With the Warwickshire County Council elections taking place on Thursday 1 May, the Local Democracy Reporting Service spoke to each of the political parties vying for power at Shire Hall about why they should gain your vote. 

While Reform UK is not represented at Warwickshire County Council, the party has enjoyed a sharp rise nationally, returning five MPs (now four) to Westminster last year and polls suggest they could cut through in the 2025 local elections. 

James Crocker, Reform UK's Stratford-on-Avon branch chair, makes his party's case. 

What are your policy priorities?

Early on, as soon as possible, we need a clear idea of exactly how much is being spent and where the money is going as best we can, to have an audit and get a sense of what lies beneath the numbers.

With only one district councillor on the patch at the moment, there is only so much that we know. We want a sense of what the existing priorities are and what the spending plans suggest they are. I have a feeling that they could diverge quite dramatically.

In short, we want to cut waste and spend money in the most prudent way. We want to be sure that is actually happening and the first thing to do would be to assess those issues.

The council has well documented financial pressures – how will your party fund its ambitions? 

One of the areas would be to see how much is going to net zero policies that we may feel are not delivering anything that is measurable. I don't think we have a very clear idea of the size, scale and detail on that and there could be a lot of immediate savings there.

Money that could be diverted to help fund policing and related areas so that we have some kind of presence on the streets. 

I appreciate this isn't always tied together, different bodies and councils have different responsibilities, but speaking to people on the streets and knocking on doors, it has had alarmed me how people feel that security in town centres has disappeared at a time when the threat level seems to have been rising – it is in different pockets but Alcester appears to be an area where people are far more worried than I had appreciated they were even a couple of months back.

What does a vote for your party represent? 

Competency and a vote for an individual that has relevant life experience, in a lot of cases for someone who has achieved in some area of life. It might be in business or the private sector.

We have one or two from the healthcare sector, the NHS, and their experience is so valuable because they have given us a clear insight into how the healthcare system and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) programmes work and how they all relate to each other.

In the private sector, quite a few of us work for ourselves, run our own businesses, and we know how to deal with third-party contractors. The fury over something as basic as resurfacing the greenway (in Stratford) explains everything, how that happened angered so many residents and will be a gigantic vote loser because the project was not thought through properly. 

These are the kinds of projects that we deal with in our everyday lives and we would make sure it was done correctly the first time. It is not okay to do it all again from scratch.

We would see competency in areas where we have seen utter incompetency for years.

What would success look like for your party? 

It is a good question. Bearing in mind this will be the first opportunity people have had to vote for Reform UK – we had the general election but I think a lot of people are considering it now for the first time – I think it is entirely reasonable that we could win five of the seats in the Stratford area, at least five. 

The reason that would not be a shock to me is because I am out on the street talking to people and the reception has been extremely positive. I know people want to vote for us, the only doubt I have is whether they physically go out and put the X in the box. All we can do is try but I don't know whether the level of apathy (with politics generally will affect that). 

Over the 57 seats across Warwickshire, there are certain pockets where we will be very strong – North Warwickshire in particular. I'm less clear on where we are to the east but all of us party chairs across Warwickshire feel we are capable of winning at least half the seats, one or two are thinking we might win three quarters because they have been campaigning very strongly for a very long time.

I appreciate that you are a hostage to fortune predicting these things but we will win seats, I am absolutely confident on that. An overall majority would be amazing if it were to happen, particularly given that the make-up of Warwickshire is quite different in certain pockets.