Mayor Ros Jones responds to Nigel Farage ‘Doncaster is broken’ claim

The Labour Mayor of Doncaster has said the city is like ‘many other cities and towns’ after Nigel Farage claimed ‘Doncaster is broken’ at a recent rally.

Mr Farage visited Doncaster Racecourse on October 1, 2026, for the first event in his ‘First 100 Days Tour’ in which he said the city is ‘synonymous’ with manufacturing and had ‘made stuff admired all over the world’.

“But it’s now a legacy rather than a reality. If Britain is broken, Doncaster is broken too. It’s time we did something about it,” he told a crowd of supporters.

Asked about the comments in a recent interview, Mayor Ros Jones said: “I do not believe Doncaster is broken. Doncaster can demonstrate how it has grown from 2004 to 2023, one of the fastest growing areas in Yorkshire.”

But then her defence of her home town seemed to falter, as she said: “However, Doncaster is like many other towns and cities that have got to realign their shopping aspects and all the different living circumstances.

“It leads us into a new town centre plan which is quite a thing.”

The Mayor was referring to the new ‘City Centre Masterplan’ announced in September 2026, which outlined how the council was looking to regenerate and transform the heart of Doncaster over the years to come.

One of the areas to see change is the Waterdale shopping precinct, where images published in the masterplan show a significant portion of the site will be demolished.

Business owners in the area have criticised the City of Doncaster Council over a lack of transparency and honest with them about their intentions.

Criticisms piqued when Capital & Centric, the developer that has partnered with the council to regenerate the area, posted a video to social media which said Waterdale would be a ‘start again job’ and a ‘completely new build’..

Asked when she and the council would be honest with business owners and residents along Waterdale, the Mayor’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbon, said: “Until there’s a finalised plan, there’s nothing to be confirmed.”

Mayor Jones added: “You’ve got to go forward with plans, as you know, you go through the planning process.

“We’ve got an extremely well knowledgeable company looking to take it all forward. They will be looking, drawing up everything, costing everything and it will be a revitalised area that will create and have shops and places for people to live. It will have green space in there and it will be somewhere people want to live.”

The Mayor also dismissed concerns over safety in the city centre.

“I walk around town very often at different times of the day,” she said, with Mr Gibbon adding that crime statistics for the city centre show offending is going down.

Mayor Jones added: “We will encourage people to report stats. If they report anything they think’s wrong, the stats actually bring in and are taken into account when they’re getting more police officers here.”