3 min read14 min

Sean Matthews, who became leader of Lincolnshire County Council in 2025, said he had shared an IT contract with Yusuf, who was Reform chairman at the time, soon after he was elected. 

Speaking on the Reform Party podcast earlier this month, Matthews said: “A lot of the work that we have is contracted out, and some of those contracts are ridiculous. Some of them are 25-year contracts.”

He continued: “When I took over last year, there was a new IT contract waiting to be signed and…the contract was put in front of me, and it was an 11-year contract in IT, and you go, this is not something I’m about to sign.

“In fact, I sent it off to Zia Yusuf and said, ‘look, am I being crazy here, is this contract ok?’ He said ‘leave it with me, I’ll have a look at it’.”

Matthews went on to claim that Yusuf “had a look at it” but, in the meantime, he had looked through it himself and come to the conclusion that it was “a lot of money” and “a long time”.

The council leader said he had persuaded the company offering the contract to make some changes, introducing a no-break clause and “they saved us over the period of those seven years, over £20m”.

After Matthews appeared on the podcast, PoliticsHome understands that his comments were raised with the council. As a result, the case was referred to the Council’s Information Assurance Team to be reviewed.

Nigel Farage’s party went into the 2025 local elections pledging to cut council waste through what it described as its own ‘Doge’ (Department of Government Efficiency) unit. 

Inspired by Elon Musk and the Donald Trump administration, and led at the time by Yusuf, the party said this cost-cutting drive would free up money for Reform-run local authorities to lower council taxes.

The plan ran into GDPR issues, with questions raised over what data Reform councillors were legally able to share with senior party figures. Reform-run councils have also been forced to raise council tax, though the party argues they are smaller increases than those implemented by other political parties.

A Reform UK spokesman said: “Reform has a wealth of businesslike experience and we support our council leaders wherever we can. We do that in the right way, with the right boundaries, and our councils have achieved huge savings and efficiencies.  

“We will not take any pathetic lectures from bureaucrats or journalists who whinge if we don’t save money, then whinge if we take action to save money. Reform UK are proven to be delivering better value for taxpayers.”

Lincolnshire County Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lucas said that the party had made “the right decision” not to throw all of its resources at the Makerfield by-election (Alamy)

4 min read17 min

“I have to say that the foot is about to be on the pedal for the mayoral, of course, now in Manchester to replace Andy Burnham,” she said in an interview with The House magazine.

“The Greens definitely will be throwing everything at that, and I would absolutely support them in so doing, and will be up there to do what I can to help.”

Speaking to The House following Andy Burnham’s landslide victory in Makerfield, Lucas, who was the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion for 14 years, said Zack Polanski’s Greens had made “the right decision” not to run a full-throttle campaign there.

Responding to suggestions last month that the Greens would properly contest the by-election in Makerfield, Lucas posted on X, formerly known as Twitter: “I hope this isn’t true.

“There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy and counter [the] dire threat of a Reform UK government.”

Lucas, who was the party’s first MP, told The House that the Green candidate in Makerfield, Sarah Wakefield, “did a good job, and she did us proud, but it wasn’t the kind of campaign where the whole party was absolutely throwing all of our resources at it, and that was the right decision”.

Wakefield won just 308 votes (0.68 per cent of the vote share) after the party was widely seen to have counted itself out of the contest.

Burnham cruised to a comfortable victory, securing almost 55 per cent of the vote and winning more votes than all other candidates combined.

He must now resign as the Mayor of Greater Manchester as the law forbids him from continuing with that role while also being an MP.

The election to choose Burnham’s successor will take place on 30 July, and Lucas believes the contest will be less like Makerfield and closer to the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, when Green candidate Hannah Spencer unseated Labour. 

“The Greens are out there to win as many seats as possible, and as I say, the next priority is the Manchester mayoral, and we think we’ve got a really good chance of winning that.

“We think that will be much more along the lines of Gorton and Denton than it was along the lines of Makerfield. I know Zack is going to be up there at the weekend getting ready to launch a campaign, so we’re taking it very seriously.”

Asked who she would like to see as the Green candidate in Greater Manchester, Lucas said that the party “have just such a wonderfully broad now set of really qualified, excellent candidates that I just want to see who’s putting their name in the ring”.

“I haven’t seen the full list yet, so I don’t doubt that we’ll come up with a really good person.”

The leader of the Green group on Trafford Council, Geraldine Coggins, is expected to be the party’s candidate, The New Statesman reported on Friday.

Commenting on the idea that the Greens could step aside for Labour in the mayoral election, Lucas said: “We certainly won’t be doing that.”

The election to choose Burnham’s replacement will use a more proportional voting system than first-past-the-post, in which voters express a first and second choice. If no candidate secures 50 per cent of the votes after the first round, then the top two candidates will be given the second preference votes from the defeated candidates.

A Green Party spokesperson said: “The Greens will be campaigning hard to win the by-election for the Greater Manchester Mayoralty and, as we showed in the Gorton and Denton by-election and local elections in the area, it is going to be a clear Greens vs Reform race in this election.”

The House magazine’s full interview with Caroline Lucas will be published in print and online in June.

19 June 2026. Andy Burnham speaks to supporters after the Makerfield by-election in Ashton in Makerfield. (Alamy)

3 min read5 min

“It is our last chance to change, but we’re going to take it, aren’t we? We are going to take that opportunity, and we are going to lay out a new path for Britain,” said Burnham, who secured his return to the House of Commons by winning over 50 per cent of the vote on Thursday.

“We have an opportunity to turn the tide to make the country feel like it’s working again, to make people see that politics can make a positive difference, to make people feel hope again.”

Burnham, who must now resign as Greater Manchester mayor to take up his role as MP, comfortably defeated his closest rival, the Reform UK candidate Rob Kenyon, by 20 percentage points.

The by-election in the northwest of England has widely been described as one of the most consequential in British political history, with Burnham now expected to launch a bid to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.

PoliticsHome reported on Friday that he is expected to meet with Labour MPs in Westminster on Monday as he prepares his push to enter No 10.

Starmer had today insisted he would fight any leadership contest, warning that he would not simply “walk away” after being elected nearly two years ago.

In a speech to supporters, Burnham called for an economy that “works for everybody” and the end of “trickle-down economics”, saying he wanted to see the renationalisation of key industries and the use of public procurement to reindustrialise Britain.

“You have to respond to what people here are saying. You have to do something to make life more affordable, to put more money in people’s pockets, to give people more breathing space again, so that they can have a better life.

“That’s what people were saying, and we must respond to that.

“We need an economy that works for everybody, not a few in far-off places from here, but an economy that works for people right here.”

He continued: “We do need to bring down water bills, energy bills, rail fares, just as we brought down bus fares in Greater Manchester to make life more affordable for people.”

The former health secretary said he would apply a “Makerfield test” and that if policies did not work for his constituency, they could not work at all.

He called for an education system less “dominated by the university route”, and on immigration vowed to bring an end to “HMO Britain”, whereby communities are not given a proper say over asylum accommodation in their areas.

“It’s not fair that they think that they can just operate like that and not hear the call of people here, the decent people here who always will do the right thing, the compassionate thing, but not when it’s unfair in terms of the way places like this are treated.”

4 min read28 min

Speaking on Friday morning, the Reform UK leader said: “There’s a couple of thousand voters there [Makerfield] who would normally have gone out and voted Reform that voted Restore, and I would say directly to them: ‘What do you want?’.

“We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again.”

In the run-up to Thursday’s by-election, there were suggestions that Restore Britain, set up by Lowe after he was kicked out of Reform, could effectively cost his old party victory by eating into its vote, allowing Labour candidate Andy Burnham to come through the middle.

Restore Britain candidate Rebecca Shepherd came third with nearly 7 per cent of the vote in Makerfield.

In the end, this figure was academic in terms of the impact on Reform’s chances of winning the seat, as Burnham’s landslide victory saw him comfortably outperform Reform and Restore Britain’s combined vote share. As pollster Peter Kellner noted this morning following the result in Makerfield, he reached this benchmark “with 6,000 votes to spare”.

But, as the University of Manchester’s Professor Rob Ford explained, Restore Britain’s current polling is significant because if it holds up until the next general election, it could cost Farage victory in other constituencies.

Ford told PoliticsHome that while the hard-right party would be unlikely to win seats outright based on current polling, apart from perhaps Lowe’s Great Yarmouth, it could take key votes from Reform in seats they must win to have a chance of winning power.

“Reform has got to win up of 300 seats to form the next government,” he said. “They really would like to be able to say X and Y seats are in the bag. Restore Britain adds this additional element of uncertainty.”

Ford argued that the best guidance for where Restore Britain could grow elsewhere in the country is to look at where the British National Party (BNP) attracted support two decades ago, pointing to areas like Barking in east London, parts of northwest England, and former villages in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

“I suspect what Lowe and Restore Britain attract is many more non-voters,” he said, in places where there is “deeply disaffected, alienated, anti-system, anti-politics” sentiment.

There were early signs of Restore Britain’s threat to Reform in Lowe’s Great Yarmouth at last month’s local elections. The party won all nine seats it contested, meaning Reform fell short of winning full control of the council.

Jon Wedon, the leader of the Restore/Great Yarmouth First group on the council, told PoliticsHome that the party’s strategy in Great Yarmouth in the run-up to 7 May was “really quite straightforward: a local election campaign on local issues”, claiming that Farage’s “get Starmer out” message didn’t work locally.

Julian Gallie, head of research at Merlin Strategy, said Restore Britain is likely to be most successful in places with high levels of support for Reform, potentially setting up more battles between Farage and Lower for that chunk of the right-wing vote. He pointed to so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats in the North and the Midlands, as well as parts of Essex.

In focus groups, when Lowe comes up naturally and unprompted, Gallie said, “it’s normally this boomer age group, and it’s the prime Facebook users who are the most tempted by Restore. They come across Restore and Rupert Lowe on there.”

However, he said that Lowe seems to be breaking through with “more leafy Conservative voters” in a way that Farage has not managed up to now.

“Lowe in his aesthetic, his farmer look, it’s seen as maybe less tacky than Reform, and can actually appeal to those more middle-class who are more right-wing on immigration and areas like that,” he told PoliticsHome.

Ford said that Restore Britain appears to be already influencing Reform by pushing the party into “more hardline” positions in a bid to shore up its right-wing flank.

“The irony in all this is that Farage’s whole political strategy was pulling parties to the right. Lowe is now using the same strategy against Farage,” he said.

Ford told PoliticsHome that while this might not hurt Farage’s standing with his own core voters, it could hurt his electoral prospects by “motivating anti-Reform voters” to set aside their differences and do whatever it takes to stop him winning.