Tomorrow night, Wandsworth Council will approve a five-year plan to spend £423.7 million on major projects across the borough: new roads, park improvements, school buildings and other infrastructure.
Most of this money comes from taxes and fees paid by property developers. When someone builds new flats or offices, they must pay the council two main charges: the Community Infrastructure Levy (a tax based on the size of the development) and Section 106 payments (negotiated fees to offset local impacts like increased traffic or need for school places).
Developers building in Putney have paid millions in these charges – money that’s supposed to help improve local infrastructure where development happens. Yet not a single project in tonight’s spending plan can be identified as benefiting Putney.
Paper 25-327, which councillors will rubber-stamp at tonight’s cabinet meeting, allocates £149 million in Strategic CIL and £85 million in Section 106/Neighbourhood CIL across the borough. The identifiable projects include:
- Winstanley & York Road regeneration: £5.8 million
- Nine Elms public realm improvements: Multiple allocations
- Falcon Road underpass: £500,000
- A range of Battersea schemes: millions
No Putney projects appear in the transport, parks, or regeneration sections of the capital programme.
Developer contributions at record levels
The council’s December 2024 Infrastructure Funding Statement reveals the scale of developer money flowing through the system. In 2023/24 alone, Wandsworth collected £78.4 million from developers — £13.8 million in CIL and £64.6 million in Section 106 payments.
This follows an extraordinary change in how the council extracts money from developers. Before Labour took control in May 2022, the Conservative administration collected just £619,551 from developers. In Labour’s first year, that figure exploded to £24.5 million – a forty-fold increase achieved by dramatically changing planning policies to maximise developer charges. By 2023/24, they extracted £78.4 million; that’s £13.8 million in CIL taxes and £64.6 million in Section 106 payments.
The Infrastructure Funding Statement shows Section 106 spending heavily concentrated in specific areas. Last year’s £65.7 million expenditure included:
- Nine Elms Northern Line Extension: £39.2 million
- Battersea Nine Elms School: £14.4 million
- Nine Elms health facilities: £1.3 million
System prevents tracking
When asked where Putney’s developer contributions go, the council maintains it cannot track spending by ward: “It is not possible to determine what projects are funded from the CIL a development may generate, CIL is placed into a central fund and allocations made as appropriate.”
Yet the council’s own Infrastructure Funding Statement shows how much Neighbourhood CIL they extracted from Putney last year, and each new development has a very specific location and goes through months of planning so the council can, and does, track income by area when they choose to. It has become a purposefully opaque system.
What worse is that there is no published framework for how allocation decisions are made, meaning that the money goes where councillors decide and it is entirely unclear how those decisions are made.
Putney absent from borough plans
The pattern extends beyond tonight’s spending programme. The council’s Growth Plan 2025, published in July, outlined Wandsworth’s vision for the next decade without mentioning Putney once across its 18 pages.
The plan identifies a “Clapham Junction Growth Corridor” extending from Nine Elms through Clapham Junction to Wandsworth Town, with capacity for 14,400 new homes. It features case studies from businesses in Battersea and photographs of developments across the borough but nothing from or about Putney.
The council has launched what it calls a “Neighbourhood Renewal Fund” where residents can suggest improvements via an online map. However, no criteria for how suggestions become funded projects have been published, nor any framework for decision-making.
Questions for the council
- Why can the council track Neighbourhood CIL income by area but not expenditure?
- How are developer contribution spending decisions made and by whom?
- What assessment has been made of infrastructure needs by ward?
- Why does the capital programme contain no identifiable Putney projects?
- What proportion of developer contributions from Putney developments has been spent in Putney?
A council spokesperson has previously stated that CIL is pooled centrally and spent according to borough-wide priorities. They maintain that all areas benefit from strategic infrastructure improvements.
