Wandsworth Council is preparing to spend more than £1 million on external consultants to deliver a sweeping “transformation programme” despite its most recent savings drive collapsing into a multi-million-pound overspend.
A confidential Procurement Board paper [pdf], released only after a Freedom of Information request and heavily redacted, shows that the contract is due to be approved on a compressed timetable of just two months. The deal would see one or two consultancies hired to set up a programme management office, design business cases, build a predictive analytics system, and shape “early intervention” policies across adults, children’s services, and housing.
The council justifies the expense on the basis that future savings will pay for it – but, tellingly, all projected figures were removed from the released document.
A culture of secrecy
Putney.news has requested the full costings, savings forecasts, evaluation criteria, supplier names, and equality impact assessments. So far, Wandsworth has refused, citing “commercial sensitivity.” Even the overall budget envelope – already flagged in the councils spending forward plan as exceeding £1m – has been withheld.
We will continue to pursue further information through FOI requests.
The scope of the contract covers some of the council’s most fundamental responsibilities: managing housing demand, forecasting social care needs, and designing cost-saving interventions in children’s services.
Critics argue that these are exactly the areas where internal expertise should be developed and retained, not outsourced at high cost to consultants.
Savings that never came
The model is familiar: spend now, save later. But recent history shows how risky this is. Only this summer, Wandsworth admitted that nearly £2m in “efficiency savings” budgeted into adult social care never materialised. Instead, the department overspent by £1.79m, forcing another raid on reserves.
It’s a pattern the council has repeated – booking in optimistic savings, only to see them evaporate once the financial year ends.
Wandsworth is not alone: other councils have taken the same approach – and ended up in trouble. Croydon spiralled into effective bankruptcy after building budgets on undeliverable savings; Birmingham sunk hundreds of millions into failed IT-driven transformation projects that never delivered; and Northamptonshire collapsed altogether after relying on consultants and “transformation” promises that outpaced its capacity to deliver.
These case studies show that consultant-led programmes have a mixed record at best. Without transparency, independent assurance, and firm political commitment, the risk is that taxpayers are left with a bill and little to show for it.
What the council must reveal
If Wandsworth wants residents to have confidence in this contract, it must publish:
- The headline contract value and savings targets
- The evaluation framework and weightings
- The suppliers consulted during market engagement
- Any equality impact and risk assessments
- The business cases and correspondence underpinning the decision
Until then, this looks like another high-stakes gamble: a £1m-plus spend on outside help, justified by savings that may never arrive.
In recent years Wandsworth seems almost to have abandoned performance management of some of these big schemes. The usual pattern of course is identify a problem or problems and create performance indicators which will tell you if whatever approach you are following is working against the problem(s) it is designed to address, BEFORE getting to the design stage of specific policy proposals. This seems to have been replaced by a desire for sweeping, often headline-attracting, Good Ideas which are implemented before a clear understanding of what success would look like has been established. If one doesn’t know, in considerable detail, what one is trying to achieve then of course it is much more difficult to know if the route one chosen to get there is right, or hopeless, or (perhaps most usually) is making some progress but could be much more effective with certain tweaks.