Reform has by any measure enjoyed an incredible 2025. But for much of the poll-topping year, its economic vision has remained an unknown entity. Ali Lyon met policy chief Zia Yusuf to hear, for the first time, his party’s plans for Britain’s flatlining economy and the millions of businesses in it.
Zia Yusuf is feeling stressed.
It is, he admits, a mental state that has crept into his psyche all too often during a year that has seen his party, Reform UK, go from insurgent upstart to general election favourite. And like many of the voters he hopes will crown Reform as the first new party to be handed the reins of power in modern history, he has a simple – if cliched – solution.
“I need to go to the gym more,” the party’s policy chief all too relatably tells City AM, when asked for his New Year’s resolution. “A big sign of abnormal stress in my life is when I’m missing workouts. To me that’s the only time I can shut down my brain.”
Unlike the millions of people vowing to shift their December indulgence through a flurry of exercise in the New Year – including this interviewer – Yusuf’s poor gym attendance is, at least, understandable when one considers the year he and Reform UK have had.
Just 12 months ago, the party was polling behind the oblivion-facing Conservatives and a Labour party which, despite having won a historic landslide just months earlier, had made an inauspicious start to its time in power. As recently as March, it did not even have a proper, official headquarters, such was the bootstrapped nature of its political operation. And it certainly – as far as most non-partisan observers were concerned – did not have a coherent plan for government or the public finances.
Top of the polls
Fast forward a year, and almost all mainstream pollsters believe that between a quarter and a third of the country now wants Reform UK to form the next government. It has finally moved into a plush new office, an astonishing incarnation of modern-day politics that devotes more of its floor space to content-producing studios than desks, and which has GB News rolling on its TV screens. All that remains is producing the kind of policy platform that will convince voters, and that’s a job that falls to Yusuf.
“It has been an incredible year for the party,” he says. “It’s gone better than even I would have hoped, and that’s coming from someone who was telling people before the last election that Nigel could be Prime Minister in 2029.”
Yusuf believes Reform owes its poll lead – which it has held and slowly grown since April – to three core drivers: the “appalling management of the country” by Labour, the fact the “British public has not forgotten what the Tories did to the country”, and – of course – its totemic position on illegal migration and small boats.
The latter – notwithstanding a smattering of promises around civil service size and hiking the NHS immigration surcharge – is one of the few bona fide policies which Reform claims to have costed and committed to, through its totemic Operation Restoring Justice platform.
Business is looking for detail from Reform
What has been conspicuously absent – but will, surely, be more pivotal to the party’s fortunes come the next election – are its plans for UK businesses, and whether voters believe it has what it takes to kickstart Britain’s ailing economy.
It is in search of answers to this large, lingering question that has taken City AM to Reform’s half-office, half-studio. And, as he embarks on laying out his party’s promises to the Square Mile situated half mile to eastward, and to millions of businesses up and down the country, the first point Yusuf reaches for is a surprising one.
“One of the key things we will bring is some stability,” he says. “All Labour is doing is just continuing what the Tories did over 14 years. Mass immigration, endless boat crossings, huge amounts of red tape for business, endless tax rises for both workers and employers – and just a constant sense of instability.”
From a party that – in the space of a few short years – has carved out a historically unprecedented ability to upend British politics, it is an unusual opening gambit. Ever since emerging from the dying embers of the Brexit party, it has dragged governing parties rightward on social issues with agenda-grabbing rhetoric and draconian policies. At its first election last year, it promised over £90bn of tax cuts and £100bn of spending reductions in its maiden manifesto. All that and much more – including its tagline of ‘Britain Needs Reform’ – has earned the party a reputation for offering many things, with stability not being one of them.
But it is a theme which Yusuf – well aware of the turbulent ride businesses have faced – returns to over 90 minutes of rapidly delivered answers that jolt from topic to topic at dizzying speed. At the heart of those plans lies a radical overhaul of the received knowledge about how Westminster should function, including a promise to end annual cabinet reshuffles and in their place appoint a smaller cabinet bursting with “galactic levels of talent” from outside SW1.
Yusuf pictured with Lottie Moss and Rose Bertram during his days running luxury concierge service, Velocity Black
‘The worst people making decisions’
“There’s been an enormous competence deficit in Westminster for a sustained period of time, where we have the least qualified, the lowest integrity… people making the most important decisions in the country,” he says.
On paper, Yusuf himself has more private sector experience than the entire Labour front bench. After studying for a bachelor’s degree at the London School of Economics, the Scottish-born politician then spent five years in investment banking at Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America) and Goldman Sachs. He is also a successful entrepreneur in his own right, having set up and run Velocity Black, a luxury concierge service, for a decade before selling it to Capital One bank for nearly $300m (£224m) of which he is believed to have pocketed roughly £30m.
Reform’s cabinet, though, will look beyond its own staff – to other entrepreneurs, financiers and business owners – to bring the expertise and, yes, stability that Yusuf believes is needed to turn the country around. Each external minister would be in post for several years – “you can’t judge an energy secretary in a year” – and will not have to serve as an MP. Instead, their names “would be put in front of the British people ahead of a general election”, after which they would work full-time on their brief.
There is certainly a world in which ending the chopping and changing of personnel – and the breathless runners and riders-style reporting it encourages – will help inculcate a less volatile political environment for business. But as Yusuf lurches from one topic to another, it is also clear that the radical plans Reform is promising in the cultural sphere are also in the offing for the economy.
JCB-owner Lord Bamford has donated handsome sums to Reform
Reform to clip regulators’ wings
Chief among them is a promise not just to aggressively pare back regulation, but to completely change the way our watchdogs function. Under Labour, regulators have not just enforced the rules, but been relied on to concoct pro-growth regulatory measures. Yusuf wants to see the mandate for regulators returned to cabinet and parliament, leaving the likes of the Financial Conduct Authority, Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority as pure enforcers of a much simpler set of rules.
The party will, he says, take a similar approach to the Bank of England, an institution with which it has had several run-ins already, including Farage labelling governor Andrew Bailey “a dinosaur”. Ministers and parliamentarians would take a much more active role scrutinising the decisions of Britain’s central bank. There would be debates – and potentially even votes – on those that risk being felt by the Exchequer or that don’t relate to monetary policy, like so-called stablecoins.
Would that influence extend – as we have seen take root in Trump’s America – to challenging the monetary policy-setting capacity of the Bank? The reply comes immediately. “Absolutely not. The Bank should retain its independence on setting interest rates. But if you look at quantitative easing and tightening programmes, the fiscal impact is in the tens of billions of pounds, and there has not been one debate in parliament about it.”
Scrapping stamp duty on shares
So far, so simple. A Reform government – as far as these plans suggest – would be transformative but in a general direction at which few businesses and investors would reflexively balk. They want to reduce the size of the state – “we are in a doom loop of more regulation and more spending” – while lowering the tax take in a measured way – “we want to cut taxes as quickly as possible but it would be dishonest to claim you could have lots of tax cuts with the state of the public finances as they are”.
Stamp duty on shares – a bete noire of listed company executives and investors that Yusuf brands “a tax from the Dark Ages” – is also for the chop.
And yet like any political party, Reform has to deal with conflicting priorities from different demographics. And as it seeks simultaneously to appeal to frustrated entrepreneurs threatening to leave the UK and Labour’s former heartlands in the north, contradictions have emerged. It wants to cut taxes, but abolish the two-child benefit cap and keep the triple-lock. It wants to unleash the private sector, but was the first party to call for British Steel to be nationalised.
And it is in answer to a question on energy policy that Yusuf gives arguably his biggest hint of how radical – and interventionist – a Reform government would be willing to be. As part of its attempts to reshape the push to net zero, which he brands “an act of unilateral economic disarmament for Britain”, the party will ramp up the UK’s footprint of small modular reactors (SMRs) “at an unprecedented rate”.
Nigel Farage and Danny Kruger announced the defection at an event in October. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
‘Extremely attractive deal’ to Rolls-Royce
To do so, it would hand out bumper contracts to produce small nuclear fission technologies in factories before installing them in plants across the country.
“What we would do, is say, ‘Rolls-Royce, we’re going to give you a huge contract for this British stuff [SMR tenders in the UK] and we will front-load you capital so that you have certainty that it’s going to happen,’” he says, adding: “And by the way, if we were to give them priority access to the British market with a massive contract, maybe the British taxpayer should be given a stake in the company.”
Is that not tantamount to picking winners, I counter, in a manner akin to China’s managed economy or – increasingly – the United States, which under Donald Trump has taken an $8.9bn per cent stake in chipmaker Intel.
“It’s not picking a winner,” he retorts. “It’s accelerating a national champion.”
“If we were to give them that priority access to the UK market on good terms,” he continues, “then.. .a negotiation, obviously, would need to be had. But I think you could make a very reasonable case that for Rolls-Royce it would be an extremely attractive deal.”
Tension at the heart of Reform policy
The move would be part of a concerted push to give “British businesses… asymmetric access to the British market”, in a manner similar to Trump’s White House. And it gets to the heart of what some will see as the tensions at play in Reform’s economic offering. They want to be more protectionist but attract “as many extraordinarily rich people from around the world” as possible. They want to reduce public spending, but keep several of the most indulgent elements of our welfare state as they are.
After a politically pitch perfect 2025, ironing these tensions out will keep Zia Yusuf busy next year and beyond.
And that’s not even to mention that testing new gym routine.