Reform Watch launches today - Reform Watch

At Westminster, there is at least a paper trail. Parliamentary votes are on the record, ministers face scrutiny from journalists and opposition researchers, and the machinery of national politics creates some baseline of accountability, however imperfect. Below that level, almost none of this exists. Council candidates stand on platforms their communities have never properly examined. Local officials make statements they would never repeat in front of a national audience. Party donations arrive without context. The movements that benefit most from this absence of scrutiny are precisely the ones that have been growing fastest into it. Reform UK came second at the last general election and is now contesting every tier of public life, from parish councils to police and crime commissioner races. UKIP, Advance UK, and Restore Britain are operating in the same space. None of them face anything approaching the systematic, publicly accessible accountability that their electoral ambitions demand. That is the gap Reform Watch is built to close. ## What we track Reform Watch is a live platform covering elected officials, active party figures, defections, non-elected officials, and financial donations across Reform UK, UKIP, Advance UK, and Restore Britain. It brings together on-record statements, documented patterns of behaviour, and the distance between what these parties say publicly and what their representatives have actually done, in one place, publicly searchable, and continuously updated. ## Built with the public One of the most important things Reform Watch has built is a tip-off tool that allows members of the public to submit information directly to our team for verification. The records that hold local politicians to account do not always exist in national archives. They exist in council meeting minutes, in regional reporting that never reached a wider audience, and in the knowledge of people who live in the communities these parties are targeting. Every submission is checked before it is published. That verification process is what makes the database reliable, and it is how the platform grows over time. ## What Gorton and Denton showed us When voters in Gorton and Denton had access to detailed, verified information about Reform UK's candidates and their records, they rejected the party. The Green Party won with a majority of over 4,400 votes. That result did not happen by accident. It happened because the information was there. Most constituencies facing a Reform push, a UKIP local election campaign, or an Advance UK candidate do not have that information available to them, and have nowhere straightforward to find it. Reform Watch is built to change that, for every community, ahead of every election these parties contest.