LONG READ In the three years since Wandsworth Council changed hands, the authority has extracted £270 million from property developers through planning levies and obligations. It plans to build 14,400 new homes across three strategic growth areas. And it has overseen an 81% collapse in development income from Putney while providing the area with zero strategic investment.
The numbers, drawn from Infrastructure Funding Statements, capital programme documents, and Freedom of Information responses, reveal a borough where developer money flows in torrents from some neighbourhoods and trickles from others – but where residents cannot track where a single pound ultimately lands.
For Putney, which contributed over £1.3 million in neighbourhood levies between 2016 and 2024, the outcome is stark: no major capital projects, no strategic housing designation, and development activity in freefall. The council’s 2025 Growth Plan mentions Putney precisely zero times across 18 pages while detailing hundreds of millions in investment for Nine Elms, Battersea, Clapham Junction, and Wandsworth Town.
It comes at a time when Putney’s infrastructure is in desperate need of improvement. Congestion levels have never been higher; tube trains are the most unreliable in the capital; buses are the slowest and most complained about in London; the High Street continues to struggle; and the council is nowhere to be seen.
This investigation examines how Wandsworth moved from extracting £54 million annually under the Conservatives to £116 million in Labour’s first year – then watched income collapse to an estimated £30-40 million as development fled the borough.
It reveals the financial mechanics behind strategic growth corridors, the opacity of neighbourhood funding decisions, and the price one area has paid for being written out of the council’s plans entirely.
The numbers: A three-year extraction boom turns to bust
Developer contributions come in two forms. The Community Infrastructure Levy, introduced in 2012, charges developers per square metre of new floorspace: 85% goes to Strategic CIL for borough-wide infrastructure, 15% to Neighbourhood CIL for local projects.
And then there are Section 106 agreements: site-specific obligations negotiated for each development, requiring developers to fund affordable housing, transport improvements, or community facilities directly linked to their project’s impact.
Under the last full year of Conservative control in 2019/20, Wandsworth collected £54.1 million total: £32 million in CIL and £22.1 million in Section 106 contributions. The following year, 2020/21, saw income crash to £39.4 million as COVID paralysed construction.
Then Labour won control in May 2022.
In 2022/23, Labour’s first full financial year, developer contributions exploded to £116.2 million: a 115% increase over the pre-COVID baseline. CIL income remained steady at £29.6 million, but Section 106 receipts surged to £86.6 million, nearly quadruple the 2019/20 level. The council extracted more in one year than in any previous period in borough history.
Move forward a year and the 2023/24 Infrastructure Funding Statement shows the boom beginning to crack. Total contributions fell to £78.4 million – £13.8 million in CIL and £64.6 million in Section 106. CIL income had halved. Overall developer money was down 33% from the previous year.
By 2024/25, the collapse accelerated. Capital programme financing documents show the council spent just £29 million from Section 106 and CIL reserves – suggesting income has fallen to similar levels, down another 50% or more. In three years, Wandsworth went from record extraction to income levels potentially below even the COVID-depressed 2020/21 baseline.
When adjusted for inflation to 2023/24 prices, the trajectory is unmistakable. The 2019/20 baseline of £54.1 million equals roughly £70 million in today’s money. Labour’s first-year haul of £116.2 million translates to £123.5 million. But by 2023/24, the £78.4 million sits only marginally above the inflation-adjusted pre-COVID baseline. By 2024/25, even that gain appears to have evaporated.
The pattern shows aggressive short-term extraction followed by a dramatic market correction as developers respond to a drop in certainty and a cut in profits.
Despite the clear warning signs, with London mayor Sadiq Khan cutting an affordable housing requirement from 35% to 20%, Wandsworth continues to push against reality: insisting on a 45% requirement, and the ability to levy extra charges at the end of a build. The housing department is running at a huge net budget loss, bringing down the council finances, yet the cabinet minister for housing continues to insist the shortfall can be covered by tapping reserves.
It’s like a landlord that doubles the rent: people initially pay because they have to. It brings in a lot of money. But before the next contract is up, tenants look elsewhere. The council squeezed developers for £116 million and now they are walking away from Wandsworth. And the council is left with a capital programme it may not be able to fund.
Where it goes: The growth corridor and the excluded
In January 2025, Wandsworth published its Growth Plan, a strategic framework for development through 2035. The document designates three “Strategically Important Housing Designation” areas with capacity for 14,400 new homes:
- Wandsworth Town Centre: approximately 3,000 homes, plus town centre regeneration, gyratory removal, and Town Hall redevelopment
- Winstanley and York Road / Clapham Junction: approximately 3,000 homes, plus estate renewal, leisure facilities, and transport improvements
- Nine Elms and Battersea: continuation of existing regeneration delivering thousands more homes plus Northern Line Extension completion
These three areas form what the plan calls the “Wandsworth Growth Corridor” – a connected spine of development from Nine Elms through Battersea to Clapham Junction and Wandsworth Town. The plan promises “targeted investment and place-based regeneration” that will “generate a ripple effect: strengthening connectivity, expanding opportunity, and enhancing quality of life far beyond its immediate footprint.”
The plan does not mention Putney. Not once. Not in the housing capacity analysis, not in the infrastructure priorities, not in the transport improvements, not in the strategic opportunity areas.
The capital programme tells the same story. Of the £423.7 million committed across 2025-2030, major projects cluster in the Growth Corridor:
- Nine Elms Northern Line Extension: £39.2 million (2023/24 spend)
- Battersea Nine Elms School and Community Provision: £14.4 million
- Wandsworth Town Station accessibility: £4.5 million
- Winstanley and York Road Renewal Plan: over £1.25 billion total programme
- Roehampton Community Hub: £16.7 million
For Putney, the capital programme shows: accessible toilet refurbishment at the leisure centre (£106,000), air handling unit upgrades (£760,000), and heating pump replacements (£285,000): maintenance, not investment. The Putney Leisure Centre refurbishment is being funded by a government green grant. The East Putney station accessibility improvements, mentioned in previous council documents, appear nowhere in committed funding.
The geographic concentration is explicit. The Growth Plan states its aim is “aligning development across these key locations” to create “a dynamic axis of growth.” Areas outside this axis receive no strategic designation, no housing capacity allocation, no infrastructure priority.
The council is building three new town centres while refusing to fix the fourth. It’s even resisting the cost of a junction redesign that has given Putney the most congested streets in London.
Imagine four siblings where three are given deposits for their first house while the fourth gets told the boiler’s fine and doesn’t need replacing. That’s the Growth Corridor strategy in a sentence.
The neighbourhood money: Putney’s vanishing contributions
Neighbourhood CIL offers the clearest window into geographic disparity because the council tracks income by area. In 2021/22, the last year before Labour took control, Putney generated £232,000 in neighbourhood levies: the second-highest total in the borough after Wandsworth.
In 2022/23, Putney’s NCIL income fell to £67,000 – a 71% drop in a single year.
In 2023/24, it fell further to £45,000 – an 81% total collapse from the baseline.
Other areas saw increases or stability. North Battersea (including Nine Elms) generated £481,000 in 2023/24. Wandsworth generated over £1 million. Even South Battersea and Balham, despite lower development activity, brought in £184,000.
Putney’s collapse reflects plummeting development activity. Fewer projects mean fewer CIL payments. The 81% drop suggests development in Putney has effectively stopped.
The spending side is harder to track. The council administers Neighbourhood CIL through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which awards grants for local projects. In 2023/24, the NRF spent £1.3 million borough-wide. Putney received £98,000 for “Putney High Street improvements” which makes up 7.5% of the total, despite representing 15% of the borough’s population.
While the council holds community engagement events and collects suggestions via an online map, no published framework explains how final allocation decisions are made or weighted. Cabinet approves NRF spending as aggregated packages, but residents cannot see how individual projects within those packages were prioritised or rejected. The Infrastructure Funding Statement lists projects funded but provides no rationale for why some neighbourhoods receive substantial grants while others receive token amounts.
Strategic CIL – the 85% that goes to borough-wide infrastructure – is even more opaque. In December 2022, responding to a Freedom of Information request, the council stated: “Once Strategic CIL receipts are received into the Council’s accounts, they are not allocated or attributed to specific wards or geographic areas… It is not possible to track how much Strategic CIL has been spent in each ward.”
The council collects developer money by ward, tracks which neighbourhoods generate income, then pools everything and declines to show where it goes. Residents in Putney know their area contributed £1.3 million in neighbourhood levies alone since 2016, but cannot determine whether any Strategic CIL collected from Putney developments has returned to Putney projects.
It’s the council equivalent of a joint bank account where both of you pay into it, but only one of you has access to the account. And the chequebook. Where did the money go? Don’t worry yourself about it, it’s been spent wisely.
The political geography: A pattern emerges
When examined together, the financial and planning documents reveal a clear geographic pattern.
The three areas designated for strategic growth – Nine Elms/Battersea, Clapham Junction, and Wandsworth Town – share demographic characteristics. High rental populations, substantial social housing, younger age profiles, and transient residents. These are Labour-friendly demographics. All three areas either voted Labour in 2022 or contain wards Labour must hold to retain control of the council in an election just six months away.
Putney is different. The constituency voted Conservative in every election from 2010 to 2019. It only flipped Labour in 2019 amid the Brexit collapse, and was held in 2024 during a national shift that provided a huge Labour majority. At the local level, Labour gained five council seats in Putney in 2022, but they remain marginal. The area has higher homeownership rates, older populations, and higher average incomes: demographics that typically lean Conservative.
The Growth Plan’s exclusion of Putney could reflect pure planning logic: the strategic areas have better transport connections, more brownfield land, and existing regeneration momentum. Putney’s suburban character and conservation areas may genuinely limit development capacity.
But the correlation between political geography and investment allocation is difficult to ignore. The council directs hundreds of millions toward areas it needs to hold while providing nothing to an area that could easily flip back to Conservative control. Whether this reflects intentional electoral strategy or simply sound planning that happens to align with political interests, the outcome is the same: investment flowing freely to some areas and not at all to others.
After 44 years in opposition, the Labour party won control by a narrow margin and are desperate to retain it for another term. Consolidating that control requires visible improvements in swing areas and high-turnout enthusiasm in safe wards. Putney, even with five Labour councillors, represents neither- it’s neither safely Labour nor a winnable Conservative seat that investment might flip.
The political logic, whether explicitly calculated or not, follows familiar patterns: invest where infrastructure can retain mobile populations in rental accommodation; showcase regeneration in town centres that can demonstrate visible transformation; energise core supporters in areas with high Labour turnout. Areas with stable homeowner populations and Conservative-leaning demographics receive maintenance but not transformation.
It’s the municipal version of gerrymandering, except with investment maps instead of boundaries. In council elections, everything is local.
The market response: When aggressive extraction kills development
The economic consequences of Labour’s strategy are now becoming clear.
Wandsworth’s CIL rates – ranging from £250 to £575 per square metre for residential development depending on location – are among London’s highest, particularly in Nine Elms. But developers pay because Wandsworth offers high-value opportunities.
The £116 million extracted in 2022/23 suggests Labour initially maintained that balance, even increasing developer activity to record levels. Section 106 contributions quadrupled. Major projects moved forward. The council maximised short-term revenue.
But by 2023/24, income fell 33%. By 2024/25, it appears to have halved again. Developers are pulling back.
The reasons are multiple. National economic conditions – rising interest rates, construction cost inflation, weakening demand – affect all boroughs. But Wandsworth’s decline appears steeper than neighbouring authorities. The Growth Plan’s explicit concentration of development in three corridors may be discouraging applications elsewhere.
Putney’s 81% NCIL collapse provides the starkest example. Neighbourhood CIL correlates directly with development activity: no development, no levy. Putney’s drop suggests the market has effectively abandoned the area.
The council now faces declining income precisely when it has committed to substantial capital spending in strategic areas. The £1.25 billion Winstanley programme, the ongoing Nine Elms infrastructure; they all require sustained funding. But developer contributions are falling. The capital programme increasingly relies on borrowing to fill the gap.
In 2024/25, borrowing requirements for the capital programme totalled £72.7 million: 45% of the programme. By comparison, Section 106 and CIL provided only £29 million. The aggressive extraction strategy has given way to an aggressive borrowing strategy as the tax base collapses. It’s an economic model that appears unsustainable.
The opacity problem: Democracy in the dark
Beyond the financial and political questions lies a fundamental democratic deficit: residents cannot see where their money goes.
By law, councils must publish annual Infrastructure Funding Statements detailing CIL and Section 106 income and spending. Wandsworth complies. The documents are thorough, running to dozens of pages with detailed tables.
But they aggregate spending borough-wide. A resident in Putney can see that her neighbourhood contributed £45,000 in neighbourhood levies in 2023/24. They can see that Wandsworth spent £17.3 million in Strategic CIL that year on projects including Tooting Bec Lido (£3 million), carriageway repairs (£4.2 million), and swimming pool improvements (£342,000). But they cannot determine whether any Strategic CIL from Putney developments funded Putney projects, or whether it all cross-subsidised other areas.
The council’s December 2022 FOI response makes this explicit: “Once Strategic CIL receipts are received into the Council’s accounts, they are not allocated or attributed to specific wards or geographic areas… It is not possible to track how much Strategic CIL has been spent in each ward.”
Yet the council does track income by ward. The Infrastructure Funding Statements break down Neighbourhood CIL receipts by area. The information architecture exists to provide geographic granularity – the council simply chooses not to apply it to spending data.
The transparency other councils provide
Wandsworth’s claim that it cannot track developer contribution spending by ward stands in stark contrast to practice across London. Several neighbouring boroughs demonstrate that such transparency is not only achievable but routine.
Camden allocates 25 percent of CIL directly to ward councillors, who maintain published priority lists and approve local projects. Residents can see exactly how much their ward receives and where it goes.
Brent provides scrutiny committees with reports breaking down ten years of Strategic CIL and Section 106 spending by both theme and ward, publishing quarterly trackers of every infrastructure funding decision.
Lambeth tracks Neighbourhood CIL spending by geographic area, with ward councillors conducting annual reviews with residents.
Even Croydon, despite bankruptcy, allocates neighbourhood CIL to Community Ward Budgets with transparent reporting.
The pattern is clear: tracking CIL and Section 106 by ward or neighbourhood is standard practice. These councils apply the same geographic coding to expenditure that they already use for income tracking. The systems enable residents to scrutinise whether development in their area generates commensurate infrastructure investment.
Wandsworth is an outlier. The council tracks income by ward for its Infrastructure Funding Statements but insists expenditure cannot be similarly tracked. This appears to be a policy choice rather than a technical limitation.
While Camden residents can propose projects for their ward’s annual allocation and Brent residents can examine a decade of ward-level spending, Putney residents cannot identify a single infrastructure project funded by the millions extracted from their area.
The distinction matters. Transparency enables democratic engagement – residents challenging priorities, proposing alternatives, holding councillors accountable. Wandsworth’s opacity precludes this, turning development into a one-way extraction with no visible local return.
Another transparency issue
The Neighbourhood Renewal Fund operates with even less transparency. While the council holds community engagement events and collects suggestions via an online map, no published framework explains how final allocation decisions are made or weighted. Cabinet approves NRF spending as aggregated packages, but residents cannot see how individual projects within those packages were prioritised or rejected.
The Infrastructure Funding Statement lists funded projects but provides no comparative data showing rejected applications or allocation methodology.
In July 2023, the council reorganised its NCIL reporting areas. As a result, six Putney wards were aggregated into a single “Putney” line while other areas have more. Battersea, for example, includes detailed breakdowns for three different areas: Battersea, North Battersea and South Battersea and Balham. Putney, however, became a monolith – harder to scrutinise, easier to marginalise in aggregate data.
This is not illegal. The CIL Regulations require annual reporting but do not mandate ward-level spending transparency. Councils comply with the law while providing minimal useful information to residents.
The result is that meaningful democratic accountability becomes impossible. Councillors cannot point to specific infrastructure improvements funded by their ward’s developer contributions. Residents cannot evaluate whether their area receives proportionate benefits. Opposition councillors cannot demonstrate systematic bias without spending months on FOI requests and document analysis.
The planning system operates on a fundamental bargain: communities accept development in exchange for infrastructure improvements funded by developers. When councils track income geographically but aggregate spending borough-wide, that bargain becomes unverifiable. Residents must trust that money extracted from their neighbourhood returns in some form, but cannot prove it.
For Putney, this opacity is particularly damaging. With no strategic designation, no major capital projects, collapsing development income, and aggregated spending data, residents face an information vacuum. Development happened for decades; millions were generated in levies; but where did it all go?
Wandsworth publishes volumes of data and reveals nothing useful.
The unanswered questions
Three years into Labour’s control of Wandsworth, the financial architecture of developer contributions raises questions the council has not addressed publicly.
Why did Section 106 income quadruple in 2022/23? The £86.6 million collected that year dwarfs any previous year except 2021/22, when a single £105.7 million payment for the Nine Elms Northern Line Extension created a statistical outlier. Did major developments simply complete on schedule, triggering obligation payments? Or did the council renegotiate agreements to front-load payments? The Infrastructure Funding Statement lists individual projects but provides no narrative explanation for the unprecedented spike.
Why has CIL income collapsed by 53% in two years? From £29.6 million in 2022/23 to £13.8 million in 2023/24, the drop is catastrophic. CIL correlates with development starts – developers pay when construction commences. The halving of income suggests development activity has crashed borough-wide. Is this purely national economic conditions, or has the Growth Plan’s concentration strategy discouraged applications outside strategic areas?
How was Putney excluded from all 14,400 strategic homes? The Growth Plan designates housing capacity across three areas but provides zero allocation for Putney despite its being one of the borough’s largest residential areas with good transport links and existing town centre infrastructure. The plan offers no explanation for this omission. Did housing capacity analysis determine Putney genuinely cannot accommodate growth? Or was it a strategic choice?
What criteria govern Neighbourhood Renewal Fund allocations? In 2023/24, Putney received £98,000 from the £1.3 million NRF budget – 7.5% for an area representing 15% of the borough’s population. Other areas received substantially more. While the council holds community engagement events and collects suggestions via an online map, no published framework explains how final allocation decisions are made or weighted. Cabinet approves NRF spending as aggregated packages. Is it population? Need? Political representation? The decision-making process remains opaque.
Why won’t the council track Strategic CIL spending by ward? The technical capability exists—the council already tracks income geographically. The choice not to track spending represents a policy decision, not a technical limitation. What is the rationale? The December 2022 FOI response stated tracking was “not possible,” but did not explain why the council chooses not to build systems that would make it possible.
When will the falling income force spending cuts? Developer contributions have declined from £116 million to £78 million to an estimated £30-40 million in three years. The capital programme increasingly relies on borrowing. At what point does falling income force the council to scale back commitments? Will strategic areas continue receiving hundreds of millions while non-strategic areas see services cut to balance budgets?
These questions are not rhetorical. They represent information gaps that prevent residents from evaluating their council’s priorities. In the absence of answers, residents are left to draw conclusions from the pattern: record extraction, strategic concentration, opacity about spending, and one area systematically excluded from all strategic investment.
The accountability reckoning
The numbers tell a clear story. In three years under Labour control, Wandsworth extracted £270 million from developers, designated 14,400 new homes in three strategic areas, and left Putney with zero strategic investment while its development income collapsed by 81%.
Whether this represents infrastructure-led planning or electoral calculation, the democratic deficit is the same: residents cannot see where their neighbourhood’s contributions go, councillors cannot track spending by ward, and no published framework explains how Neighbourhood Renewal Fund decisions are made.
Putney News has filed Freedom of Information requests on:
- Ward-by-ward capital spending data for 2022-2025
- Section 106 income by ward
- The methodology and decision-making framework for Neighbourhood Renewal Fund allocations
- Geographic and demographic data used in Growth Plan area designations
- The rationale for aggregating Putney’s six wards into one NCIL reporting area
The council has 20 working days to respond. Putney residents deserve answers.
Readers with information about CIL or Section 106 spending in Putney can contact us at news@putney.news. We will continue investigating where Putney’s developer money goes – and why the council won’t tell residents.
METHODOLOGY NOTE: This investigation draws on Infrastructure Funding Statements for financial years 2019/20 through 2023/24, capital programme documents through 2029/30, the Wandsworth Growth Plan 2025, Freedom of Information responses from December 2022 and June 2024, and capital financing reports from July 2025. All figures are taken directly from official council documents. Where inflation adjustments are referenced, calculations use UK CPI data with 2023/24 as the baseline year. The estimated 2024/25 figure of £30-40 million is derived from capital programme financing documents showing £29 million in S106/CIL spending, suggesting similar income levels given the council’s stated policy of using developer contributions before borrowing.
