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Any other employer would call this an onboarding failure. Why should this be different?

ended 27. May 2026

Reform councillors at Kirklees Council this week admitted in the chamber they didn't understand standing orders, the council constitution or what an amendment even was. One councillor suggested it would be "unconstitutional" to vote on things they didn't understand. Of the 27 newly elected Reform councillors, just one had any prior experience as a councillor.

The meeting was called to elect a council leader. It failed. It will now reconvene next Thursday.

This is not just embarrassing. It is a recruitment, shortlisting and onboarding failure playing out in a very public chamber, with real consequences for the people those councillors were elected to represent.

The Local Government Association is clear that induction should happen before the first meeting. New councillors should understand the constitution, standing orders, their legal responsibilities, scrutiny and planning processes before they are asked to vote on anything. That clearly did not happen here. And the question worth asking is whether Reform offered any structured preparation at all, or whether winning the seat was considered a sufficient qualification for doing the job.

One councillor in the chamber said publicly that elected members should have done their homework before attending. And she is not wrong. Personal responsibility matters. But in any regulated environment, individual responsibility and organisational accountability sit alongside each other. They are not either or. The council has a statutory duty to provide induction before the first meeting. The party has a responsibility to prepare its candidates before they walk into a chamber. And the candidates themselves should have been asking what preparation was available long before polling day. When all three fail at the same time, pointing at the individual is the easy answer. It is also the incomplete one.

Because the numbers tell a story. Since the May 2025 local elections, Reform has lost roughly 80 councillors through resignations, suspensions and expulsions. PoliticsHome specifically called it an "unusual rate," noting Reform lost more than 5% of its councillors within six months. Within just two weeks of the May 2026 elections, departures are already emerging across Sheffield, Plymouth, Thurrock, Bradford, Sunderland, Gateshead, Walsall and more.

The Guardian reported individual resignations following social media scrutiny here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/11/newly-elected-reform-councillor-resigns-stuart-prior-social-media 

The BBC covered suspensions in Durham here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y04l3jdx7o 

When that many people leave a role within weeks of starting it, that is not bad luck or a culture clash. That is what happens when candidate shortlisting prioritises enthusiasm over suitability, when there is no meaningful assessment of whether someone understands the role they are standing for, and when onboarding is treated as optional rather than essential.

Worth noting, comprehensive cross-party resignation data does not appear to exist. The tracking that does exist is almost entirely focused on Reform because the rate is considered unusual enough to warrant it. That absence of data is a problem in itself. If we are not tracking this across all parties, we cannot have an honest conversation about whether this is a Reform problem or a symptom of something more fundamentally broken about how we recruit people into public life.

In any other organisation, a turnover rate like this would trigger a serious review of hiring practices, role clarity and induction. The fact that it involves elected public officials makes it more serious, not less. Every resignation triggers a by-election. Every by-election costs around £20,000 of public money.

Main story: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clypmk3k80ko 

  • Is the role of a councillor clearly enough defined before people put themselves forward? Should all parties be required to publish their candidate preparation and vetting processes? 
  • Do we even track resignation rates across all parties, and if not, why not? 
  • Is this a Reform problem specifically, or does it reveal something broken about how we recruit people into public life more widely? 
  • Should elected candidates be required to complete mandatory induction before they can take their seats and vote?
  • Would a mandatory competency assessment before standing for election be democratic or just another barrier to entry?

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
Reform councillors at Kirklees this week admitted they didn't understand standing orders, the constitution or what an amendment was. One called voting on things they didn't understand "unconstitutional." Of 27 newly elected, just one had prior experience.

Turning up to run a council without reading the rulebook is like starting surgery and asking where the scalpel goes.

The LGA is clear. Induction happens before the first meeting. The council, the party and the candidate all failed. Blaming the individual is the easy answer. It is also the incomplete one.

Since May 2025 Reform has lost roughly 80 councillors. Every resignation triggers a by-election costing £20,000. That bill isn't picked up by the party. It is picked up by small businesses and working people through their taxes. By you.

We don't track this across all parties. Until we do, we can't know if this is a Reform problem or a broken system everyone is quietly ignoring.
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Tony Redondo
Founder at Cosmos Currency Exchange
When parties prioritise headcount over competence, public administration suffers. The numbers reveal institutional failure: Reform UK saw an unusual 5% churn rate within six months of the 2025 local elections, losing dozens of councillors to suspensions and resignations. The Green Party, while experiencing lower initial churn, faces its own vetting failures — recent London resignations stemmed from the party fielding candidates legally disqualified as council employees, a basic statutory oversight. Across both cases, candidate shortlisting consistently favours enthusiasm over suitability. Without central tracking of councillor churn, this recruitment deficit goes unmonitored. The starting point should be a statutory post-election induction lock: just as professionals in regulated industries must prove competency before practising, no newly elected lawmaker should cast votes affecting public money until they demonstrably understand the rules.
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Sarah Gatford
The Positivity Pathfinder - Head of Interactions at Sarah Gatford Ltd
What would it look like if we recruited for public life the way good organisations recruit for anything that actually matters?

Reform clearly hasn't bothered, and Kirklees is what that contempt looks like in public.

You don't hand someone a job with no map, no induction, no clarity, and then act surprised when they flounder. That's not a character flaw on the councillors' part. It's a design flaw on Reform's.

Positive psychology distinguishes challenge from threat. A challenge is a stretch you've been resourced for. A threat is a stretch you haven't. Reform sent 26 first-time councillors into a chamber without the basics, then left them to embarrass themselves on the record. That's not democracy in action. It's negligence dressed up as insurgency.

Reform is a party that treats winning the seat as the whole job, and the actual work of governing as someone else's problem.

You can't run a country on vibes. Turns out you can't run a council on them either.
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Samuel Mather-Holgate
Managing Director & IFA at Mather and Murray Financial
If this is a recruiting failure the HR manager needs to be sacked, unfortunately in this instance that is the public. Populism is a concept often seen through one term. When the public want change and vote it in, it's often not what they hoped for so is overturned at the next available opportunity. That said, better infrastructure around governance may be helpful to ensure that local councils don't just grind to a halt now they are flooded with incompetent councillors.
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Debbie Porter
Managing Director at Destination Digital Marketing
Reform councillors in Kirklees at least exhibited honesty in admitting they didn’t know how councils work, but this isn’t a problem confined just to that local authority. Here in Derbyshire, the vast majority of the 42 newly elected Reform UK county councillors had never met or worked together before they were elected. They met for the first time after the election and the first order of business was to elect a leader - demonstrating they weren’t even self-organised enough to do that either. At Cabinet since their election, they’ve been corrected several times by public officers to explain what they are and are not responsible for. If you applied for a normal job, the very least expected of you is that you know roughly how to do the job in hand. This is the trouble with agitators and pressure organisations like Reform when their bluff is called and they win the prize they claim they wanted. It’s also the trouble with the electing public who assume all parties are equal to the task.