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On Wednesday night, the former deputy prime minister campaigned in Barking and Dagenham, east London, where Nigel Farage’s party is hoping to make a major electoral breakthrough in the capital at the 7 May local elections. A YouGov poll published last week gave Reform a slender four per cent lead over the Labour Party.

The Manchester MP’s visit to the outer London area came a day after Prime Minister Keir Starmer avoided being referred to the Privileges Committee over the Lord Mandelson affair, and amid intense speculation about how much longer he has in No 10.

Speaking to Labour activists at the Trades Hall working men’s club in Dagenham, the party’s former deputy leader, who resigned from cabinet in September over unpaid stamp duty, joked about the current negativity within Labour as it braces for a bruising set of nationwide results next month. On the same night, pollster and Tory peer Lord Robert Hayward projected that Labour would lose a huge 1,850 council seats across the country.

“The one thing I say about Labour is we’re not happy unless we’re unhappy. So, we do like to know about the things we haven’t got, right?” said Rayner.

Accompanied in east London by a videographer, as well as her partner, Sam Tarry, a former Labour MP who was also previously a Barking and Dagenham councillor, Rayner sought to frame Reform UK as a threat to the area’s working-class communities.

“The kids here, he [Farage] wants those kept in poverty.

“He doesn’t want employment rights, and we’re delivering employment rights in the biggest way for a generation. We’re bringing down waiting lists in the NHS. He wants to make sure that we go to an insurance-based system. He doesn’t want a free NHS at the point of use anymore.

“So that’s not going to work for our communities here.”

Rayner added: “I talked about the poverty I grew up in when I was a child, but the one thing that never occurred to me, and was never an issue, was that I could be evicted from my council home, and that’s why we need the biggest wave in a generation of council homes, and we need to build them now.”

The local Labour MP, Margaret Mullane, who used to be a barmaid at the working men’s club, told PoliticsHome that Rayner’s working-class roots made her an effective campaigner in that part of the capital. One Labour activist described her as a “future prime minister”.

While Rayner is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Starmer in Downing Street, her political future is currently complicated by an outstanding HMRC investigation into her tax affairs, which many Labour figures believe must be completed before she can launch a bid to become prime minister.

She could also face a competition with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to secure the support of the Labour left and soft left. Burnham, who PoliticsHome revealed last week is also campaigning in London ahead of polling day next week, must find a parliamentary seat before launching a leadership bid of his own.

Rayner showed no signs of rebellion on Wednesday night, using her speech to campaigners to talk up the Labour government’s achievements after nearly two years in office.

“I’m so proud to have had the opportunity to represent you as your deputy prime minister, and make no apologies for being part of this Labour family and to continue believing what Labour does, because I’ve seen in action what Labour has done to give me opportunities that my mum never had,” she said.

However, should 7 May go as badly for Labour as the new Lord Hayward research suggests, then Starmer’s position in No 10 will almost certainly come under renewed pressure at the end of next week, which in turn will likely push Rayner back into the spotlight.

As well as losses in London, where Zack Polanski’s Greens are expected to be the primary beneficiaries, Labour is set to lose council seats across England, go backwards in Scotland, and fall out of power in Wales for the first time since Cardiff’s devolved institutions were established at the turn of the century.

Defeat in Barking and Dagenham would be particularly painful for Labour, with the party having won all 51 council seats when they were last up for election four years ago.

Local Labour councillor Phil Walker said that the Mandleson vetting row was being brought up by residents on the doorstep in Barking and Dagenham, compounding the PM’s unpopularity. “They think Starmer is stupid”, he told PoliticsHome. “It adds to an image that isn’t good.” Another councillor said the issue had cut through “even to kids”. 

Walker added that next week’s elections pose Labour’s biggest test in this London council “since 2006 when we kicked out the BNP (British National Party)”.

“The one thing I say about Labour is we’re not happy unless we’re unhappy,” Rayner tells activists

The Dagenham wards seen by Labour activists as most at risk of falling to Farage’s party are Village, Heath and Eastbrook. A collapse in support in this part of east London would be especially ominous for Mullane, who will be defending a majority of just over 7,000 at the next general election. “There is real pressure to keep Village – it is the heart of the constituency,” she told PoliticsHome.

Many residents who opened their doors to Labour activists on Wednesday night described themselves as undecided, which Mullane said demonstrates that “turnout will be crucial” for Labour if the party is to stave off the threat of Reform in Barking and Dagenham.

The cost of living and crime dominated doorstep conversations, as did the recent five per cent council tax rise. Labour’s decision early in government to make the winter fuel allowance means-tested, later amended after a major backlash, was cited as having caused “so much damage” with voters in the area, even nearly two years later.

Shortly after being visited by Labour activists, one resident came out of his house to dispose of the party’s literature in the recycling bin. 

Speaking earlier this week ahead of the locals, the Prime Minister’s political spokesperson said: “These local elections come down to a simple choice.

“Labour on your side, with your local Labour council working in partnership with a Labour Government, or Nigel Farage and Reform, who would put your family, your NHS and your community at risk.”

Nigel Farage arrives on a JCB digger, 2025, Birmingham (PA Images/Alamy)

6 min read10 min

Wearing a trademark garish tie and less-trademark expression of fear and trepidation, Nigel Farage entered a rally in March 2025 clinging to the outside of a JCB lorry.

Knuckles white, the Reform UK leader rolled into the conference centre in Birmingham as a ticker on the giant screen behind him counted off potholes around the country: COUNTY DURHAM 65,038, CAMBRIDGESHIRE 64,915, DEVON 55,825.

Farage was preparing to launch his party’s local election campaign. Beset by mounting and unavoidable bills for social care and special educational needs, councils are finding their residents and voters frustrated at growing bills seemingly delivering less for the average resident. Reform have been open about hoping to turn the frustration into electoral success.

However, candidates across the country will struggle to fix the problem. Councils find themselves responsible for funding issues they have no power to fix and, in some cases, pledges to cut council tax they have no ability to keep.

Despite this, roads remain the main concern for voters. According to new polling from YouGov, road issues, including potholes and congestion, are currently listed as a chief concern of voters above the economy, immigration and health services.

With sweeping changes expected in the upcoming local elections, those coming into power will have little experience of how to combat what they see as decades of mismanagement.

“Aren’t potholes,” Farage began his speech, “just the perfect symbol of broken Britain?”

Water, contrary to popular presumption, is actually the main cause of potholes. While heavy vehicles do not help, water seeping then freezing into the tarmac is the chief offender. Rapid freezing and thawing exacerbates the damage caused by the moisture, breaking up the tarmac and creating holes.

The other culprit is social care. As budgets are stretched around non-discretionary spending on adult and children’s social care, the ability to spend more than the absolute minimum on roads is depleted.

Until recently, the technology of repairing potholes has seemed a relatively settled matter.

Traditionally, potholes are fixed by hand, often using spades and rapid setting tarmac, or bitumen for larger holes. Small amendments have been made over time, including the use of water-fed stone saws instead of drills, in order to minimise dust and disruption. Compactors run over cold-seal tarmac, before being topped with sealant to prevent rain water getting in.

The process is not particularly interesting – requiring two technicians working by hand, enveloped by fluorescent barriers and the always mandatory hi-vis jackets.

However, patchwork-style fixes are strictly time-limited.

Nick Thom, assistant professor of engineering at Nottingham University, told the BBC that these styles of repair may only last two or three months – enough time to schedule proper resurfacing, but not enough to provide any long-term fix.

JCB’s Pothole Pro, on the other hand, has created a high-tech advancement on patchwork potholing – an all-in-one vehicle that claims to fill potholes in only eight minutes, for the fee of £184,000 per machine. It is popular with Farage. Multiple campaign appearances, the introduction to a major speech and the centre of Reform’s conference centre have now played host to the vehicle his deputy described as a “fantastic machine”.

However, many councils with constrained budgets have focused on prevention rather than cure, treating and replacing road surfaces before they get damaged, rather than play whack-a-mole with potholes.

Paolo Maldini, the iconic left back of AC Milan in the 1990s, once remarked that if he had to make a tackle he had already made a mistake. Former Conservatives highways lead for Lincolnshire council, Richard Davies, shares his philosophical outlook.

“If a pothole has formed, you’ve failed. We have 5,500 miles of roads. We try to work out where the road is going to fail, and rebuild a five-mile stretch. You can’t be reactive.”

Davies represents a council traditionalist’s view of potholes. Flashy, techy solutions are a false hope – good long-term management represents a solution.

Farage and Reform are taking a different approach.

In September, the Pothole Pro loomed over the conference hall, as Reform led the news agenda and set out its plans for national government, having taken power in councils across the UK in the May 2025 elections.

The love for JCB is reciprocated: its owner, the former peer Lord Bamford, just donated £200,000 to Reform.

Farage also published a sleek video of him clambering into one of the 13-tonne machines earlier this month on Facebook, which sounded almost like an advertorial for the company.

“We’re going to be asking a lot of questions when we go into county councils as to why these machines have not been used already.”

But, in some areas, those questions had already been answered.

In Davies’ patch in Lincolnshire, one of the 10 new councils secured by Reform in 2025, the Pothole Pro had already been shunned following an unsuccessful trial some years previously. 

Councillors had decided that the Pothole Pro travelled too slowly along country roads, where there may be a long trip between repairs. For their part, JCB say speed is a benefit of the Pothole Pro, alongside the vehicle providing a much safer method of repair for those working on the roads.

If a pothole has formed, you’ve failed

But Davies says a couple of spades and a bag of tarmac in the back of a van is both niftier and cheaper.

“It works if you’re fixing things close together, but the bits that haven’t broken will break soon,” he says. “Potholes will spring up, you can’t stop them, but it’s about the best way of dealing with them.”

Nevertheless, shortly after their election, Lincolnshire’s new cabinet decided to bring back the Pothole Pro for a 12-month trial. Fellow Reform-led Derbyshire and Staffordshire county councils also announced they were trialling the Pothole Pro.

Last year, while under Conservative rule, West Northamptonshire county council decided its existing machine had become too expensive to use. Other council contractors are looking to sell their machines too.

Councils previously filled by world-weary technocrats are now the domain of bright-eyed Reform ideologues. That eagerness could disguise a lack of concrete knowledge.

Faced with a budget squeeze, Reform councils are eyeing the funding allocated to highway maintenance. That will limit their ability to solve the pothole problem, Pothole Pro or no Pothole Pro. And many are already raising council tax, despite their campaign pledges.

Davies, who lost control of Lincolnshire council to the Reform turquoise wave, has a view on their challenges.

“It’s like being drunk at a pub, with your mates. You talk about what you’d do if you ran a pub, and how you would go about it. But it’s different to doing it.” 

(Tracy Worrall)

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At times, delivering this year’s Mais Lecture, Rachel Reeves sounded more like a fierce critic of government devolution policy than someone involved in delivering it.

The Chancellor spoke of the “stifling Whitehall orthodoxies” that have held back the regions; the “local ambition frustrated by central government control”. She attacked the “fiction that a strong economy could be built on the success of just a few places”, and called for a “genuine break with the past” as the only true solution to all of the above.

The language of the lecture must have given some relief to the mayors and officials running England’s devolved authorities. It reflected precisely their frustrations at the slow and limited nature of change.

The lack of power to raise revenues locally and to truly decide, not merely preside over, the prescribed allocation of central Treasury funds, has been at the core of discontent about the way devolution has been delivered since the start.

For now, the details of how it might be solved are with the Chancellor’s Treasury officials. To understand what’s at stake, why frustrations persist and what should be done, we’ve gone straight to the regional mayors and devolution experts.

If a single statistic can tell the story, it must surely be the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) finding, released last year, as to how much autonomy the UK gives its regions compared to other nations.

Among the OECD countries in 2024, the average proportion of overall revenues generated by a central, national exchequer was 53.2 per cent, with the rest being raised, and spent, by regional or federal authorities. In the UK, that figure was 91.8 per cent; the highest by some distance.

The UK’s economy is as centralised as it gets. It makes the Chancellor’s plan to “liberate” the regions, by granting “control over long-term, self-sustaining capital”, extremely ambitious.

Alex Walker, senior researcher at think tank Re:State and former research assistant at the Bennett School of Public Policy, says that while the scale of the job is huge, the intention is right, and necessary to redressing a paradox of the system.

“It’s a very big development,” he says. “England is a big outlier in how fiscally centralised it is. At the moment, you’ve got this decentralisation of spending responsibilities, but not really much decentralisation of revenue raising power.”

Responsibility without power is surely a political leader’s nightmare. And, Walker says, it’s the cause of a democratic deficit at the core of English devolution.

Under the current model, he says, the money comes largely out of general taxation so the accountability is upwards to the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) and various Whitehall departments: “Once strategic authorities are more financially and fiscally independent from central government it should lead to the accountability being more towards their local electorate in terms of how they are spending that money that’s being raised and generated in the local area.”

There is the way money is raised, and there is the way it is distributed, or not, to the regional authorities.

England is a big outlier in how fiscally centralised it is

Akash Paun, devolution programme director at the Institute for Government, says: “Mayors often speak of the unhelpful ‘begging bowl culture’ created by the funding system they operate within, in which combined authority budgets are a hodgepodge of grants from across Whitehall.

“This is a system that has limited the ability of mayors and local partners to develop joined-up and long-term strategies for their regions, as they have to account separately to numerous different government departments for their use of public money.”

A proposed solution to this surely unsustainable situation is the integrated settlement, an instrument introduced into the English Devolution White Paper of December 2024 as a means to grant authorities access to a “consolidated budget across housing, regeneration, local growth, local transport, skills, retrofit, and employment support”.

The idea is sound. And few would argue with communities minister Miatta Fahnbulleh’s view, who tells The House it is based on the idea that “mayors know their areas better than Whitehall ever could”.

She adds: “That’s why we’re scrapping dozens of ring-fenced grants and giving seven city regions more control through integrated settlements – so they can spend on what their residents actually need.”

Far more contentious, and many mayors say deeply unhelpful, are the many qualifications and stipulations required to reach an integrated settlement in the first place. Namely, that only those authorities proven to have met eligibility criteria and thus elevated to the status of ‘established’ mayoral strategic authority (EMSA) may qualify for an integrated settlement.

At the moment, only seven combined authorities do: in Greater London, Greater Manchester, the North East, West and South Yorkshire, the West Midlands, and the Liverpool City Region.

Seven authorities out of 16. That leaves nine working to meet the criteria to reach the status to receive the funding they need.

Those criteria are extensive. And include a contentious detail that an authority must “have been in existence, with a directly elected mayor in place, for at least 18 months” before it can even submit a request to become an established authority, let alone actually receive the integrated funding.

It has left many mayors in a state of frustration, eager to get on with the work of investing in their regions.

Not least Labour’s Claire Ward, East Midlands Combined County Authority mayor, which has hit its 18 months, applied for established status and subsequent integrated settlement, but still finds itself in ongoing talks with MHCLG about getting to the next step.Ward says: “I want it to move much faster. I want to be in a position where I’m not being held back from the things that we can do in this region because I don’t have the flexibility over the integrated settlements or I don’t have the powers that are going to come with the established status.

“As mayor I feel it’s my duty to be challenging government to explain why I can’t have those powers, why I can’t have additional funding, why I don’t have that flexibility that would allow me to do far more in terms of being able to create that growth of an opportunity in the region.

“I do not want this region to be held back any longer than it needs to be.”

This is precisely the sentiment of Paul Bristow, the Conservative mayor for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, a new mayor elected to a new role.

“We’re ready,” he says. “The authority had already done a lot of work, before I was elected last year.

“We’re following MHCLG’s guidance on when we can get established mayoral strategic authority status. The government has said it will only consider an integrated settlement for the next spending review, which is 2027.

“I want to progress that as quickly as possible, and perhaps get elements earlier, because the right time to get Cambridgeshire and Peterborough moving is now.”

The approach that’s been increasingly taken by government departments is them telling us how we should be spending the money

The sense of being held back, it seems, isn’t confined to those authorities awaiting the crucial established status.

The South Yorkshire mayoral combined authority was granted EMSA status and promised an integrated settlement as early as the white paper in 2024. Yet still its Labour Co-op mayor, Oliver Coppard, feels deprived of the powers he was promised. Coppard isn’t holding back in his criticism of a devolution system he says is “founded on a lack of trust”.

“We’ve found the process to be not in the spirit of devolution,” he says. “The principle is not being adhered to by the government. The government wants to hold onto the reins.

“And we’ve had concerns about various departments and what we are being asked to achieve with the money we’re being given. It’s the wrong way around. The approach that’s been increasingly taken by government departments is them telling us how we should be spending the money.”

Precisely what devolution was meant to undo.

There have undoubtedly been big steps forward, and real legislative action. There is grand talk of liberating the regions. But clearly, too, there is residual resistance, bureaucratic or otherwise, to releasing the reins.

“That attitude is still there in central government,” says Walker, “where the local state can’t be trusted to deliver people’s priorities. And when something goes wrong the instinct is to take it back to central government control.

“We’ve been hamstrung by a model where central government micromanages things across all of government.”

The Chancellor has identified the problems and recognised the frustrations of the regions: the begging bowl culture needs to end, and the gross imbalance in mayors’ powers and responsibility needs to be redressed.

And she has drawn broad rhetorical strokes for a solution which could truly transform the devolution process for the better.

There are risks. Vividly voicing the frustrations of regional leaders is fine, if you then fix the problems. Fail to find the right formula – or, worse, do a U-turn – and the tensions between Westminster and Whitehall on the one side, and the hamstrung devolved authorities on the other, could escalate.

Labour could find itself overseeing yet another “exercise in local ambition frustrated by central government control”, and the great opportunity devolution offers the nation as much as the regions could be lost.

An MHCLG spokesperson said: “We have a proud record on devolution. We’ve already rolled out more integrated settlements and cut bureaucracy for mayors so they have more freedom to spend in ways that they think work best for their communities. We’re not stopping there, with our English Devolution Bill, fiscal devolution roadmap, and Right to Request process we’re going even further in moving power and money out of Whitehall and into the hands of those who know their areas best.”