kent and Medway residents to venture into Europe.”

This demonstrates a willingness among some local Reform leaders to moderate or entirely invert the party’s hardline anti-green national messaging when advocating for high-profile infrastructure projects that promise significant regional economic investment.

A central pillar of Reform UK’s transport platform leading into the 2025 local elections was the promise to eradicate Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and reverse schemes that restrict vehicular access to urban spaces. LTNs, which utilise modal filters such as physical bollards, planters, and automatic numberplate-recognition (ANPR) cameras to prevent through-traffic (rat-running) in residential areas, became a highly polarised wedge issue under the previous Conservative government.

Following their unprecedented electoral success, Reform UK’s national leadership sought to immediately capitalise on this mandate. The party’s national chair, Zia Yusuf, promised a “large-scale reversal” of existing LTNs across the ten newly controlled councils. In a public statement, Yusuf declared that the party views such traffic management schemes with “the same suspicion as mass immigration and net zero,” assuring voters that residing in a Reform-controlled local authority would guarantee a much higher bar for any new LTN proposals and the swift dismantling of existing infrastructure.

There was one problem. An investigation conducted by journalists in May 2025 revealed that across the ten councils controlled by Reform—Derbyshire, Doncaster, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, North Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, and West Northamptonshire—there were no Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in existence to remove.

Its easy, and some would argue fun, to call Reform UK idiots for this. But to me this reveals something more. It provides an insight into the mechanics of populist transport policy. The party successfully deployed a highly controversial, urban-centric political wedge issue to mobilise voters in predominantly rural, semi-rural, and suburban county councils where the targeted infrastructure does not exist. The “phantom LTN” phenomenon highlights a severe disconnect between the party’s national culture-war rhetoric and the actual realities of the places they now govern. Their flagship transport pledge was rendered moot by where they actually won control.

Despite the absence of physical LTNs to dismantle, their underlying anti-restriction ideology has heavily influenced other facets of traffic demand management, frequently at the expense of proactive public safety. In Lancashire, the Reform-led administration has faced severe, cross-party criticism for its rigid, metric-driven approach to road safety interventions. According to local parliamentary representatives speaking in the House of Commons, the new council leadership has systematically refused to implement new traffic calming, speed reduction, or road safety measures unless a highly specific and morbid threshold is met. Namely, it is claimed, that the council must wait for at least ten collisions to occur at a specific site, of which 20% must result in individuals being killed or seriously injured (KSI), before preventative action is taken.

While I find the Lancashire Road Safety Strategy to be much more muted in its language, to the point of recognising the needs of vulnerable road users, this is not the point here. It highlights the tension between maintaining unhindered vehicular flow and executing the council’s statutory duties regarding highway safety, suggesting that the ideological protection of the motorist extends to an aversion toward even basic traffic calming.

For county and unitary councils, the maintenance of the local highway network is both a statutory duty and the most highly visible example of transport performance to the electorate. Decades of underfunding, coupled with increasing traffic volumes and extreme weather events linked to climate change, have resulted in a severe degradation of the UK’s local road network. In response, the central UK government allocated a £7.3 billion capital funding block for local road maintenance covering the period from 2026 to 2030, aiming to provide long-term certainty and move local authorities away from reactive “patchwork politics” toward sustainable, life-cycle asset management.

To drive accountability and ensure this capital injection is utilised efficiently, the Department for Transport (DfT) published a nationwide interactive map in January 2026, grading all 154 local highway authorities in England using a strict Red, Amber, Green (RAG) traffic light system. The performance ratings are generated via an assessment of three distinct scores:

• The actual physical condition of the local roads
• The level of capital investment dedicated to maintenance, and
• The adoption of industry best practices.

Best practice encompasses the use of modern preventative maintenance technologies, such as hot asphalt patching, thermal patching, and spray injection patching, which are statistically 35% cheaper than reactive fixes and significantly prolong the lifespan of the asset.

The performance of Reform-controlled councils on this critical metric has been predominantly mediocre to poor, highlighting the systemic difficulties of translating populist efficiency rhetoric into complex operational infrastructure management. Though, to be entirely fair to those councils, these scores likely reflect longer term systemic funding issues with road maintenance, and its not as if other councils have performed brilliantly either.

Local Road Maintenance Ratings for Reform-Controlled Authorities (January 2026)

Local Highway Authority	Overall RAG Rating	Condition Scorecard	Spend Scorecard	Best Practice Scorecard
Derbyshire	Red	Red	Amber	Amber
West Northants	Red	Amber	Amber	Amber
North Northants	Amber	Amber	Amber	Red
Kent	Amber	Amber	Green	Amber
County Durham	Amber	Amber	Green	Amber
Doncaster	Amber	Amber	Green	Amber
Lancashire	Amber	Amber	Amber	Amber
Staffordshire	Amber	Amber	Amber	Amber
Lincolnshire	Amber	Amber	Amber	Amber
Nottinghamshire	Amber	Amber	Amber	Amber

Reform have immediately questioned these findings. Derbyshire, for example, publicly questioned the DfT’s underlying data metrics and requesting clarification meetings. West Northamptonshire Council, similarly branded with the lowest rating, acknowledged the severity of the assessment, stating an intention to work alongside the DfT to improve its score. Furthermore, North Northamptonshire received a Red scorecard specifically for failing to adopt industry best practices, suggesting a reliance on inefficient, reactive pothole filling rather than strategic preventative treatments.

The inherent tension between the party’s pro-motorist ideology and the physical requirements of infrastructure maintenance was exposed vividly in Staffordshire. Upon assuming control of the county council, the Reform administration implemented a highly publicised three-month freeze on all new, non-essential roadworks in several urban areas, specifically targeting Stafford town centre. The explicitly stated goal of this policy was to prevent drivers from being stuck in queues during the summer months, and demonstrate immediate action on the party’s promise to free up the road network.

This triggered a disastrous second-order effect on the council’s core infrastructure performance metrics. Because highways engineering teams were barred from operating in key urban corridors during the summer—traditionally the optimal, most cost-effective window for asphalt maintenance due to dry, warm weather conditions—the volume of highway repairs plummeted. Between May and October 2025, Staffordshire County Council filled 17,826 potholes, representing a 15.1% reduction compared to the 21,013 potholes filled during the exact same period in 2024 under the previous Conservative leadership.

Political opponents rapidly capitalised on this, noting that the administration had squandered the optimal weather conditions of the year despite receiving an additional £10.5 million in government highways funding. The council defended the drop by insisting they were adhering to repair plans and budgets inherited from the previous administration, while also committing an additional £15 million to highways investment over the next two years to completely overhaul long-term repair strategies.

Attempting to maximise unhindered vehicular flow by unilaterally banning road maintenance actively accelerates the degradation of the road surface. This inevitably results in a vast proliferation of potholes during the winter, ultimately resulting in a substantially worse driving experience, and higher vehicle repair costs, for the very motorists the policy was designed to protect.

The true, systemic impact of Reform UK’s governance on transport matters is most visible in the local authority budgets published for the 2026/27 financial year. Elected on platforms promising governmental efficiency, a reduction in the tax burden, and the elimination of allegedly wasteful “green” spending, the administrations have immediately clashed with the profound inflationary pressures of local government service delivery and the reality of multi-million-pound structural deficits.

Reform’s ideological hostility to Net Zero policies manifested in immediate, high-profile capital scheme cancellations. The most prominent example occurred within Kent County Council, an authority heavily promoted by national party figures as Reform’s flagship “showcase” administration. In its inaugural budget, the council officially scrapped a £7.5 million capital programme designed to transition the council’s fleet of operational vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs), alongside putting a £32 million green retrofit programme for public buildings “on ice”.

The administration justified the EV cancellation on grounds of fiscal prudence, arguing that borrowing £7.5 million was irresponsible given the council’s wider financial precariousness, and noted that maintaining the existing fleet of 213 diesel vehicles costs only £1.4 million annually. However, the Institute for Government noted that avoiding short-term capital outlays to appease anti-green sentiment was a classic short-term maneuver that “could store up future costs.” The council has locked itself into the escalating maintenance and fuel costs of an aging internal combustion engine fleet, ignoring calculations by the Office for Budget Responsibility that suggest sticking with fossil fuels through to 2050 will cost double that of transitioning to clean energy.

Despite the much-publicised savings generated by scrapping green infrastructure, Kent’s first budget under Reform leadership was described by opposition Liberal Democrat leaders as a “casino budget” fraught with “extreme risk” and “instability”. The budget exposed the council to its highest-ever financial risk, leaving financial reserves dangerously low.

To balance the books, Linden KemKaran, was forced to pass a 3.99% increase in council tax—a violation of the party’s pre-election pledges to lower the tax burden. Furthermore, despite the pro-motorist rhetoric, core funding for transport infrastructure was kept static against rising inflation, representing a real-terms cut to the Kent highways budget. Opposition figures highlighted that this would inevitably lead to “more potholes, more road collapses and a crumbling network.”

This trend of unavoidable tax increases was mirrored across the country, shattering the illusion that local government efficiencies alone could bridge the funding gap. In Derbyshire, the Reform-led council was forced to look at a maximum 5% council tax hike to close a £37.8 million financial shortfall, driven almost entirely by the escalating costs of adult and children’s social care. In Lincolnshire, the initial proposals for the 2026/27 budget similarly assumed a 4.99% council tax increase to maintain basic services.

In County Durham, the financial crisis forced the administration to seek alternative revenue streams. Facing an £11.1 million financial “black hole,” the Reform cabinet approved a £10 million package of cuts and new charges. In a move that penalises infrastructure development, the council introduced a policy to charge utility companies a collective £310,000 in 2026/27 for carrying out essential roadworks on busy routes. While this generates minor revenue, it threatens to delay vital utility upgrades and broadband rollouts, as companies factor the punitive costs into their operational planning.

Key Transport Budget Adjustments and Scheme Status (2026/27)

Local Authority	Scheme / Initiative	Action Taken	Rationale
Kent	Electric Vehicle Fleet Transition	Cancelled	Avoided £7.5m borrowing. Locks in £1.4m/year diesel maintenance costs.
Kent	Core Highway Maintenance	Static Budget	Real-terms cut due to inflation.
County Durham	Subsidised Bus Routes (35A, 104)	Withdrawn	Saves £84k in 26/27, £117k in 27/28.
County Durham	Utility Roadworks on Busy Routes	Penalised	Raise £310k in revenue to plug budget black hole.
Lincolnshire	North Hykeham Relief Road	Backed	Pending final DfT funding confirmation.
Lancashire	South Lancaster to M6 Link Road	Backed	Approved altered route and removal of reconfigured M6 Junction 33.
Staffordshire	Core Highways Investment	Backed	£15 million additional capital investment injected over two years.

The funding crisis in UK local government leaves virtually no discretionary capital funding for transformative transport improvements. Populist promises to simultaneously cut taxes, freeze roadworks, and vastly improve road surface quality is a circle that’s impossible to square Consequently, Reform councils have been forced into the exact same tax-raising, budget-squeezing postures as the mainstream administrations they replaced.

The approach of Reform-controlled councils to public transport networks is simple. Fiscal consolidation over community connectivity, alongside a deep ideological reluctance to embrace state-interventionist models such as bus franchising.

The previous national government enacted the Bus Services Act, granting local authorities enhanced legislative powers to reclaim control over local bus routes, set fare caps, and dictate timetables via franchising models—as shown in Greater Manchester’s “Bee Network”. However, Reform-controlled councils have shown little appetite for utilising these powers.

In Staffordshire, local Members of Parliament have openly criticised the Reform administration for demonstrating a complete “lack of interest in boosting bus routes and taking advantage of franchising”. Politicians noted that under previous administrations, more than half of all routes in constituencies like Cannock Chase were lost to commercial cuts, eroding frequency and reliability. Despite the new legislative powers available to reverse this decline, the Reform council has failed to intervene, leaving vulnerable rural communities—such as those in Norton East, Slitting Mill, and Etchinghill—without reliable public transport connections.

Here, I am willing to cut some Reform some slack. Franchising can be a great political slogan, but the financial reality of local authorities means that the significant revenue risk of local buses being franchised cannot be borne. Oxfordshire, for example, seen as one of the most progressive transport authorities, has ruled out franchising its buses for just this reason. I sense here that this is a matter that is being used as a political stick by which to beat Reform with.

Where action has been taken regarding bus networks, it has primarily been driven by the urgent need to plug financial deficits rather than improve services. In County Durham, as part of the £10 million package of cuts required to balance the 2026/27 budget, the Reform cabinet ordered the total withdrawal of bus routes 35A and 104. The administration justified the cancellation by deeming these specific routes “under-used and unviable,” executing cuts that will save the council £84,000 in the 2026/27 financial year and £117,000 in 2027/28.

The council appears willing to absorb the negative impacts of this policy—namely, the social isolation of rural electorates who rely on these routes to access employment and essential services. This creates a feedback loop: as subsidised routes are cut to balance local budgets, communities become entirely dependent on private cars, which in turn places greater wear-and-tear on the degrading local highway network.

Despite the loud national rhetoric dismissing active travel as ideological folly, the pragmatic requirements of local government finance have forced a quiet integration of these schemes. Because central government funding from the DfT is frequently ring-fenced for specific policy outcomes, local authorities must either accept the parameters of the grant or forfeit millions of pounds in capital investment.

In North Northamptonshire, the council’s Capital Programme Update for 2025/26 and beyond demonstrates this capitulation. The council formally accepted DfT grants for active travel, allocating £191,000 from Active Travel Fund 5 for 2026/27, alongside an additional £508,000 from the Consolidated Active Travel Fund. Simultaneously, the council removed a £4.092 million Integrated Transport Block budget, replacing it with a new, strictly regulated Local Transport Grant. West Northamptonshire similarly accepted Active Travel Fund grants to implement priority schemes derived from their Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans (LCWIPs).

While elected Reform councillors may rhetorically dismiss cycle lanes to appease their base, the council’s finance directors and transport officers continue to actively bid for and draw down ring-fenced central government funds to maintain investment in the transport network.

To fully understand why transport investment in Reform-controlled councils has stagnated, you need to just focus on a single thing. And no, its not adult or children’s social care. Its home to school transport, and especially that for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) home-to-school transport.

Local authorities possess a strict statutory duty to transport eligible children to appropriate educational settings, as specified under the Education Act 1996. While the school bus may be a symbol from our childhood, in practice this often requires councils to fund private taxis to transport children to out-of-county facilities on a daily basis. This expenditure operates as an uncontrollable, demand-led pressure that cannibalises the wider transport and highways budget. Councils cannot simply just not do it. This results in scenarios where solitary taxis are dispatched to ferry students 50 miles in opposite directions at exorbitant daily rates. Note how I said appropriate educational setting, as the closest is not always the most appropriate.

Reform councils have inherited this systemic crisis, and their attempts to manage the financial fallout have sparked considerable local controversy. In North Northamptonshire, the financial imbalance has become so severe that the public buses budget now represents merely 7% of the entire home-to-school transport budget. This means private bus and taxi operators focus entirely on lucrative, guaranteed school contracts, effectively destroying the commercial viability of rural public transport.

To regain financial control and curb these escalating costs, both West and North Northamptonshire have implemented highly restrictive new travel assistance policies for the 2025/2026 academic year. These policies enforce significantly stricter walking route assessments to disqualify applicants, limit discretionary refunds, and refuse refunds for transport already utilised unless under exceptional circumstances such as a house fire or domestic violence.

In County Durham, the financial crisis has forced the Reform administration to further, proposing the introduction of direct transport charges for users of Learning Disability Transport services who had previously received the service free of charge.

When statutory home-to-school transport consumes the vast majority of local transit funding, councils are left entirely unable to subsidise public bus routes, invest in community infrastructure, or adequately patch the highway network. This situation is one of the main causes forcing the 3.99% to 5% council tax hikes witnessed across Reform-controlled authorities, completely overriding their ideological commitment to a low-tax economy.

The dynamics of transport governance differ significantly between the upper-tier county councils controlled by Reform UK and the two newly established Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) won by the party: Greater Lincolnshire (Mayor Andrea Jenkyns) and Hull & East Yorkshire (Mayor Luke Campbell).

Unlike county council leaders, regional mayors wield significant devolved budgets specific to transport, infrastructure, adult education, and economic growth. Crucially, combined authorities are almost entirely insulated from the demand-led financial pressures of adult and children’s social care, allowing mayors to focus exclusively on capital investment and regional strategy. Consequently, the behaviour of the Reform mayors has diverged noticeably from the party’s county council leaders, demonstrating a distinct shift toward pragmatism and working to just get things done.

Mayor Luke Campbell secured a comfortable victory in Hull & East Yorkshire, becoming the region’s inaugural mayor. Upon assuming office, Campbell immediately utilised his devolved powers to break with the hardline anti-active travel rhetoric of his party colleagues. In late 2025, Campbell co-signed a historic joint mayoral commitment alongside high-profile Labour mayors—including Andy Burnham (Greater Manchester), Tracy Brabin (West Yorkshire), and Steve Rotheram (Liverpool City Region)—to radically improve streets for walking, wheeling, and cycling. The pledge explicitly commits the mayors to collaborate with Active Travel England to create a country-wide walking network and deliver 3,500 miles of safer routes connecting schools and transport hubs, aiming to get 20 million people more active daily.

The design of Mayoral Combined Authorities heavily incentivises cross-party collaboration and the pooling of regional resources. To successfully secure continuous DfT funding, such as the multi-billion-pound City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTS), mayors must present a united front and demonstrate a commitment to integrated, multi-modal transport networks. Mayor Campbell’s endorsement of walking and cycling infrastructure may indicate that the economic imperative to secure Treasury capital might supersede the party’s populist suspicion of “green” transit.

Campbell kept his headline election promise by setting the mayoral council tax precept at £0 for the 2026/27 financial year. However, this refusal to raise independent revenue immediately has constrained him financially. Campbell faced intense scrutiny from opposition Liberal Democrat councillors when it was revealed that his flagship campaign promise of a £1 million annual Community Investment Fund was absent from the Medium Term Financial Plan. The budget only allocated the £1 million for the 2025/26 year, with combined authority finance directors confirming there was no budgetary provision for the subsequent three years.

Reform UK Mayoral Powers and 2026/27 Transport Posture

Mayor / Authority	Mayoral Precept (26/27)	Key Transport & Infrastructure Priorities	Stance on Active Travel
Luke Campbell  (Hull & East Yorkshire)	£0	Regional integration, cross-north collaboration.	Highly Supportive: Co-signed 3,500-mile active travel pledge with Labour mayors.
Andrea Jenkyns  (Greater Lincolnshire)	£0	Humber Freeport, backing North Hykeham Relief Road.	Neutral/Silent:Focus primarily on heavy infrastructure and maritime logistics.

In Greater Lincolnshire, Mayor Andrea Jenkyns has aligned her transport and infrastructure priorities more closely with industrial, energy, and maritime logistics. Leveraging the region’s status as a hub for offshore wind—which generates roughly 17% of the UK’s electricity—Jenkyns has focused her transport strategy on enabling the Humber Freeport and enhancing port connectivity. Her administration has highlighted the issue of rural transport deserts, noting that inadequate bus subsidies force residents to rely almost exclusively on private cars for economic survival. Her leadership has broadly supported traditional heavy infrastructure, actively supporting the progression of the North Hykeham Relief Road project through the constituent county council.

The administrative complexity of South Yorkshire presents a unique dynamic. While Reform UK secured a majority on Doncaster Council in the May 2025 elections, the executive function of the council remains controlled by a directly-elected Labour Mayor, Ros Jones. Furthermore, overarching transport policy is dictated by the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA), led by Labour’s Oliver Coppard. SYMCA controls the devolved budget covering local public transport, roads, and active travel, and has successfully brought the local tram network under public control while pursuing bus franchising across Sheffield, Doncaster, and Rotherham. Despite the Reform council majority, the local authority has successfully collaborated with SYMCA to advance major infrastructure projects, most notably securing progress on the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield Airport following its controversial closure in 2022. This indicates that even where Reform holds a council majority, overarching regional transport strategies managed by combined authorities can continue unabated, bypassing local ideological resistance.

So what does this all mean?

The performance of Reform UK-controlled local authorities and mayoralties on transport matters during the 2025–2026 period offers an insights into the friction between populist political ideology and the realities of public office.

The party’s national narrative—characterised by a fierce defence of the motorist, a rejection of Net Zero infrastructure, and a pledge to dismantle traffic restriction schemes—has yielded highly mixed and sometimes contradictory results at the local level. The flagship promise to remove Low Traffic Neighbourhoods fell victim to where they won power. Conversely, some attempts to actively appease motorists by freezing urban roadworks, as witnessed in Staffordshire, directly backfired.

The promise of low taxation and high operational efficiency has been shattered by the reality of local government finance and duties. Unable to escape the legally mandated costs of adult social care and SEND home-to-school transport, flagship Reform councils have been forced to push through council tax increases of up to 5%. To balance these highly precarious budgets, transport and infrastructure and anything else non-essential gets cut. Transition schemes for electric vehicle fleets have been cancelled, commercially unviable rural bus routes have been terminated without replacement, and new, punitive charges for utility roadworks and disabled transport have been introduced to generate some – any – revenue.

At the mayoral level, its different. Devolved funding models have insulated leaders like Luke Campbell from budgetary pressures, meaning a more pragmatic approach to transport planning. The mayors of Reform UK are demonstrating an understanding that securing long-term, multi-billion-pound regional transport investment from central government ultimately requires abandoning rigid ideological purity in favour of integrated, multi-modal strategic planning.

To me, this represents a wider issue in British transport policy. Political parties may shout and scream, and even get the odd minor victory here and there, but our centralised governance system combined with the funding crisis in local government forces councillor’s hands eventually. Reform are now discovering this stark reality.

Going forward from here, what matters is how the politics plays out. At this May’s local council elections, Reform are predicted to perform well and secure more council’s. They are also polling well nationally. I feel that these local councils will go through the same motions as their predecessors, with the big transport policy game being played out nationally at the next election.

On a personal note, I have some very strong reservations of Reform. You may have your own, and its not my position to try and change your mind. We live in a democracy, and, whether we like it or not and for the time being at least, they enjoy the support of a substantial part of the electorate. To date, Reform has struggled to apply its transport policy agenda. Who knows what might happen should they start winning bigger.

As the 2026/27 financial year commences, the overarching challenge for these administrations will be managing the rapid, visible degradation of highway assets while operating within a restrictive central funding ecosystem. This ecosystem demands the very green transitions, active travel networks, and integrated public transport systems that the party was initially elected to oppose, ensuring that the tension between national populist rhetoric and local pragmatism will remain the defining feature of Reform UK’s transport policy.