Just days after being elected, one of Reform UK’s 53 new councillors in Essex, Stuart Prior, was already heading for the door, having handed in his resignation.
Six months earlier he allegedly authored social media posts in which he celebrated a Sikh woman being raped in the Midlands, described Muslim people as “rats” and wrote that white people were the “master race”.
Confronted by the Mirror over the posts ahead of the election, Mr Prior said he “did not recall” the tweets, despite the journalist pointing out that pictures of the candidate’s house and dog also featured in posts from the same account.
Regardless, he was kept on as a candidate by Reform, winning seats on both Essex County Council and Rochford District Council last Friday. The former was a major victory for Nigel Farage’s party, winning a majority in the authority to end 25 years of Conservative control.
Now these councils will be forced to hold by-elections to fill the vacant seats just months after the nationwide local contests, each at a cost that is set to run into the tens of thousands of pounds.
Mr Farage has repeatedly insisted that candidates are properly vetted, and that the party’s processes are as tough as any of its rivals, but several Reform candidates were accused of making racist and offensive comments on social media in the weeks before the local elections.
This is not a new problem for Reform. Since May last year, 17 of the party’s councillors have vacated their seats. In 12 of these cases (70 per cent) the circumstances related to vetting or conduct issues, a lack of engagement with council duties, or basic administrative issues that were not spotted.
By comparison, Labour saw a similar attrition rate from its 2025 cohort, so far losing three councillors from a total of 98. However, none of them resigned over vetting issues, and one was due to death.
Of the 12 former Reform councillors, 11 are set to cost local taxpayers £287,000 in by-election costs, figures obtained by The Independent through Freedom of Information requests indicate, as the mounting cost of Reform’s inadequate or unprepared candidates is revealed.
The two by-elections triggered by Mr Prior’s resignation are set to cost a further £35,000, estimates provided by Rochford council show, pushing the total figure up to £322,000. Unlike at a general election, which is funded by central government, local election costs are paid for by the authority in which they are held.
Responding to The Independent’s analysis, Reform argued that the figure is “misleading”, pointing to an estimated £1.3m in combined costs arising from by-elections triggered by the resignations of Labour and Conservative councillors over the same time period. Following the May 2025 elections, the two parties had a combined 10,527 councillors, and Reform 804.
The party’s first resignation after the 2025 local elections was Andrew Kilburn, who left Durham Council after just nine days when it emerged he was an employee of the local authority and therefore was ineligible to stand.
Staffordshire County Council’s Wayne Titley resigned just two weeks after being elected, following criticism of Facebook posts published before the election, where he advocated for small boats attempting to reach Britain to be sunk with a “volley of gunfire”.
Similarly, Lynn Dean stood down from Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council in April after being suspended from Reform for allegedly publishing racist posts on X. Her vacated seat was already scheduled to be contested on 7 May as part of the wider local elections, and she remains an independent councillor on Staffordshire County Council.
Barry Martin, also of Staffordshire council, is the latest of the 2025 intake to go, resigning earlier this week. The former councillor had two formal complaints against him relating to his social media activity upheld by the authority last year, allegedly writing shortly after his election that the role was “so dull and boring” and that he was “thinking of resigning”. Reform council leader Martin Murray said that Mr Martin resigned for health reasons and a family bereavement.
Other cases include:
- Robert Bloom, North Northamptonshire – who resigned in August after being charged in October with two counts of racially or religiously aggravated harassment
- David Cumming, Durham – who resigned in January following a period of extremely low attendance (20 per cent)
- Adam Smith, West Northamptonshire – who was expelled from the party in August for bringing it into “disrepute”, resigned in March
Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office spokesperson, Lisa Smart, said: “If Nigel Farage spent half as much time vetting his candidates as he does looking for a TV camera, he might have avoided saddling the British taxpayer with a gigantic bill for his party’s incompetence.
“Reform’s record of dodgy councillors is eyewateringly expensive for the British public and proves that Farage’s party is simply not fit for office. Local communities deserve better.”
Asked in April if all of Reform’s candidates in Essex had been vetted, Mr Farage said: “I know that our candidates will be held to a higher standard than any of the other parties.
“That’s because we are the challengers. We are the ones taking on the establishment. Yet we have done a good, thorough professional job,” he added.
Mark Kieran, CEO of Open Britain, said candidates put forward for political office should be “serious people” properly qualified to do the job.
He said: “Voters elected these councillors in good faith, expecting a party as well-funded as Reform UK to have carried out reasonable due diligence – and for the councillors they elected to be around long enough to deliver on their campaign promises.
“Now Reform’s back-of-a-fag-packet vetting has denied voters their democratic representation and landed them with a collective £300,000 bill – draining scarce funding from libraries, social care and bin collections.”
The Independent has attempted to contact Mr Prior.
A Reform UK spokesperson said: “This analysis is a transparently selective and deeply misleading attempt to manufacture a political attack on Reform UK.
“It conveniently ignores the fact that last year the Conservatives and Labour together saddled taxpayers with at least £1.3m in local by-election costs. In this parliament alone, Labour has cost the public purse almost £1m after the resignations of two scandal-hit MPs. The public is now being expected to fork out another £500,000 for a by-election in Makerfield as a result of Labour’s internal psychodrama.”
