Reform UK leader Nigel Farage visits Newmarket as part of unveiling of mayoral candidate Ryan Coogan

Nigel Farage has paid a visit to a Suffolk town as part of Reform UK’s unveiling of Ryan Coogan as candidate to be mayor of Cambridgeshire.

Mr Farage and Mr Coogan visited Newmarket and St Neots to launch the party’s campaign, which also included fielding a full set of candidates in the Cambridgeshire County Council elections, taking place alongside the vote for mayor on May 1.

The pair went to Turners (Soham) Ltd - a transport company with a Newmarket hub - and Mr Farage had a temporary British bulldog tattoo done while visiting Pennyroyal Tattoo Studio in St Neots.

The party has no elected representatives yet in Cambridgeshire but Mr Farage said Reform UK was “here for real” and could win “a significant number of seats”.

Hitting out at county council debts, he said the authority needed an “equivalent of DOGE”, referencing the Department of Government Efficiency initiative being run by billionaire Elon Musk in the United States.

There have been cross-party calls for a fair funding review for Cambridgeshire, with politicians highlighting the low level of grants from central government compared to other areas.

Mr Farage said while it was true government funding had fallen since 2010, he said this did not “excuse the debts that have been run up by this county”.

Addressing school funding specifically, he said: “The reason that schools are funded less is because you don’t have quite the same social problems in Cambridgeshire - in pockets you do - that maybe you get in parts of East London.

“Of course MPs should lobby central government to get a fair deal. Whatever the deal you get though - I go back to the county council’s debts, hundreds of millions of debts – is whatever you get.

“You have to cut your cloth and manage your budget accordingly and that has just not been happening, so I think we come in as a fresh face with some genuine business experience, and we are going to be a bit tougher, in fact we are going to suggest that a Cambridgeshire equivalent of DOGE is set up to cut wasteful spending.”

When asked if this meant a Reform UK leadership at the county council would mean more cuts, he said there would be “the right cuts yes”.

He said: “Cuts in the right places, money that is being wasted on climate change initiatives, pension funds that are being managed in accordance with net zero goals rather than reducing economic returns. A change of attitude we think is badly needed.”

Mr Coogan, who has a varied business career, including running a logistics company in Huntingdon, said if he was elected as mayor at the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority his main priority would be to “start scrutinising and start auditing the books”.

He also highlighted the county council’s debts and said there was “so much waste going on” at the authority and referenced that the council owned development company This Land had borrowed £127million from the county council, which is currently run by a Liberal Democrat, Labour and Independent coalition.

He said: “That money could have been used actually across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to actually improve the services, but it is not, it is being paid out to a property developer that is failing.”

Mr Coogan, a parent with children at Waterbeach Primary and Cottenham Village College, also claimed the education system is “failing the SEND students across the county” and said the county council should be increasing spending on that rather than on “vanity projects”.

When asked how he hoped as mayor of the Combined Authority to impact on the decisions of a separate authority, Mr Coogan suggested he could withhold money to force improvements.

He said: “The thing about the mayor is you have got a position across the county to actually influence every single authority, a lot of the funding that you get as mayor actually is distributed through the councils to spend.

“So you have a lot of power when you are actually negotiating some of the issues across the county with the various authorities.

“Because if they need something from the mayoral authority and actually they are failing in a particular area, then it is very easy to address that issue in any business negotiation and actually say ‘look this is failing, can you deal with that, then we can release the funding for this’.”

Mr Coogan said he also wanted to scrutinise spending at the Combined Authority.

He added: “We are talking millions and millions of pounds going out across the county on things like net zero on the cash book. Well I need to know what that is. What on earth can we be spending all of this money on things like net zero for?”

There are currently four other candidates that have been announced as standing in the mayoral election.

They are Paul Bristow (Conservative), Lorna Dupré (Liberal Democrat), Bob Ensch (Green Party), and Anna Smith (Labour).

Full candidate lists for the county council election have not yet been released.

Currently the Liberal Democrats are the largest group at the authority with 23 councillors, followed by the Conservatives with 21 councillors.

Labour has 10 councillors and there are two independent councillors, four non-aligned independent councillors, and one St Neots Independent councillor.