Andrea Jenkyns (Reform’s mayor of Great Lincolnshire) has proposed an office budget increase of £147,000. This current budget for mayoral offices is £115,000.
When defending the requested increase, Jenkyns expressed a desire to tackle ‘non-mayoral concerns’.
Capacity
Jenkyns is a former Conservative MP who held under secretary roles in the Department for Education. Speaking on the proposed increase, she said:
I literally have zero people in my team. The people who are in the combined authority at the moment are delivering on infrastructure and putting together a plan for skills.
But it’s a bit like being an MP, you need an office. I have over two and a half thousand emails each month from constituents.
I’m staying up until 3 o’clock in the morning answering some of them myself.
We need to get the capacity in there so people get the best service, that they’re responded to and supported with their concerns.
The mayor of Greater Lincolnshire position has existed since 1 May 2025, and Jenkyns is the first politician to occupy the role.
Lincs Online described her plan to target concerns beyond her brief as follows:
Ms Jenkyns also told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that she’s had many people come to her with ‘non-mayoral concerns’ and she wants to help as many people as possible.
Jenkys said:
They might have a housing issue directly which is currently under the districts, they might have an issue with getting their child into a school or school transport.
That doesn’t come under my remit but as I’ve always done as a politician, I don’t believe in not helping people.
I want to make sure that we’ve got the capacity to help people. Every mayor across the country has a team.
I just want a very small team to support my constituents.
Jenkyns drew attention at the Reform conference when she unexpectedly performed a self-penned musical number:
🎤 Dame Andrea Jenkyns entered the Reform UK conference singing a song that she co-wrote called Insomnia and wearing a sparkly blue jumpsuit.
Jenkyns said: “Is this godawful Labour Government giving you sleepless nights and insomnia too?” pic.twitter.com/MJjDolmdsr
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 5, 2025
DOGE Lincolnshire
In the run up to the election, Jenkyns said:
I want to cut through woke wastage and push back on this ridiculous climate emergency narrative, which is costing every taxpayer in this room. Now I’ll establish a Lincolnshire DOGE, just like they do in the US, where we’ll root out wasteful spending [to] ensure that every penny of taxpayers money is spent wisely.
I want to see an end to funding unnecessary roles like diversity officers and actually have practical solutions like filling our potholes.
Jenkyns compared her plans to cut waste to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):
Just as @elonmusk is ensuring government efficiency in Trumps administration, I will do the same in #Lincolnshire and root out the WOKE spend and ensure every penny of taxpayers money is spent on things that matter. We will become a blueprint for common sense. @reformparty_uk… pic.twitter.com/JlopCKYfxQ
— Dame Andrea Jenkyns DBE 🇬🇧 (@andreajenkyns) January 4, 2025
DOGE made wide-reaching cuts to the federal government, but estimates have suggested “Musk and DOGE could end up costing more than they save“. Trump has suggested he would have done things “differently” to Musk since the two men ended their relationship. The end of Musk’s time at DOGE famously captured global attention when the billionaire accused the president of being in the Epstein Files (the following tweet has since been deleted):
Jenkyns has continued to support a UK ‘DOGE’ even after former US proponents have backed away from the initiative:
We need to do three things;
1. DOGE every public sector institution to root out wastage of taxpayers money.2. Stop spending money on the boat people.
3. Stop spending money on Net Zero. @GBNEWS @PatrickChristys pic.twitter.com/CADPXnEwfU
— Dame Andrea Jenkyns DBE 🇬🇧 (@andreajenkyns) July 25, 2025
Net Zero
Opposing a switch to ‘Net Zero’ is a key part of Reform’s political platform. This is despite studies which show Net Zero will actually save the UK money, as Simon Oldridge writes for Zero Hour:
✅ £40 billion saving every year by 2050:
The Climate Change Committee has shown that investing in Net Zero will generate UK annual savings of almost £40 billion every year by 2050, delivering lasting prosperity.
In a video titled You’ve been lied to about Net Zero, Simon Clark says that people create misinformation around Net Zero as follows:
So these are the five steps of the anti-net zero playbook. Inflate the costs, ignore the cost of business as usual, ignore the operational savings, ignore the co- benefits, and most egregiously, ignore the costs of inaction. Not getting to net zero is going to cost the world much, much more
Clark also highlights that when people target the ‘cost’ of switching to Net Zero, they ignore the costs of not switching:
the second step often is is to pretend that we can just carry on with business as usual and it won’t cost us anything. Let’s say we’re talking about decarbonising transport. And then people say, “Oh, but you know, an EV that’s going to cost like £40,000. You know, that’s a huge investment. That’s expensive, right?” You know, and you add that up over all of the cars in the in the country and you suddenly get a big scary number.
Again, let’s say we just carry on with petrol cars. Petrol cars don’t aren’t free, right? Okay, maybe you own a petrol car now, so you don’t have to buy a new one, but that won’t last forever. So, that’s step two is you basically pretend that the existing system, which we’ve already built and paid for, can just carry on forever and won’t ever need replacing.
Another example of this is in electricity production. Here in the UK, we get about 15% of our electricity from nuclear power, but our nuclear fleet is aging. The majority of reactors are set to be decommissioned by the end of the decade. To keep the lights on, those plants have got to be replaced. So talking about how expensive new wind and solar projects are without mentioning the alternative, which is how expensive gas fired power plants are is well disingenuous and it makes those wind and solar projects look much more expensive.
And further, step three is you just pretend there aren’t any operational savings from investing in clean energy solutions. For a gas firepower station, you have to buy gas every year to keep it running, right? And that’s the the major cost of doing so. For a wind and solar plant, like you have this upfront investment cost once you built it, there’s no fuel costs. So, if you just pretend that that saving of not having fuel costs doesn’t exist, then obviously it makes it seem more expensive to get to Net Zero.
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Guardian News
