Wandsworth is facing its worst financial crisis in a generation — a gap so large it exceeds the entire staff payroll, according to the Council. In his first in-depth interview since taking office, new Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance Peter Graham talks to Clapham Junction Insider about the election that returned the Conservatives to power, and the council tax rise that could follow (up to 230% on the council’s own share, in a “do-nothing” scenario) with reflections on Northcote Road’s summer closures, the temporary accommodation bill, and a legal challenge to central government.

The local elections were expected to bring dire consequences for Labour nationally, and the resulting earthquake had repercussions in Wandsworth too. Although the local party fared considerably better than its counterparts elsewhere in London, it fell short of a majority by just one seat — 28 against 29 — handing Wandsworth Council back to a fragile Conservative administration.

After two chaotic opening months, marked by the departure of Tory leader Aled Richard-Jones and his replacement by Robert Morritt, the end of Summer seemed the perfect moment to sit down with Peter Graham, the council’s new Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance.

The interview opened with some genuine chitchat about AI — its benefits and pitfalls, and the possibility of a future in which AI agents converse mainly with each other, with little need for human involvement. But that discussion is for another day. The real purpose of our (very long!) conversation was the borough’s finances, and how the new ruling majority intends to close the financial gap it faces.

You will find links to articles on CJI for additional information and context highlighted in dark red when appropriate.

Clapham Junction Insider: On the night of the election, it must have been really tense. The last ward to be counted was St Mary’s and it was also the closest result of the night — the Conservative candidate won by just 15 votes. So out of hundreds of thousands of voters across the borough, the overall outcome came down to wards like St Mary, West Hill, Thamesfield, and Tooting Broadway. How did you experience that night, and what did you make of the result?

Peter Graham: It was very, very close, so it was a bit of a rollercoaster. Some of the early results didn’t go as well as we were hoping, and then we had some really good results come in towards the end. The mood in the room shifted — initially, it wasn’t just about our results, it was also that the Greens looked like they were going to take seats off Labour.

Eventually they didn’t.

No, eventually they didn’t. And I think it’s because Labour had reacted sufficiently well in those wards. But the reason it didn’t look that way on the night is that people hadn’t realised postal votes were fed into the counts quite late. Among on-the-day ballots — the votes from people who voted on the day — Labour did quite against the Greens in the wards where the Greens nearly won. When those votes were counted first, it looked like they’d lost a councillor or two. But then, when the postal votes came through to be counted and those bundles were added, they did much better, and their leads came back.

So initially, there was some Labour concern about losing seats to the Greens, and concern from us that we hadn’t made as much of a breakthrough as we needed to for a majority. But when the Battersea Park and St Mary’s results came in,  suddenly we were there or thereabouts.

Context: In Battersea Park, a safe Labour ward, the Conservatives won one out of the three seats.

When you look at other boroughs — and especially I am thinking about Westminster where it switched completely from the result they had four years ago, with 32 Conservative seats to Labour’s 22, we did not see the same pattern in Wandsworth. Labour even won the majority of the vote overall — 34% against the Conservatives’ 31% (even lower for the Tories than their 38% in 2022).

It wasn’t as decisive an outcome as in Westminster, but there was still a big shift in support. There’s a reason we got the council back — Labour had a reasonable majority before, and now we actually control the council.

You can look at the popular vote, but the popular vote doesn’t necessarily tell you how the result would have been. If it had actually been a popular-vote election, we would have campaigned very differently. What parties do is campaign hard in the wards where they think they can win, and they tend to not campaign as much elsewhere — in some wards they don’t do much at all. Not because we don’t care about those wards, but because we have very limited resources — we rely on volunteers, and we never have enough, so we have to prioritise. If it had been a popular-vote election across the whole borough, I’d have spent a lot of time in places like Tooting Broadway and Furzedown, where we didn’t spend any time because we knew those were contests between Labour and the Greens. We stayed in the places where we were competitive. If we’d been campaigning evenly across the whole borough, the way you do in a GLA election, we might well have won the popular vote. We won where it mattered, because we campaigned where we felt it mattered.

The result is still pretty clean — narrow, but clean. If every Conservative councillor turns up and votes a certain way, we get the vote through because of the mayor’s casting vote. We also have our agreement with Malcolm Grimston [the independent councillor – note from the editor], which is great, because it gives us more stability — we would otherwise always be a little precarious. We’re very pleased to have that agreement with Malcolm. But the fact is, with the exception of Malcolm, it’s Labour councillors versus Conservative councillors, and that means it’s very clear what direction we’re taking — and you need that clarity of direction for the machine to work. I think if we’d been left in a position where no one had a majority and no agreement could be reached, you’d just have fudge and a mess — at a time when we desperately need clear decision-making to sort out the financial challenges.

• To understand more about the local election result, read our report: Wandsworth Election results: what it means and what to expect onwards

The result could have been completely different if Malcolm Grimston (a former Conservatives) had sided with Labour — it would have been an exact split, and since Labour was in control before, they’d have had the casting vote.

Yes, that’s true — if Malcolm had voted for a Labour mayor and against ours, then every single vote would have been one where it could have gone either way. And, to give him due credit, he recognised that would lead to inherent instability.

He is a former Conservatives, but I don’t think it’s really about former party allegiance so much as that he takes the financial crisis very seriously. He knows these financial issues have to be addressed — he’s still fiscally conservative in the small-c sense — and I think that mattered, because it showed he understood those things in a way that, frankly, some in the Labour group don’t. I also think he knew there needed to be stability and predictability about what was going to happen in order for decisions to be made and problems to get addressed.

Don’t you think the local election result has as much to do with Starmer’s unpopularity at the time rather than with Labour’s local mismanagement? Again, going back to the Westminster borough example, it wasn’t a complete reversal where people said, “We tried Labour, it didn’t work, let’s go back to exactly what it was before.“

National politics is always a factor in local votes. One of the biggest reasons Labour won the council in 2022 was that people who’d previously voted Conservative were very upset about Boris Johnson — not because they liked the local Labour Party. In fact, we spoke to many people in 2022 who said they thought the council was doing a really good job, but they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative because of the national government. So yes, I’m sure Labour’s national government and Starmer’s unpopularity played a role in Labour losing here too — what goes around comes around.

But I think the difference is that, beyond the national factor, some Labour voters had grown unhappy about their high-profile but relatively insignificant policy changes — things like Access for All and so on. They hadn’t actually done very much and were burning through the reserves. I think a lot of people recognised there was a financial issue, and that we were right to point out there was a problem. I do think Labour’s local record showed they hadn’t done a great deal, other than borrowing lots of money to build council houses for a relatively small number of people. I think the fact they hadn’t done much, and that services didn’t seem to be improving, with problems ahead, had something to do with why they lost.

• Actually, in 2022, while the national context played a role, the trend was much in favour of Labour. Read our full analysis at the time.

Still on the election, but focusing on what happened immediately afterwards — you had Aled Richard Jones elected as the new leader, and then, surprising a lot of people, he resigned, and the group chose Robert Morritt. As we pointed out in the Clapham Junction Insider, Robert Morritt isn’t a newcomer to the area — he was actually expelled from the Wandsworth Conservatives in 2013. At the end, all the Putney Conservatives apparently voted as a block for Morritt , and all the Battersea Conservatives voted for Daniel Hamilton. You yourself were in the ballot, initially, from what we’ve been told.

Well, I’m not going to say very much about this. I wasn’t a candidate and it’s a secret ballot, so I have no idea who voted for whom. There were only two candidates and the result of the vote wasn’t announced to the group beyond the outcome — we weren’t given the numbers.

But I don’t think there were dramatic policy differences between what either of them was offering, and I think our group is relatively united and cohesive on what we need to do as a council in order to address the issues the organisation has, and the challenges we face locally. The manifesto that Aled helped put together and led the process on developing is very much what we’re now trying to implement. I think it’s much more important to look at what we’re actually doing — and what we’re trying to do hasn’t changed as a result.

So, apart from the last four years, you’ve always been in the majority on the council. Is it business as usual now?

I was only a committee chair when we were last in charge, so it would be different for me even if it were “back to business as usual.” I don’t think we’re simply reverting. The constitution is a good example of this — what we’ve looked to do is bring back things that were working, like democratic rights that Labour removed and that should be restored, but not as a “turn the clock back” measure. Rather, we tried to use imagination — where things have moved on and there’s a different way or better way of doing something, we are doing that instead of automatically going back to where things were before. And we can’t have business as usual given the financial crisis we’ve got. There was a lot of stability when we were last in charge, and that stability has gone. We don’t have the luxury of business as usual, at least for the time being.

Announcements from the July’s Council meeting

We followed the Council meeting in July, where you made a series of announcements — we’ll come to those — but first, we welcome the declaration that council documents are going to use plain English. In practice, does this mean it will be clearer than the jargon we’re used to seeing in many council papers?

I hope so. Obvioulsy most council papers are put together by officers who certainly aren’t trying to make them unnecessarily hard to read , but I think there can be improvements in clarity. Certain documents have a tendency — and we’ve been battling with this internally — to get too long, without clearly spelling out the important points. For decision-making purposes, even where it’s not a public document, you want that clarity.

We’re trying to improve both the length and the explicitness with which things are put forward. This is one of my frustrations: you shouldn’t have to go and find a committee report or a cabinet report to find out what’s going on, for a given subject. We ought to be making that information available online anyway, so people don’t even need to sift through papers to find it. That’s always going to be a running challenge, but I hope we’ll see papers where it’s easier to see what’s going on and spot the important things.

Regarding the different announcements — I think the first one you made was about the logo. Isn’t it a bit childish to say: “We’ll change the logo back because we don’t want to keep the legacy of the Labour council“?

It’s not really about legacy. I think there’s a civic pride issue with some of our key symbols. The council’s coat of arms used to appear on, for example, reports to Full Council and committee reports — we weren’t using the logo with the Battersea Power Station for the Council’s papers. And the other thing is that the logo, and particularly the colour scheme they introduced, was quite garish and unpopular — we had people raising it with us on the doorstep, saying “what is this?” and not liking it.

So we just want to move away from the logo being an issue, and the coat of arms isn’t a logo, it’s simply a reversion to the traditional badge of the borough. We’re not going to go out spending money replacing signs the way Labour did. People will still see Labour’s logo around, it’s still on the buildings outside, and we’re not about to take that sign down. We’re not going to waste any money when we’ve got real financial challenges. But when it comes to documents and other things, we’ve slowly started reverting to the coat of arms as the symbol that we use.

• Read our article: With Labour in charge, Wandsworth gets a new logo

At the meeting in July, you talked about the cost of changing the logo but then, one of the first things you did after winning the council was reinstate Northcote Road pedestrianisation for weekends, and that costs quite a lot of money. The numbers I’ve got are that in 2022, the last time it happened, it was £24,000 per weekend, on top of a £2.5 million counter-terrorism bill for 2022.

Context: the cost of changing the logo was over £50,000, according to the calculation made by Peter Graham before the Council (see article).

We’re not talking millions. The costings will be released and it’s running for slightly fewer weekends than before. The cost is basically the things needed to stop traffic and ensure safety, and a lot of it is actually just making sure there’s good security. So it’s that kind of cost. The reason we brought it back is that it was something we promised as a manifesto commitment. It’s both a community event and something that brings footfall to Northcote Road, to the restaurants and pubs, and it had proven to be really popular and, we felt, economically successful. Bringing it back, using the appropriate funds meant for that kind of activity, we felt was important.

There are then choices about whether you just do it, in effect, on a temporary basis for a few weekends each summer, or put in permanent changes with infrastructure, so you don’t need temporary barriers. In that latter case, you’re talking millions. We’re not talking millions for temporary arrangements for a few weekends in the summer. We’ve made no commitment to put in permanent infrastructure — what we’ve said is that we’ll run it every year.

In 2022, we covered the end of the measure by the Labour administration to stop the event, and we discussed with the business association and gave them examples of alternative schemes. We were a surprised nothing was explored, like what they do in Notting Hill, Merton, or in Paris, where parking spaces are taken over by parklets, more or less permanently, so people can enjoy being outside without cluttering the pavement, while still allowing the road to function — and it actually brings money to the council too, because the council charges a fee for allowing it.

• Read our article, including example of schemes in Notting Hill, Merton and Paris: Wandsworth Council will not renew funding for the Northcote road pedestrianised scheme

There’s a number of things to consider. One is the impact on residents, because there are a lot of residential streets very close to Northcote Road itself, as well as flats above the shops, so we have to be mindful of the impact on those residents. I think it’s proportionate to have a scheme that runs in summer — a scheme running for more than, say, August and a weekend or two would have a disproportionate impact. And a parklet here, a pavement change there, adds up to millions when you look at the length of Northcote Road.

There’s certainly no alternative group or body out there willing to put up the capital for those changes. I don’t rule out those changes, and where we can make public-realm improvements and have the money available, we will — we’ve done plenty in the past. But the problem we’ve got right now is a big constraint on our capital spending, because that capital has come from the Community Infrastructure Levy or Section 106 money from new developments. At the moment, building is grinding to a halt, and Labour gave very little planning permission for anything of magnitude, so the traditional source of that money is drying up.

• Funding from property developers has been discussed on CJI. You can refer to our article published in 2022: Is Wandsworth well managed or addicted to property developers’ money?

You’ve also been talking about regrouping council services within the main town hall. Do you think you’ve got enough room — because even before Labour was in charge, you had different locations for running different services.

Yes, that’s true. It comes down to the best way to handle asset management across the council’s overall estate. We own this building — most of it is half-empty, if not three-quarters empty — but because we own it, we don’t pay rent on it. Because it’s a listed building, with heritage considerations, it’s very difficult to do anything else with it. We can bring it up to standard and therefore bring officers into this building, freeing up other sites and releasing them.

The Town Hall Extension, behind us, has more people based in it, and they can stay in situ while this building is brought up to spec. This building will effectively have to shut down for about a year, because dealing with asbestos and so on is quite disruptive. There are enough other offices and facilities to manage that process, then bring people in here and free up those other sites — getting to a financially more sustainable position, with higher-quality accommodation for officers, with almost everyone located in one place. That’s also really important for Wandsworth Town and Southside and the whole area around here — and it means we can do something about opening up the Town Hall Extension site. Economically it’s really important.

What disturbed us was that we came in and found, despite it never having been to a single council meeting — not even a cabinet meeting, not discussed at all — there were plans in place to move all the council’s officers to a rented office building in Nine Elms. Labour’s idea was to pay rent, with no plan for what would happen to this building, which would have been left as a white elephant. It’s very hard to know what the logic was, because there were no papers. But nevertheless, they’d signed a contract that’s costing over £200,000 for us to exit and not to move there, which is scandalous in the circumstances. The lack of transparency or democratic accountability on that is unreal.

The government grant cut and the financial consequences for Wandsworth

Let’s talk now about the major topic that the Conservatives raised repeatedly during the campaign: the financial gap left after Keir Starmer’s government decided to withdraw much of the funding for Wandsworth. Can you explain simply, for our readers, what funding is provided by central government, what it used to be, how much is being removed — and what’s left?

The trouble is that funding comes in lots of different pots, so there’s no simple answer. However, the main grant we get — the one that covers the bulk of what we need to do — is being reduced by £84 million a year, about 40%. There are other elements of government funding too, but those are normally ring-fenced in some way, so you can’t just replace what you’ve lost on one hand with funding from those other areas, because it’s ring-fenced for schools, or public health, or whatever.

There’s also more than £50 million of reserves spent this year. When Labour won in 2022, reserves stood at £205 million, and they’ve left them to £114 million. So they’ve spent getting on for half of what they had.

• CJI has analysed in detail the financial issue in this article: A financial timebomb: what Wandsworth isn’t saying about council tax
  Context: In the 2025/26 revised budget, the “Government Grants” total in the budget papers is £214m and the government said the transition is phased through 2028/29. According to the Council, the total grant funding loss will be “£19m in 2026/27 rising to £79m by the end of the three year settlement” (Tax requirement forecast February 2026 – Paper No. 26-63 par. 54). However, arrangements for 2029/30 onwards have not yet been determined, therefore the Council is only making projections afterwards, when saying they will be receiving £84m a year less by 2030 (i.e. about £133m).
  According to the same Council’s document, the use of reserves was £21m in 2025/26 and this year (26/27) £50m.
  

Next year (2027/28), the budget gap is set at £96 million — that’s not exactly the full amount being removed by the government, which is probably only half of that. So how can you explain it?

It’s about more than what the government is removing, because there’s also the fact that the local administration had opened up a gap between what they were budgeting to spend and what they actually had the income to cover.

I think that’s where Wandsworth is in a uniquely difficult position. Others have had their funding cut substantially too — we’ve got the worst cash position of any council, but there are others with an equivalent or even slightly worse percentage cut. What the others didn’t have was this internal spending gap on top of the cut in funding. Westminster, for instance, are dealing with the central government issue, but not a massive borough-created issue on top. Unfortunately, we’ve got a situation where the local challenge was already big enough that the central government cut is only about half the problem, and we’ve got to cover both. Covering £84 million would already be extremely difficult, but covering £100 million-plus is much harder.

We looked at your different announcements at the July meeting, and you seemed to target mainly the Labour legacy at the time — the symbolic logo, the cost of living scheme, Access for All, the sanctuary housing programme — but when you add all that up, you’re actually only presenting about £6 million in savings.

Plus £20 million on temporary accommodation. We already passed, at our first Cabinet meeting, a series of changes to our policies on temporary accommodation. Spending on temporary accommodation was down at around £5 million a few years back; it’s now heading towards £40 million a year, and rising. To be fair, COVID had already caused some increase — but then, instead of bringing it back down again, it started rising exponentially on top of that. If you track it back, during the COVID period it was around £20 million, maybe slightly below. We were moving towards £40 million a year, with no controls in place to try and turn that around — it was increasing every year.

The reforms we’ve already put through, combined with further actions we’ll take, mean we’re confident we can achieve savings of £20 million a year on temporary accommodation by the end of this council term.

So down from £40 million to £20 million?

Yes. There’s underlying demand pressure too — we’ll clarify exactly where we think demand is coming from, because it’s a combination of factors. We can definitely bring the existing bill down, but it’s also a question of how many people are still entering the system, which affects the overall cost.

A big part of what we announced was this change on temporary accommodation, trying to make more private-sector placements, because if we can get someone into a private-sector placement, we improve their situation and reduce the cost to us. At the moment, we’re directly paying — from the general fund, so essentially funded by council tax — for people to be in temporary accommodation.

And how many people are there?

Just over 4,000 households in temporary accommodation, which is also up significantly — something that Labour pledged to cut, and instead went up a significant amount. The nature of what “temporary” means varies — some of it is more permanent than others, so it’s not always comparing like with like. But if we can get people into normal private-rented accommodation, we not only put them in a more secure, better position, but we discharge the duty and stop having to pay for it through council tax. So it’s a win for them and a financial win for us.

People might end up in temporary accommodation because it’s too expensive for them to go into the private sector and they can’t afford it. Therefore, does it mean that you’re subsidising the rent in the private sector?

No, there’s a whole range of reasons people end up in temporary accommodation. Some of it can be to do with having run into trouble in a previous rented situation. Others can be really difficult circumstances — domestic violence, for instance — where someone has to go into temporary accommodation, and it’s completely understandable why that happens.

What we don’t want is for people to then get stuck in temporary accommodation — we want to help them get back into permanent accommodation and, in some cases, social housing, but what we want to do is break the idea of temporary accommodation being seen as a route to social housing, because it shouldn’t be seen that way. For the vast majority who won’t get social housing, we want to help them get back into ordinary accommodation, where the council isn’t footing the bill for their temporary status. That’s important for the individuals, because it normalises their housing arrangements, and it’s important financially, because it means we’re not paying for it.

So, as I said, I was trying to find out how much you’re planning to save with the cost-of-living scheme changes, Access for All, and so on — around £6 million a year — plus the £20 million on temporary accommodation. At the same time, you’re spending roughly the same amount of money elsewhere: 24 additional police officers funded through the Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy, and enhanced street cleaning, graffiti removal, and enforcement in high-footfall areas. Aren’t you just spending with the right hand what you’re saving with the left?

We will definitely be making net reductions in expenditure overall — there’s no question about that. But it is true that in one or two areas, we will spend more than the council was spending previously. Those are things that we promised to do in our manifesto. I think they’re really important for providing what residents think the council should provide as services. If we’re going into a position where we may have to ask people to pay quite a bit more in council tax, I think people will be more understanding of that if they also see improvements in the basic services they rely on and want to see functioning well. If the government just took money away and we replaced it, but didn’t make anything better, people would say, “Well, hang on — you’re asking me to pay a lot more, but I’m not getting anything more for it.” I think people would struggle with that.

Clearly, we have to make a significant net reduction in expenditure, because we know the baseline position we inherited from Labour is that council tax would have to rise by 230% or more, on our share, to make the numbers add up.

The challenge of the Council tax rise

In the article we did on the change of leadership and the hectic first few months of the Conservative administration in Wandsworth, we got a comment from Malcolm Grimston saying the by-election caused by the resignation of the Labour councillor wasn’t welcome, because you’d apparently been planning to make some announcement on tax at that time and had to postpone. First of all, for readers — and this comes up every time, this debate about “freezing” council tax — very often readers don’t understand that council tax has three parts: the part for the Mayor of London, the part for the council, and the 2% social-care precept.

Yes, exactly — and that third part isn’t really distinct, because it gets rolled back into the main council figure the following year.

Labour said “we’ve frozen Council tax” while increasing that part; but in the past the Conservatives used the same rethoric, before also increasing the social-care precept.

My objection wasn’t to them using the social-care precept — my objection was to them claiming that consecutive uses of the social-care precept were a “freeze.” That’s not something we ever claimed, and I think it becomes increasingly ridiculous when people can see their bill going up year on year, to claim it’s a freeze. It’s the Labour government that changed what needed to be displayed on the bill. So when Labour locally say council tax was “frozen,” they’re arguing with their own government, which told them they had to put on the bill that it was a 2% increase on their share.

If you look at the bills that went out in April this year, you had a whole load of material saying council tax was frozen, and then the actual bill said “council plus 2%” — so their own material conflicted with the bill in the same envelope, and it was their own government that told them to present it that way on the bill.

The reason I raise the different parts is because when we say, for example, “we might need to increase council tax by 200%,” we’re only talking about the council’s part. If the Mayor of London increases his part by 10% and the council increases by 200%, it doesn’t mean people will pay triple what they were before — it’s actually much less than that.

Yes, that’s correct. When we’re talking about 230%, that’s the “do-nothing” scenario — what we’d have to do to our own element of council tax to make everything add up if we did nothing else. That would be on the part of the bill that’s ours, not the Mayor’s part.

At the moment, on a Band D property — there’s also a small Putney-specific levy for their common, but across most of the borough — there’s just over £500 on a Band D bill that comes from Wandsworth Council, and just over £500, a pound or two more, that comes from the Mayor of London. We pay more to Sadiq Khan currently than to Wandsworth Council — that’s the first time that’s ever happened, this year.

The article mentioned that you were planning to announce a substantial increase, and it’s been postponed. What sort of “substantial” increase are we talking about?

Malcolm was quite correctly pointing out that we’d jointly agreed to set out our intentions on tax early, so people would have time to prepare before April. We still are, but the by-election delayed our original date.

We are talking about a situation where the funding gap that we have to close is bigger than the council’s entire payroll. Sometimes people say, “Couldn’t you just make efficiencies?” Well, we could literally have no employees — which of course we couldn’t do, because we have statutory functions to fulfil, but let’s say, hypothetically, there was an incredibly advanced version of AI that came along and we went to zero employees — we still wouldn’t have closed the funding gap. That’s how big the gap is: it’s bigger than the entire payroll of the organisation.

Is the Council planning any big redundancy programme?

No, we’re not planning any mass programme of redundancies. We are looking at how we can make things more efficient, which isn’t quite the same thing, because there’s a lot of natural wastage in large organisations — you can reduce headcount over time without a wave of redundancies. Reducing the size of the organisation is one thing; redundancy is a different issue.

We’re not going down a path of trying to make a load of people redundant, with all the associated costs — we will restructure things. By the end of four years, I’d expect to have significantly fewer employees overall, but for some things we’ll have more, depending on the area — more police officers, for example, where technically they won’t be our employees, but we’ll be paying for them and helping direct what they do. In other areas, we’ll put more resource in — street cleaning, pressure-washing, contractors putting on new teams. So it won’t be even across the board, but clearly one of the things that we can do is reduce staff numbers without affecting our quality of service, using things like AI and doing things more intelligently. But even doing all of that, we still won’t close the funding gap — the problem is so big that it’s very difficult to see how we close it without looking at council tax as one of the levers that makes the difference.

Wandsworth isn’t the only one in this situation — you’ve got Hammersmith, Westminster, Windsor, City of London. Have you talked with them about what they’re planning?

We’re talking to our colleagues in other boroughs, partly because we’re also looking at ways to potentially challenge the government’s funding decision. We recently announced that we’ll use the Sustainable Communities Act to force a response from the government on our funding situation. So we haven’t given up on trying to get a better deal, or more transitional protections, which would mean we wouldn’t be looking at some of the more drastic measures.

Is it a joint challenge by the six councils involved?

Under this mechanism we’d each have to challenge individually — we can’t do a collective challenge — but I think Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea will launch the same challenge for their own funding that we’re launching for ours. We don’t know whether it will work, and we’re not going to make promises that it will succeed, but I think the more we can engage, the more responses we get to the consultation, the more chance there is that the government does something to take the pressure off, which would mean we wouldn’t have to look at council-tax increases on quite that scale. But they may not — so we’ll set it out both ways.

What we’ll do later this month is say: here’s where we are, here are all the things we can do to reduce expenditure, maximise income, find efficiencies including AI and other tools, restructure services more intelligently — but this is the gap that remains, and without the government moving, this is the impact on council tax. That’s why it’s important that people respond to our consultation, so we can put a strong case to government with as many responses as possible.

Context: On 20 August 2026, Wandsworth has sent a joint letter with fellow borough of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea asking prime minister Andy Burnham to reconsider plans to slash their funding by millions of pounds. The leaders of those London councils have said that they will use a legal power to formally challenge this decision.
Wandsworth has launched a consultation on how they should reduce spending.

But with that challenge outstanding, does that mean you’re not going to announce the council-tax rise right now? Because it’s less time for people to prepare.

What we’ll announce is what council tax would have to be if the government doesn’t respond positively to our challenge and doesn’t improve the situation. Part of our message to government will be: is this really what you intend us to do? If these are the numbers, and this is the only remaining lever that we can pull to balance the books, do you actually want us to pull it? Are you telling us we should, or are there alternatives you can provide that mean we’re not looking at scenarios of that kind? We’ll see what the government’s answer is — I’d certainly hope they’re willing to look at it again.

Context: A 230% increase means roughly doubling the full amount of the council tax by tripling the part dedicated to the Council (i.e. the share of Band D Council Tax is currently about £500 ; according to the numbers presented by the Council, they might need to add another £958  (on Band D tax – for example), on top of finding £79m in savings).

Looking ahead, what are the main challenges you’re planning to address over the next four years?

I think the biggest challenge is simply to balance the books — to make sure the council can go on doing what it has to do while being able to pay for it. But if we just do that, nobody sees any real improvement.

So the challenge on top is to actually deliver core services more effectively — to improve them. In a few areas that will involve spending a bit more money, in the context of spending a lot less overall — policing and street cleaning being examples. But it can also be things that don’t involve money, that just involve the service being run better.

For example, at the moment, we’ve still got physical parking permits. I don’t have a car myself, but for those who do, if you change your car for some reason, you have to cut up the old permit, write “void” on it, photograph it and send the image to the council, and then post the physical remains back too. Yet for temporary permits, it’s already digital, no physical permit needed. Moving that whole system over, so people just have a digital permit, is what I’m talking about.

When we talked to Aydin Dikerdem 6 months ago, he said: “We inherited a 44-year-old machine and we’re in the process of transforming it.” Labour said there were many areas available for modernisation in council services in order to save money and gain efficiency. Are you planning to retain some of their ideas?

• Read: Interview: Aydin Dikerdem on council homes, rent control, the funding squeeze and why there is still so much more to do in Wandsworth

I can tell you there was no actual plan for digital permits at that stage — just people talking about what they might like to move towards, with no timetable. We’ve made clear that digital parking permits are one of our priorities, along with making that system, and the online interface, work more effectively — because those are things we can do that don’t cost money but make a real difference.

We’re retaining things that are working, but we found standards had considerably declined in certain areas over the last four years — and it’s not just us saying that. Look at what the housing regulator said about the way the last administration was running the council’s housing stock — it went from ticking boxes to being rated as failing.

I’m not putting personal blame on any individuals in the last administration, but I don’t think the way the council is functioning as a machine has improved overall, in the last four years — and I actually think, in significant, areas it’s got worse. That doesn’t mean everything they did was wrong. We’re just finding that certain things we’d expect to function well aren’t. Even basic things — like the council’s handling of FOI requests. We discovered a huge backlog. There wasn’t a backlog when we left. Why was it taking 18 months to answer certain FOI requests that legally have to be answered within a month? So I simply don’t think the evidence is there for them to say they improved the way the council was operating.

I think what they’re talking about is more using IT tools — for reporting defects in the street, or if you are a Council tenant, having an app instead of having to call the council. 

I think what had started to happen, latterly, was that some of these problems were being identified better and thought was being given to them. They had improved the telephone service to some extent, although it’s still not universally better, and there are still issues about what can be actioned directly when you ring up, versus what gets handed on and then potentially doesn’t get picked up properly. I think the thought and effort going into the phone service was starting to improve it, but there’s still a lot more work to be done. A lot of the calls into that service are still follow-up calls — people calling back because they called or emailed before and nothing happened, or it wasn’t followed through. We need to get to a point where people don’t need to make that call because it’s already been actioned, or they’ve been updated appropriately.

So I wouldn’t criticise everything that happened — some things also happen regardless of who’s in charge, because officers pick things up and run with them. The last Labour administration could correctly point to the fact that some of the ways we engaged with residents, as a council, weren’t good enough — not for political reasons, just because the council hadn’t moved with the times. I still don’t think they’re good enough. We’re trying to improve them further. We’re certainly not going to reverse any changes that have made things better.

Most residents don’t have many interactions with the council. We want the interactions they do have to be as painless and easy as possible, leading to a happy resident, rather than what a lot of them experience right now.

When you say you’re planning to spend a little in order to save a lot more, do you already have a team in charge of working out how to improve the process?

Yes, there’s already been a fair amount of work looking at different areas — how we can improve systems, and where we can bring systems together so they talk to each other, which is another big part of it. We’ve got lots of things that work well in silos but aren’t connected — if you connect them and provide one portal, one service sitting on top, suddenly the whole thing improves. There’s a lot of work being done on that, but it will all take time. For example, the parking-permit system, even once the design is in place, will probably need about a year of transition as permits expire and get renewed digitally. That’s probably the most sensible way to do it.

There are things we can do to improve council services that don’t cost money, that just involve time, work and effort to put in place, and might even save us money while improving the service. Hopefully we can do those things.

In the short term, I think the biggest challenge is that we’ve still got an opposition trying to say there’s no problem at all. We just had a by-election where the Labour line was that there’s no financial crisis, that the Conservatives want to cut services because we’re mean, nasty people, and that we want to increase tax by far more than needed — in fact, that tax doesn’t need to increase at all. It’s such a fantasy position — if we’re about to make, according to Labour, a record-breaking tax increase and reintroduce unnecessary austerity, then presumably we’d end up with a massive budget surplus. Clearly, we’re not going to have a surplus. Whatever I come out with will be designed to make income and outgoings balance

What changes are you hoping to point to with pride at the next local election in 2030?

Everything I’m doing is designed to make sure our income and expenditure net out at zero by 2030/31 — there’s nothing we’re doing that’s unnecessary, in that sense. Now, you might disagree with the prioritisation — you might say, “We’d have done this rather than that,” or “put tax up by more to spend more on this,” or “put tax up by less by cutting something you’re not cutting.” There are certain income-maximisation measures too, but honestly there’s not a lot more we can do on income that we’re not already trying. So those are the levers we can pull, that’s it.

We would be in a much healthier place as a borough, politically, if there were a realistic debate, with the opposition genuinely participating, making real points about where we should spend more or less — but right now we’ve got a situation where people are talking past each other, where we’re setting out what the actual numbers say and Labour are living in some sort of alternative universe. In private, at least some of them understand there is a real financial crisis, but we’ve got a leader of the opposition determined to pretend there isn’t. I don’t think that’s sustainable — it’s certainly not leading to a healthy atmosphere, and it’s going to lead to a lot of very angry people at some point, when they realise someone’s been lying to them — and it’s not us.

The Council held another extraordinary meeting on Tuesday, 15 September 2026.

The meeting was dominated by a stark statement on the council’s dire financial position, with a projected budget gap of £215 million by 2030-31. This necessitates a significant council tax increase, potentially rising by 94% to £1,978 annually in April 2027, unless government funding changes. The opposition vehemently opposed the proposed increase, labelling it “outrageous ” and “unnecessary.” [update on the meeting made with the help of Open Council Network]