Reform UK’s 2025 conference kicks off on Friday 5 September, as party leader Nigel Farage takes the helm in Birmingham over the weekend. The event comes as the party enjoys success in the polls, and welcomes former senior Conservative MP Nadine Dorries to its ranks.
Former Reform chairman Zia Yusuf said on Friday: “Nigel [Farage] is preparing for government. We are taking seriously the important work of getting ready for government.”
The party has been criticised in the past for its radical, anti-immigration policy proposals. These would see asylum seekers treated more harshly, and the bar to entry to the UK raised.
At the same time, generous tax breaks have been pledged for businesses and households alike. However, given the spending commitments also made by the party, it is not always clear how a Reform government would afford its ambitious goals.
Here are some key points from Reform’s policy platform, and what the experts have to say:
Migrant deportation plan
In August, Mr Farage shared radical plans for the mass deportation of asylum seekers, including children, to address what he claimed was a “rising anger” among the British public towards the UK’s small boats crisis.
He claimed the party would remove 600,000 asylum seekers within their first term if elected to power.
The party leader pledged to do this by securing deals with countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Iran to return migrants to their countries. Asked whether this could mean handing money to a regime like the Taliban, Mr Yusuf said that would be “quite reasonable”.
Reform said the plan would require the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights.
It would cost £10bn to implement, the party claims, but save £7bn currently spent on illegal migration during the first five years.
However, recent analysis by The Independent found that the plan could mean spending £6.3bn each year on deportation flights alone. Further plans to scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 would also cost £3.6bn.
Reform has not provided a breakdown of how its own figures were drawn.
Responding to the proposal, the Refugee Council accused the party of “fuelling fear and division” while Adam Wagner KC, a human rights lawyer, said plans to leave the ECHR were “legally extreme”.
Mr Yusuf added that the party would create the ‘UK Deportation Command’, modelled on America’s controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This will be like “Trump mark two”, he told The Times in August.
Scrap Net Zero
Reform said it would ‘scrap net zero’ within its first 100 days in power, with Mr Farage claiming earlier this year it is “costing the Exchequer an extraordinary £40bn plus every year”.
The UK is legally committed to reaching net zero by 2050 under a law passed by the Conservatives in 2019. It means the UK must cut carbon emissions until it removes as much as it produces.
The ultimate purpose of this is to halt the progress of climate change.
Writing for The Sun in March, Mr Farage said net zero policies are “deindustrialising Britain”, squarely blaming the decline of manufacturing in the country on them. He later told the paper that the issue could become “the next Brexit”.
Responding, energy secretary Ed Miliband said the Reform leader was spreading “nonsense and lies”, adding that dropping net zero plans would risk “climate breakdown” and also “forfeit the clean energy jobs of the future”.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in 2021 found that net zero will cost £344bn by 2050, which will be spread over three decades. This equates to £11bn a year, or 0.4 per cent of GDP.
The spending watchdog also concluded that the “costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Lower income tax, abolish inheritance tax
At his wide-ranging speech in May, Mr Farage also said that Reform would increase the personal allowance – the amount a person can earn before they have to pay income tax – from £12,570 to £20,000.
This would represent a very generous tax break for all workers, but would come at a serious cost to the Treasury. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies said the policy would cost between £50bn and £80bn a year.
Mr Farage has also said the party would abolish inheritance tax, which is in most cases only liable on estates worth over £325,000. The OBR forecasts this will raise £9.1bn for the exchequer in 2025-2026.
End two-child benefit cap, reinstate winter fuel payments
During the same speech, Mr Farage committed to ending the two-child benefit cap “not because we support a benefits culture”, but to help low-income families.
Alongside this, he pledged that Reform would reinstate the winter fuel payment for all pensioners.
After restricting the £200 to £300 payment to all but the poorest pensioners last winter, Labour announced in May that the threshold to receive it would be raised to £35,000 going forward.
Mr Farage said the measures would be paid for by scrapping net zero, ending asylum seeker hotel accommodation, ending equality initiatives in the public sector, and cutting the number of quangos.
However, given the massively reduced tax revenue Reform would generate under its pledged taxation policies, it is unlikely any of those policies would raise anything close to the funds needed to deliver these policies.
Speaking about Reform’s electoral strategy, John Curtice told The Independent that “cultural issues have become much more central to electoral choice” in recent years, adding: “Reform support is above all defined by culture war issues.”
The senior political analyst added that support for the party among people who voted for Brexit is at 53 per cent, and just 11 per cent among those who voted to stay in the EU. This is an “indicator”, he said, of the party’s supporters’ views: “They talk about immigration, they talk about equalities, and they talk about net zero. That’s their market.”
