Daniel Sutherland

Daniel James Sutherland is a Reform UK councillor, the current leader of Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council. He was previously a Labour cabinet member on Calderdale Council before defecting in 2025.

Career and views Council appointments Sutherland has been a councillor for Illingworth and Mixenden on Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council since 2010. For fifteen years he represented the centre-left Labour Party, becoming a cabinet member and senior figure in the local party. He was briefly suspended from the council in 2012 while being charged with assault of a woman after a party in June that year, later returning to council. In May 2012, his mother, Lisa Lambert, In February 2025, Sutherland defected to far-right Reform UK, becoming Calderdale's first Reform councillor and only the second Labour councillor in the UK to switch to Reform.

Views on housing Sutherland opposed the bedroom tax in 2013.

He significantly contributed to Calderdale's Local Plan. Under his portfolio involving planning and housing, in 2016, he fielded a successful motion to, among other targets, increase housebuilding and make the housing ladder more accessible for young people and families. He said that while hundreds of affordable homes had been built in Calderdale in the previous eight years, "we know that more needs to be done." Following its multi-year drafting process, the draft Local Plan was published in 2018. At this time, Sutherland additionally noted the need to create and retain jobs. Labour's vision for the Local Plan was to encourage demographic population growth and economic sustainability, rather than "stand still" by only providing for the present.

As Reform leader, in 2026, he opposed the Local Plan he had helped produce, saying that "numbers have changed" as "the population of Calderdale is not growing." He said that Calderdale's demographics skew older and more should be done to accommodate needs of the current ageing population instead.

Views on the environment Both as a Labour and Reform councillor, Sutherland has prioritised preventing development on greenbelt land in Calderdale. In his 2016 motion involving the Local Plan, he targeted the construction of sustainable housing with a preference for building on brownfield land to minimise the impact on greenfield and greenbelt land. His party's opposition to a highly controversial wind farm plan stated that Reform UK Calderdale would "fight to scrap Net Zero", as part of the national party's climate change denial policy.

Views on geopolitics Sutherland's contributions to Calderdale's Local Plan included, in 2016, exploring solutions to mitigate negative impacts of Brexit on the construction industry.

Election results Sutherland was first elected to Calderdale Council in 2010, and was successfully re-elected in 2014, 2018, 2022 and 2026, each time representing Illingworth and Mixenden.