Reform UK's 2024 Contract with the People presented a populist right policy programme of tax cuts, spending cuts, withdrawal from international bodies and 50 per cent public ownership of utilities. Twenty three months on, the Contract is no longer the operative programme. Reform is a vehicle whose positions move with Nigel Farage personally rather than with the document it was elected on. The gap is between a published Contract and an unpublished one being written in real time.
On immigration the Contract pledged to freeze non essential immigration, pick up small boats and return them to France, lift National Insurance for foreign workers to 20 per cent, and leave the ECHR. In February 2026 Farage unveiled Operation Restoring Justice, escalating to 600,000 deportations over one parliament, disapplication of the Refugee Convention for five years, use of repurposed military sites as mass detention centres and charter removal flights. The Contract framed immigration as a control problem. The new programme reframes it as a removal operation.
On welfare the Contract banked £150 billion of annual savings partly through cuts to working age benefits and tighter sickness assessments. In May 2025 Farage pivoted leftward, pledging to scrap the two child benefit cap and reinstate the universal winter fuel allowance withdrawn by Labour. The savings the Contract banked were the operating logic for the tax cuts the Contract also promised. The reversal removes the fiscal architecture from underneath the tax cuts that depend on it. Reform has published no revised fiscal plan to replace the savings.
On utilities the Contract pledged 50 per cent public ownership of energy and water, with the remainder held by UK pension funds. By April 2025 Reform had dropped the pledge entirely. Farage pivoted to backing full nationalisation of British Steel in Scunthorpe. The headline distinctive economic policy of the 2024 Contract is no longer Reform policy.
On the NHS the Contract committed £17 billion of additional spending and to examine the French insurance based model while keeping care free at the point of delivery. In a January 2025 LBC interview Farage said he was open to anything including replacing NHS funding with an insurance based system. The Contract sold the existing model. The leader has begun to question whether to sell it at all.
On climate the Contract pledged to scrap net zero, fast track North Sea licences and end energy levies. Through 2025 the position hardened from policy rejection into open rejection of the climate science consensus. Within twelve months of the May 2025 local election wins, seven of the nine Reform led councils analysed by the Grantham Research Institute had scrapped their climate targets, three had rescinded Climate Emergency declarations, and councillors in five had expressed climate change denial in chamber. The Contract was a regulatory rollback. The 2026 record is a denial of underlying science.
On governance the Contract pledged a smaller more democratic Lords, a referendum on proportional representation and replacement of the BBC licence fee. In March 2025 Farage suspended and effectively expelled Rupert Lowe over a public disagreement. Lowe founded Restore Britain in June 2025 and registered it as a political party in February 2026. A party that promised democratic Lords reform cannot manage democratic disagreement with its own MPs.
Reform has published no detailed defence position beyond the Contract's 2.5 per cent GDP commitment, no detailed education policy beyond patriotic curriculum framing, and no detailed housing or Europe position. For a party leading national polling in 2026, the absence of positions on most policy areas government must manage is notable.
This is not a party operating the 2024 Contract. Reform has escalated immigration from freeze to mass deportation, softened welfare by reversing savings that fund tax cuts, dropped utility nationalisation entirely, opened the NHS funding model to replacement, hardened net zero rejection into climate science denial, and expelled an MP over disagreement with the leader. The Contract is not being implemented. It is being personalised. Reform is leading polls because voters prioritise the anti immigration, anti establishment message over policy coherence. Whether the programme survives the leader is unanswered because the leader is the programme.