Wandsworth has one of the strongest reputations in local government. It has the lowest council tax in London. It ranked in the national top ten for productivity this year. Its council leader said last month that residents can be confident “value for money is at the heart of everything we do.”
We decided to look at the numbers behind that claim.
The man running the council is the highest-paid council boss in England. His salary was approved earlier this month, at a Full Council meeting, without debate and without a press release. Residents were not told.
Andrew Travers earns £294,120 a year, 71% more than the Prime Minister. He has been in post on an interim basis since April 2025. No permanent appointment has been announced.
Two weeks before councillors approved his salary, Mr Travers told a public committee that the council’s only plan to avoid insolvency is “a broad, reasonable aspiration to get us going.”
That plan matters. Wandsworth faces a £137 million budget gap over the next two years. Its reserves stand at around £121 million, less than the gap they are meant to cover. As we reported last month, the £45 million transformation programme meant to close the shortfall has no identified savings behind it. The strategy setting out how those savings might be found is not due until September, after the May elections. Residents have not been formally told that without it, the council faces a 34% council tax rise.
Mr Travers recently wrote about the council’s top-ten productivity ranking in The MJ, the local government trade magazine, describing it as evidence of financial resilience. The article is behind a paywall. Residents cannot read it. The data his organisation presented to a committee in February raises questions about what that resilience looks like on the ground.
The workforce
The council’s own figures, presented to a joint committee in February, cover the year to December 2025. They show a workforce under strain in several measurable ways.
The most striking is sickness. Days lost to stress, anxiety and depression rose by 33.5% in a single year, from 2,896 to 3,867. That is not a general pattern across all illness categories. Every other cause of long-term sickness was stable or fell over the same period. The council’s own papers identified stress as “the biggest contributor to long term sickness.” Something specific is happening.
At the same time, the number of staff on formal underperformance procedures jumped from two to sixteen, an eightfold rise in twelve months.
Then there is pay. The median salary across the workforce is £45,564. One in six staff now use Wagestream, a service that lets workers draw part of their wages before payday when money runs short, up from one in ten six months ago. The average advance is £62. Mr Travers earns £294,120, 6.46 times the median salary of the people he manages. A year ago, before he took the post, that ratio was 5.1. The council’s own pay policy documents record both figures.
None of this is conclusive on its own. Stress sickness has risen across the public sector. Wagestream is offered as a staff benefit, not a sign of distress. But the direction of all these numbers, in the same period, in the same organisation, is worth understanding before accepting the efficiency story at face value.
The agency bill
When a council loses permanent staff faster than it can replace them, it fills the gaps with agency workers, temporary staff hired through recruitment firms, typically at a higher cost than permanent employees. The bills for this show up in workforce data but rarely in headlines.
Wandsworth’s agency bill for the year to date stands at £21.8 million, on course for around £29 million for the full year. To put that in context, the council’s entire annual parks budget is around £8 million.
More than half of that agency spending, £12.5 million, has gone to firms outside the council’s own approved supplier list. Councils negotiate preferred supplier agreements to keep agency costs under control. Spending outside those agreements typically means paying more, with less oversight. The council’s own papers noted that this uncontrolled proportion is growing.
A council spending nearly £30 million a year on temporary staff, with the majority of that going through uncontrolled channels, is not running lean. It is papering over a gap.
How the salary got here
This is not a new situation. The role has been England’s highest-paid council chief executive post since at least 2017/18, when Paul Martin earned £294,805 in it. Mr Travers’ immediate predecessor Mike Jackson was named the highest-paid council boss in the country by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in 2023/24, at £281,443. Mr Travers earns more.
There was a brief pause. When Brian Reilly held the post as interim chief executive from October 2024, the council’s own pay policy noted the pay ratio had fallen “largely due to the interim arrangements.” When Mr Travers took over in April 2025, it went back up.
For comparison, the chief executives of Southwark and Lambeth each earn around £230,000. Both run councils of comparable size as single boroughs. Mr Travers leads a shared service covering two boroughs, Richmond and Wandsworth, which the council would say justifies a higher salary. The combined workforce is around 3,650 people. That is a reasonable argument. It is also one that has never been tested publicly, because until now no one was looking.
The September strategy will be the first real test of whether the transformation plan is genuine. If it arrives with identified savings, the efficiency story holds. If it doesn’t, residents will have been paying the highest council chief executive salary in England – a 28% premium over other London council chief execs – for a plan that never existed. Putney.news has been tracking the financial trajectory since March 2025, when the warning signs first became visible.
Those are the questions. We put them to Mr Travers on Monday 16 March. Three days later, we have yet to receive a response.
What you can do
All 60 Wandsworth councillors face election in May 2026. You can find and contact your ward councillors at wandsworth.gov.uk/councillors. The medium-term financial strategy is due in September 2026. You can track council meetings through the democracy portal at wandsworth.gov.uk/democracy.
While Wandsworth Council may tout impressive statistics and efficiency metrics, there’s a fundamental governance challenge that numbers alone don’t capture and one glaringly evident in planning and finance committees where the consequences are most acute.
The pressure placed on council officers is particularly severe in these technical arenas, where it’s painfully obvious that many councillors haven’t read the papers, lack grasp of essential detail, and make decisions based on political instinct rather than informed analysis. Officers find themselves in an impossible position: expected to deliver outcomes based on what councillors think can be done, rather than what’s legally permissible, financially viable, or technically achievable.
In planning committees, this manifests as members making pronouncements about development viability, design standards, or policy compliance without understanding the statutory framework they’re operating within. Officers must then either push back against elected members risking accusations of being obstructive or find ways to work around decisions made in ignorance of material planning considerations.
In finance, the problem is equally acute. Complex budget decisions, capital programmes, and financial risk assessments require detailed scrutiny, yet too often councillors arrive unprepared, relying on superficial understanding or political positioning rather than engaging with the actual numbers and their implications. Cllr Ireland performance over the last year has been painful to watch.
“Best run” should mean councillors who do their homework, understand the technical constraints officers work within, and make informed decisions rather than imposing unrealistic expectations born of inadequate preparation. Without this basic competence, even the most capable officers are set up to fail.
One might hope the new slate of candidates will bring individuals with the necessary technical skills and commitment to rigorous preparation but given the pattern of candidate selection prioritising political loyalty over professional competence, that hope appears optimistic at best.