Reform Hires £48k Climate Officer While Rejecting Net Zero — Can Leicestershire Have It Both Ways?

Leicestershire County Council’s Reform UK leader has defended the recruitment of a £48,000-a-year climate resilience officer — while simultaneously arguing that Britain “can’t affect” climate change and dismissing net zero as a ruinous ideology. The contradiction at the heart of the position has drawn sharp criticism from the Conservative opposition.

The Role, the Man, and the Argument

The job advertisement, still live on the council’s careers page at the time of writing, describes a role that will “play a leading role in delivering the council’s commitments and strategic outcomes on climate change and the environment”, working with “internal and external partners and stakeholders” and producing “technical and non-technical reports”.

Cllr Dan Harrison, who leads Reform UK’s 25-seat administration at Leicestershire County Council following the party’s sweeping gains in the May 2025 local elections, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the role was about building resilience against flooding — not reducing emissions. He said he took the “pragmatic view that we cannot change what nature’s doing.”

“We are less than one per cent of the world’s pollution,” Harrison said. “You’ve got China, America and other countries getting on with it. There will be effects, but who knows? The whole thing is on the table, but why impoverish nations or communities or people through some belief that we could change it, but we can’t.”

He added: “No we can’t affect this as a nation or a country — but we can’t just sit back and allow it to destroy people’s lives. So let’s be proactive. Let’s help people.”

The council put out a separate statement clarifying that the role was “not about net zero”, saying it was “about working with partners to support our communities to be more resilient and to adapt our services in the face of changing weather patterns.”

Harrison also hit out at what he called “gesture politics”, backing North Sea drilling as a source of “trillions of pounds in taxes” and criticising the Labour government’s energy policies.

The Flooding Context — and the £2 Million Reallocation

The row does not emerge from nowhere. In January 2025, Leicestershire experienced what council documents described as the worst flooding event in recent memory — a single storm resulted in approximately 900 properties being inundated across the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland area, with 717 confirmed cases in Leicestershire alone.

Following Reform’s election victory in May 2025, the new administration voted in July 2025 to divert £2 million originally earmarked for carbon reduction into flood mitigation initiatives. The funding — set aside by the previous Conservative administration in 2022 with a goal of reaching net zero by 2045, later pushed back to 2050 — was redirected into a programme of drain maintenance, flood equipment grants for parish councils, and community adaptation work.

Joseph Boam, Reform’s deputy leader, called it “fantastic to see us beginning to dismantle the costly and ineffective net-zero agenda”, adding that the money was now being directed at flooding problems “that have been overlooked for far too long in Leicestershire.”

The new climate resilience officer role sits within that same strategic reorientation — defending it on the basis that it is about adaptation to flooding rather than emissions reduction.

The Opposition View

Conservative opposition leader Deborah Taylor was sceptical. “They all have this ethos around them that climate change is rubbish,” she told the LDRS, “then to see a job advertised for £50k is a bit strange isn’t it? They seem to want to separate ‘Net Stupid Zero’ from climate change. Well they are interlinked. It seems like a shift in position.”

Taylor questioned the need for a dedicated officer to oversee partnership work, saying she “would rather see that funding put towards clearing the drains and gullies to prevent housing being flooded.”

The wider picture is significant context. Research published in March 2026 by the Grantham Institute at the LSE found that seven out of nine Reform UK-controlled councils had scrapped their climate targets since May 2025. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Byline Times have both documented Reform councils removing climate content from strategy documents and dissolving environmental committees. Leicestershire is, in that context, something of an outlier — a Reform council that has cut net zero commitments but is simultaneously advertising for a climate-related officer, even if the framing carefully avoids the words.

Reform’s Climate Contradiction Is Perfectly Designed — and That’s the Problem

Let’s be honest about what is happening here. Leicestershire County Council has found a way to have it both ways, and it has done so with some political skill.

The argument goes like this: we don’t believe in net zero, we don’t think Britain can change the climate, we’ve cut the carbon reduction budget — but we do believe flooding is real and getting worse, so we’re hiring someone to help us deal with it. That is a coherent enough position on its own terms. It is, in fact, the kind of adaptation-focused pragmatism that climate scientists themselves argue is increasingly necessary regardless of where you stand on emissions reduction.

But here is the tension Reform’s leadership either cannot see or chooses not to acknowledge: you cannot sensibly argue that the climate is changing in ways that require a dedicated £48,000-a-year officer to manage the consequences, while also arguing that human activity is not driving that change and that emissions policy is a ruinous fantasy. If the flooding is getting worse — and in Leicestershire it manifestly is, as 717 confirmed inundated properties in a single storm event makes clear — then the question of why it is getting worse is not some abstract ideological debate. It is directly relevant to what you do about it.

Cllr Harrison’s “less than one per cent of the world’s pollution” line is a standard piece of climate sceptic rhetoric, and it is worth examining it directly. The UK accounts for approximately one per cent of global CO2 emissions. That is also true of most individual medium-sized nations. If every country applied the same logic — we are a small share, so why bother — global emissions reduction becomes arithmetically impossible. The argument is not wrong as a statement of proportion; it is wrong as a basis for policy, because it applies with equal force to every country on earth.

The more interesting question raised by this story is whether Reform’s adaptation-without-mitigation approach will prove popular with voters in Leicestershire. The flooding last January was real, and residents in affected areas are understandably more concerned about their homes than about emissions targets. If the £2 million reallocation results in better drain maintenance and faster flood response, that is tangible and local. It is easy to mock “Net Stupid Zero” when the alternative you’re offering involves actually clearing the gullies.

What we should resist, though, is the framing that adaptation and mitigation are alternatives. They are not. A council that prepares residents for worse flooding while simultaneously dismissing the policy frameworks that might slow its progression is doing half the job. The climate resilience officer, if appointed, will be dealing with the symptoms. The causes are being written off as someone else’s problem.

We’ll be watching how this role develops — and how Leicestershire’s flooding situation changes in the years ahead.

Have Your Say

Was Reform right to redirect the £2 million from carbon reduction to flood defences? And does hiring a climate resilience officer while rejecting net zero make sense to you? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think — and sign up for our free local news updates to stay across Leicestershire politics as it develops.