Derbyshire County Council’s Reform Leader, Cllr Graves, presented the Revenue Budget outturn for 2025/26 at the Council meeting on 15th July 2026. The budget was set by the preceding Conservative administration.

Graves’ presentation contained many factual inaccuracies assisted by generous interpretations.

When referring to the previous Conservative administration, he claimed that:

“for several years running (they) had delivered signficant overspends”

In the previous 5 years there was only 1 year of an overspend – all other years were underspends.

“we have strengthened our reserves. Instead of running them down, we have built the General Reserve up to £37m…”

In the Council report from the July 2026 meeting it stated that the General Reserve had reduced from £39.566m to £37.035m, not increased.

The trend over the last 5 years has been downwards.

“…and next year’s budget has been set without dipping into any of those reserves at all”

The 2024/25 budget was also set without any need to call on the General reserves. However Graves’ Reform administraiton used £5.548m of General Reserves to achieve his £2m underspend!

“…£61.5m of Highways delivery. A 62% increase on the previous year fixing carriageways, retaining walls and landslips, that were neglected for far too long”

Graves presented this as a Reform administration achievement. In reality, it was due to a substantial increase in funding support from the East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA).

EMCCA is the new regional authority; Graves was a candidate for Mayor with the intention of abolishing the position. He is on record saying that it wouldn’t improve services.

On 9 May 2025 ( as the Reform administration was taking office), EMCCA increased its funding by £13.803m to Derbyshire County Council : a 50% increase on the November 2024 anticipated allocation.

In October 2025, the Council Cabinet noted:

“Through EMCCA, and for the first time ever, the region has access to a significant amount of revenue funding some of which is via the Investment Fund and Transport for City Regions (TCR), but also through retained EMIZ business rates and devolved Adult Skills Fund.”

A further £19m was allocated by EMCCA to Derbyshire County Council to deliver additional projects.

“We have turned a forecast overspend of £0.5m in Quarter 3, into an actuals underspend of £2m at the year end against a net revenue budget of £794m. That is financial discipline that the Conservatives did not deliver”.

What Graves didn’t mention was that the original budget set by the previous Conservative administration was £769.8m!

Graves delivered an overspend of £24.2m against the plan approved by the Council, in February 2025. Fortunately for Graves during the year , there were:

• Additional Government grants of £7.2m
• Transfers from reserves of £5.5m
• Use of Council capital receipts ( which normally is used for capital projects) , for revenue spend ( change of accounting policy) £4.9m
• Underspend on debt charges £3m
• Higher than expected interest/dividend receipts £7.1m

If it wasn’t for these fortuitous events then Graves would have presided over one of the worst overspends in the last 5 years.

Graves didn’t mention the significant worsening of the Schools Dedicated Schools Grant deficit which doubled in the last year from £45m to £93m.

Although this does not form part of the Revenue budget it does impact on the Council’s reeserves.

In the 2nd July 2026 Cabinet paper, para 4.5 states

“Without Government intervention, at March 2028 when the regulations were due to expire any deficit on the DSG balances would need to be funded by the Council. This would have put this Council, along with many others, in an unsustainable position.”

There is a risk that this deficit has to be funded by Derbyshire County Council, a deficit made considerably worse by the Reform administration.

Comment

Graves is celebrating an underspend which is in the “noise level” of local authority budgetting. On a budget of £794m, it represents just a 0.2% variance.

This is less about “financial discipline” and more about “financial engineering”.

It’s more about political spin, than plain facts.

Previous administrations will have done exactly what Graves has done to “cook the books”. However Graves and Reform claim to be different, and to “challenge the political establishment”. In reality, they are the same , except Reform is not as clever as the others in covering up their “financial engineering”.

The plain facts are that the Reform administration spent £24.2m more than the original budget plan. A number of events helped bridge the gap including raiding £5.5m of Council reserves, an action he suggests is not virtuous.

In re-writing the budget he has engineered a “fake underspend”