Every promise broken: Wandsworth’s scrutiny reforms fail every test

LONG READ In March 2025, Wandsworth Council’s Executive approved the most significant changes to its governance system in over two decades. The consideration took less than two minutes. No questions were asked. No debate occurred. Council Leader Simon Hogg asked “Are there any comments or questions on the paper? If not, is that agreed? Wonderful.”

Nine months later, the first real tests of this new system have arrived. At November’s inaugural meeting of the new General Overview and Scrutiny Committee, a headteacher travelled from Kent to defend her school for children with severe autism. She was given three minutes to speak. When councillors asked if she could answer their questions, the chair ruled it “way outside the remit.”

At December’s full council meeting, an independent councillor discovered the new rules had silenced him entirely, unable to raise ward issues because he cannot form a “group” under the revised standing orders.

The new system is producing exactly the failures opposition councillors predicted in March, when they warned the changes were “a blatant power grab” that would leave them “rifling through papers in Richmond to find out what’s happening in our own borough.”

This investigation reveals how those warnings were ignored, how the consultation that supposedly informed the changes never actually occurred, and how every promise made to justify the reforms has now been broken.

The consultation that wasn’t

The paper presented to the Executive in March 2025 claimed the proposals had been developed through proper consultation. Paper 25-104 [pdf], dated 21 February 2025, stated that “the deliberations of the Task and Finish Group and the General Purposes Committee has informed and contributed to the development of the proposals in this report.”

This claim does not survive scrutiny.

An earlier progress report, Paper 25-36 [pdf], presented to the General Purposes Committee on 4 February 2025, reveals what actually happened. It states: “Following the last meeting of this Committee on 4 October 2024, the task and finish group has met on two occasions. An oral update will be provided to the Committee on the discussions from those meetings.”

Two meetings. No written recommendations. Just oral updates. And an Executive decision already scheduled for three weeks later.

At that February meeting, opposition councillors made their position explicit. Conservative Councillor Peter Graham told the committee: “We have had two online meetings of the task and finish group. We haven’t agreed any recommendations. Indeed, the discussion that summarised here that somehow would come to consensus, it was largely that there were lots of other questions we needed to look at, lots of other pieces of the puzzle that needed to be pinned down before we could adequately say what we wanted.”

Councillor Matt Corner noted there was “no real record of output” from the Task and Finish Group meetings.

Even Labour’s Councillor Claire Apps, who led the democracy review, admitted there was a “failure to bring recommendations,” though she minimised the changes as “bread and butter.”

One month later, Paper 25-104 claimed these very deliberations had “informed and contributed to” the proposals. The documented record shows the opposite: opposition members explicitly stated no recommendations were agreed, and no written records exist of what was supposedly decided.

What the new system changed

The reforms restructured how Wandsworth Council makes decisions and how those decisions can be challenged.

Previously, six thematic scrutiny committees reviewed Cabinet decisions before they were made. Housing experts examined housing decisions. Education specialists reviewed school matters. This pre-decision scrutiny allowed councillors to raise concerns while changes could still be made.

Under the new system, a single General Overview and Scrutiny Committee handles all call-ins, but only after decisions have already been taken. The committee has three Labour members and two Conservative members, guaranteeing party-line votes will always favour the administration.

The threshold for what counts as a “key decision” requiring advance public notice was raised from approximately £215,000 to £1 million. This means 78% fewer decisions now require the scrutiny that previously applied.

Independent councillors lost their voice entirely. Under the old rules, five councillors could bring a motion to full council. The new standing orders require motions to come via “Group Whips.” Single-member representatives cannot form groups. Two independent councillors and one Reform UK councillor now serve on Wandsworth Council. Even collectively, they cannot reach the new six-councillor threshold required to raise issues.

The warnings that proved true

When these changes were debated at full council on 5 March 2025, Councillor Peter Graham delivered a detailed warning of what would follow.

“Tonight, the paper and Councillor Apps have spoken about CFGS, the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny,” Graham said. “This is what they say about changing the constitution: Changes should be considered by a working group and then go to a formal council committee like audit or general purposes before being submitted for final approval at council. Most of the changes before us tonight went straight to the Executive, which is not a formal council committee and excludes the opposition, it excludes backbenchers and it even excludes Councillor Apps.”

Graham then listed fourteen major changes that had never been properly consulted on before that night’s vote.

Graham predicted councillors would “have to resort to rifling through papers in Richmond to find out what’s happening in our own borough.” This seemed like hyperbole at the time.

At November’s Bradstow call-in meeting, opposition councillors explicitly referenced Richmond’s transparent practices as a contrast to what was happening in Wandsworth. The comparison is particularly damning because the two councils share the same Chief Executive and the same senior officers through a joint staffing arrangement. Richmond operates a committee system with cross-party representation and full transparency. Wandsworth’s new system is demonstrably less open. Same officers, completely different outcomes. The difference is not capacity. It is political will.

Graham’s speech grew more pointed as he continued. “As councillors, we are democratically elected, but this council has ceased to operate democratically. Tonight’s procedure is a farce.”

He warned that “one by one, rules are removed or become meaningless, swept aside in a slew of arbitrary rulings. We can’t get our rights upheld now. We can’t even get basic answers.”

Then he addressed the administration directly: “In its consistent contempt for the rights of members, the Executive is showing contempt, not just for its own backbenchers, and not just for opposition councillors. We are representatives. Your contempt is contempt for the residents who elected us.”

The vote that night was 33 in favour, 1 against (Councillor Malcolm Grimston), with 20 abstentions from the Conservative group (read a summary of the meeting from the Open Council Network).

The promises vs. the reality

Council leaders promised the reforms would improve scrutiny. “Soon, Overview and Scrutiny Committee members, our backbenchers, will decide which decisions are really important to look at,” Councillor Apps said in March. “They will give their ideas and recommend at a time when Cabinet can still listen. They can help with policy development. They can be more strategic.”

Paper 25-104 claimed scrutiny committees would be able to “meaningfully influence proposals at a much earlier stage.”

The first real test came in November. The headteacher of Bradstow School, Sarah Adams, travelled from Kent to defend the specialist facility serving children with complex autism needs. The Cabinet had voted to close it. Opposition councillors had called in the decision, identifying eight serious concerns including hidden DfE correspondence and disputed financial claims.

Adams was allowed three minutes to speak. When Conservative councillor Crivelli asked if she could answer questions from the committee, Chair Sheila Boswell ruled it “way outside the remit of this committee.” A vote was held: three Labour councillors voted against allowing questions, two Conservative councillors voted in favour. Adams sat silent for the rest of the two-hour meeting.

All eight concerns raised by the opposition were voted down 3-2 on party lines. Zero concerns were resolved. The closure was upheld unchanged. The school closes on 31 December 2025.

This was not “meaningfully influencing proposals at a much earlier stage.” The decision had already been made. Implementation was already underway. The meeting occurred just six weeks before closure.

Headteacher denied right to defend Bradstow as Labour rushes closure

Apps had promised the new system would mean “listening to more voices, particularly those seldom heard voices.” At its first test, the voice of a headteacher representing twelve vulnerable children was silenced by a party-line vote.

Leader Simon Hogg had promised to “let the sunlight in.” Critical correspondence between Wandsworth and the Department for Education was withheld from the original Cabinet papers. It was only disclosed after the call-in request. Cabinet Member Judi Gasser admitted the DfE’s position was her “inference” from a lack of “warm words,” not based on clear communication.

When the new Cabinet system launched in April, Putney.news reported that the first meeting was published with no agenda, no papers, only vague “Leader Update” and “Cabinet Member Update” headings. We described this as a “digital curtain” hiding decision-making.

The independent councillors silenced

At the full council meeting on 10 December 2025, Independent Councillor Malcolm Grimston discovered he could not raise an issue affecting his West Hill ward.

Under the previous rules, five councillors could bring a motion. The new Standing Orders require motions to come via Group Whips. Grimston is one of three independent councillors on the council. The Director of Law and Governance confirmed to Councillor Mark Justin that single-member representatives cannot form “groups” under the Standing Orders. Even if all three independents worked together, they fall short of the new six-councillor threshold.

When Grimston raised a Point of Order, the Mayor acknowledged: “I realise this was a missed opportunity.” He added that “there may be good reason to review this Standing Order” and that it “doesn’t stop it being looked at again in the future.” No timeline. No commitment. Just acknowledgment that the rules had silenced elected representatives, paired with no urgency to fix it.

Three councillors representing thousands of residents have been effectively silenced from raising ward issues at full council.

Three councillors gagged as council admits mistake but skirts fix

The denial

At the same December 10 meeting where Councillor Grimston discovered he had been silenced, Council Leader Simon Hogg was asked about the new scrutiny system’s performance.

“I think this is a new process and the process is working well,” Hogg said. He described the Bradstow GOSC meeting as the headteacher being “quite rightly” given the chance to speak.

When directly asked why Labour councillors voted to prevent the headteacher from answering questions, Hogg responded: “I don’t think that’s what happened. I think they agreed to let her speak, which she did speak. This is a call-in committee. I mean, as I say, it’s a new system, which we’ll get used to, but it was used entirely appropriately.”

The documented record shows otherwise. Sarah Adams was allowed three minutes to speak. When opposition councillors asked if she could answer their questions about her own school, Chair Boswell ruled this “way outside the remit.” Labour councillors then voted 3-2 to uphold that ruling. Adams sat silent for the remaining two hours while eight concerns about her school’s closure were debated and rejected on party lines.

Hogg’s assessment that the system is “working well” and was “used entirely appropriately” stands against this reality: eight concerns raised, zero resolved; critical DfE correspondence still unexplained; disputed £4.6 million debt figure still unanswered; the one person most qualified to answer questions about Bradstow School prevented from doing so.

The expert advice ignored

The council paid approximately £29,000 to the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny for expert governance advice. At the March 2025 council meeting, Councillor Graham summarised the CfGS guidance on constitutional change: “This is what they say about changing the constitution: Changes should be considered by a working group and then go to a formal council committee like audit or general purposes before being submitted for final approval at council.”

What Labour did: held only two Task and Finish Group meetings, produced no written recommendations, sent changes straight to the Executive (which excludes the opposition), and nodded them through in less than two minutes. Full council received first sight of the detailed changes the same night as the vote.

CfGS had also noted that Wandsworth’s existing scrutiny structure was “showing signs of weakness and fatigue” and that “the politically dominated culture does not assist clarity and transparency.” The council’s response was to concentrate power further, not distribute it.

What happens next

A Freedom of Information request submitted by Putney.news on 12 December 2025 targets the Task and Finish Group records. Paper 25-36 [pdf] explicitly lists these as “background papers,” documents that under the Local Government Act 1972 should be publicly available. The response is due 15 January 2026.

Three outcomes are possible. Full disclosure would reveal what actually occurred in those two meetings that supposedly “informed and contributed to” the changes. No records existing would confirm the council kept no documentation from meetings used to justify major constitutional reforms. Refusal would raise further transparency concerns about a process already marked by inadequate consultation.

Whatever the response reveals, the pattern is already clear. Every promise made in March 2025 has been broken. Every warning issued by the opposition has proven true. The system is working exactly as designed: reducing oversight, silencing critics, and concentrating power.

The council approved these changes in less than two minutes. Residents will live with the consequences for years.

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Councillors Hogg, Apps and Osborne were contacted for comment. Any responses received will be published in full.

A Freedom of Information request for Task and Finish Group records is pending, with response due 15 January 2026.