Wandsworth may be asked to help pay for repairs to Hammersmith Bridge, after the government abandoned a seven-year-old funding agreement that split the mounting costs equally between central government, Transport for London (TfL) and Hammersmith and Fulham Council (H&FC).
Since 2021, the cost of repairing the bridge has been notionally split three ways; a formula that has resulted in paralysis, in large part because H&FC can’t even hope to cover its part of the estimated £240m costs.
On Tuesday that split was walked away from during a debate in Parliament that was secured by Putney MP Fleur Anderson. Unprompted, the Minister for Local Transport signalled that other boroughs, principally Wandsworth and Richmond, could now be asked to contribute.
The shift is far from a solution. Wandsworth has twice refused to contribute to the costs of reopening Hammersmith Bridge, once at a closed meeting of the bridge’s “Taskforce” and again last week at an election hustings in Roehampton.
Minister for Local Transport Simon Lightwood MP told the House that the Department for Transport would “assess higher contributions and additional third-party contributions favourably” on any funding bid for the bridge; the first time such language has been used.
It was the only thing that moved during the session. Despite impassioned pleas from MPs, including Anderson, Richmond Park’s Sarah Olney, Andy Slaughter (Labour, Hammersmith & Chiswick), Olly Glover (Lib Dem, Didcot & Wantage) and Greg Smith (Conservative, Mid Buckinghamshire), everything else in the debate stood still.
The debate did produce an unexpected result: just a few hours later, at a hustings in Southfields, the Labour candidate declared that she had heard from Anderson directly that funding had “now been agreed”. There was no evidence of that during the debate and we are treating the claim in the same way as a recent claim by the Liberal Democrats that they have resolved the decades-long signalling problems with the District Line on the Wimbledon branch: with a healthy dose of pre-election salt.
The fourth debate on Hammersmith Bridge in five years produced no new funding, no date for a funding decision, and no timetable for restoration.
Anderson’s closing remarks confirmed the pattern, cleanly and in her own words.
“I thank the Minister for his response. I am obviously disappointed that he did not suddenly announce when the taskforce will be, when the funding will be given, when the funding will be reconsidered and when the restoration will happen. I live in hope.”
The shift
Andy Slaughter knows Hammersmith and Fulham Council from the inside. He led it before entering Parliament, and he was blunt in his assessment. Referring to the amount H&FC has already put into the ailing bridge, he said:
“I did not believe it was feasible to add the £50 million in there. Hammersmith and Fulham council deserves a huge amount of credit for that, but the idea that it will make another substantive contribution towards the bridge is for the birds. The money is just not there. If we are saying that, we are saying the bridge will never reopen. We need a little bit of honesty here.”
The 1 June 2021 funding principle, agreed under the previous government, had split the repair cost three ways: the Department for Transport would pay a third, Transport for London would pay a third, and H&FC would pay a third. That principle has sat on the table for nearly five years without any funding actually being released against it.
Lightwood’s reply, a few minutes later, walked the principle away while talking about the new “Structures Fund” that the current Labour government announced nearly a year ago and for which applications opened last week. He said in his debate response:
“It is also an expectation of the Government that the local contribution toward the cost of any future repairs for Hammersmith bridge is provided. That is the case for all projects being assessed for funding through the structures fund. Although at present there are no plans to specify a minimum level of contribution, my Department intends to assess higher contributions and additional third-party contributions favourably. Some hon. Members mentioned a historical agreement to split the funding into a third, a third and a third. Obviously that was under a different Administration; I just know where we are today.”
Anderson confirmed the walkaway in her closing remarks, noting it as a small piece of progress in a debate that had produced no larger ones.
“I am also heartened to hear that the third-third-third funding structure is being reconsidered. It is not necessarily the structure on the table.”
The minister did not announce a new funding model. He did not commit a single pound. What he described was a disposition, not a decision. But a disposition stated in Parliament, in answer to a question five years in the asking, is the most movement on this issue since 2021. And the direction of movement points across the river.
The scorecard
Readers who followed Tuesday morning’s preview story sent seven specific asks to Anderson’s office via an email form after she specifically requested input from constituents.
In truth, none of the seven was raised as framed. Two were adjacent. One, which concerned inviting other benefiting boroughs to contribute, was the one whose territory ended up being moved by the minister, though it moved because Slaughter forced the ground open, not because Anderson raised the ask directly.
The others were designed to force specific answers: a named civil servant accountable for delivery, a date for the strengthening business case decision, publication of all Taskforce minutes, a statutory basis for the Taskforce, a yes-or-no on Spring 2026 fiscal event funding, an invitation to other boroughs to contribute, a yes-or-no on motor traffic.
The questions actually asked across the debate were different and almost all procedural. When will the Taskforce meet again? What is the updated cost estimate? Has an application been made to the Structures Fund? When will a decision be made? Each of those is answerable with “in due course”, and no minister can fairly be called evasive for saying so.
Olly Glover MP gave the structural reason for the gap.
“The Hammersmith bridge issue speaks to a structural problem for London infrastructure, in that the relationship between Transport for London and councils is not always best placed to ensure that planning and decision making on significant infrastructure happens on an effective cross-borough or cross-city basis.”
We made the same argument earlier this month. It is worth noting that a cross-party observation of a structural problem is not the same as a cross-party demand for a specific remedy. Without a specific ask, it tends to produce answers without commitments, which is what happened here.
Wandsworth
That leaves a question for Wandsworth Council. In her opening speech, Anderson described the council this way.
“I have worked closely with residents and with Wandsworth borough council, which is also fully engaged and supportive of the restoring of the bridge.”
That characterisation sits against two pieces of evidence already in the public domain.
The first is the Taskforce minutes of its last 30 January 2025 meeting, released to Putney.news earlier this year. At that meeting, H&FC Leader Cllr Stephen Cowan asked the Taskforce directly whether boroughs benefiting from the bridge should contribute to its repair. The minutes record Wandsworth’s reply in six words. “Cab member says no money. Disagrees with figures, suggests there is increased traffic.”
The second is on the record of a public hustings held in Roehampton last week. Wandsworth’s Cabinet Member for Transport, Cllr Jenny Yates, told residents:
“Wandsworth Council has never been formally asked to contribute financially and we’re not position to do so. We need our capital money to keep our own bridges safe.”
Both statements were calibrated to refuse a borough-to-borough request, and a council is entirely within its rights to do that. What changed on Tuesday was the form of the question. There is now a government policy statement on the table. The Department for Transport has said publicly that it will look favourably on higher local contributions and contributions from third parties when judging any bid for Structures Fund money. Wandsworth is the most directly affected neighbouring borough, and Roehampton, the ward most cut off by the closure, is the ward Yates represents.
The cost of the closure to Wandsworth residents was set on the public record by Anderson’s own debate speech. Ninety per cent of those she surveyed described the closure as “extremely disruptive”. Vehicle numbers on Putney Bridge rose 16 per cent between 2020 and 2023 (a claim disputed by the official figures). Six bus routes across the river have been withdrawn.
The local elections on 7 May will settle the composition of Wandsworth Council, but the government’s position on third-party contributions does not change depending on the result. Whoever leads the council on 8 May will have the question to answer.
What happens next
Three things to watch.
H&FC has not yet submitted its Structures Fund bid, though Slaughter expected one “quite shortly” in the debate. Bids close on 3 August 2026. Decisions are expected in autumn 2026.
The next Taskforce meeting, which had been the stated mechanism for unblocking the funding question, is now explicitly deferred until “once funding awards are made through the Structures Fund and agreed.” That is not soon, and it means the Taskforce will meet to confirm a decision rather than to help shape one.
Between now and then, the bridge remains open to pedestrians and cyclists, closed to motor traffic and buses, and costing Hammersmith and Fulham Council around £2 million a year to keep safe.
This piece draws on the Westminster Hall debate of 21 April 2026, the DfT Annex A released under FOI-00060732 on 27 February 2026, a transcript of the Roehampton hustings on 15 April 2026, and Putney.news’s published reporting on the bridge since January 2026. Quotes from the Westminster Hall debate are verbatim from the Hansard transcript.
A bit of fact checking would be useful here, Kieren. For example, Fleur Anderson repeated the ludicrous claim that “vehicle numbers on Putney Bridge rose 16 per cent between 2020 and 2023” – ludicrous not only because the 2020 figure included the height of the covid shutdown when travel was artificially reduced so of course there was an increase on that, but by comparing 2023 figures with 2020 ones she was comparing traffic after the bridge was closed with traffic after the bridge was closed.
And she also claimed (not reported here) that congestion as a result from the closure of Hammersmith Bridge had discouraged people from cycling. In fact on Putney Bridge, supposedly gridlocked since the closure, cycling increased by 27% between 2017 and 2023. She could not be more wrong if she tried, and she’s certainly tried!
Richard, two of the methodological points are fair: 2020 is a broken baseline for any traffic comparison because of Covid, and Hammersmith Bridge was already closed to vehicles by then.
But aren’t you making the same mistake with your cycling increase claim? 2017 predates the bridge closure, so comparing it with 2023, when the bridge had been closed to motor vehicles for nearly four years, is exactly the apples-to-oranges comparison you are accusing Anderson of. The 27% cycling figure may well say something real, but it says it about a system that was changing for a lot of reasons at once.
Anderson isn’t sourcing her number from nowhere, either: it is a figure the council has repeated for some time, and the more useful question is where it originates and whether the underlying data support the conclusion being drawn from it. We have already published the fact-check on exactly this kind of cyclist-share argument: Not one true word: Cllr Jenny Yates’s traffic claims, fact-checked. The section on cyclist numbers at the Putney Bridge junction looks at what the AECOM and TfL source data actually show, and it is not the story the headline figures tell.
Anderson was using DfT statistics from https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/count-points/36823 when she made her claim that traffic had increased by 16% between 2020 and 2023 in the debate. Anderson’s previous claim of an increase of 25% between 2019 and 2023 was based on a gross misreading of data by Wandsworth Council – at least she has moved on from those numbers.
But Anderson’s use of DfT data is still deeply problematic. Not only is she now comparing two DfT figures AFTER the closure, the first is only an ESTIMATE, not an actual count and as both you and Richard said, an estimate from the year most affected by COVID. In fact DfT shows that traffic as a whole in London rose by 16% between 2020 and 2023, so the fact that traffic on Putney Bridge increased by the same amount is hardly surprising.
Richard is not making a mistake in comparing estimates based on manual counts in 2017 and 2023 as that is exactly the comparison that reflects how traffic has changed on Putney Bridge as a result of the closure of Hammersmith Bridge. The result – motor traffic is DOWN from 42,511 to 37,239, some 12%, while bikes are UP from 4,404 to 6,166, around 25%. This also contradicts Anderson’s claim made in the debate in Parliament that congestion had caused a cycling to decrease – in fact the DfT’s numbers show quite the opposite has occurred, at least on Putney Bridge.
Looking beyond a single count point, traffic in the entire borough of Wandsworth has dropped since Hammersmith Bridge closed, and by more than that seen in the rest of London. Air quality has also improved, with Putney High Street, one of the most polluted places in London, for the first time meeting national pollution limits in 2025 (www.londonair.org.uk)
While it would be rash to ascribe all these improvements to the closure of Hammersmith Bridge, it is simply misrepresenting the data to claim that the closure has led to increased traffic in Putney, and with it more pollution, when the opposite is the case.
Anderson should be aware that DfT will make the final decision on whether Hammersmith Bridge deserves funding based on their own statistics, not an MP’s misreading of their numbers. Those numbers show that traffic on ALL the neighbouring bridges is down. It is likely that other submissions to the Structures Fund, unlike Hammersmith Bridge, will be able to demonstrate significant traffic displacement, and as a result be at the top of the queue for DfT funding.
The Structures Fund is national and only £1 billion.
If a large proportion of that fund was used for Hammersmith Bridgeit it would be electoral suicide nationally.
Enough public money has already been wasted on Hammersmith Bridge Ii.
A new Hammersmith Bridge would be far cheaper, cost less to maintain and be capable of carrying buses which have now significantly heavier.
Ok so since we published this story, we have obtained via FOI the TfL Thames screenline manual counts (the same dataset DfT relies on for these locations) for the five bridges that bracket the closure: Kew, Chiswick, Hammersmith, Putney and Wandsworth.
The cleanest comparison the data permits is 2018 (the last settled pre-closure year for Hammersmith) against 2024 (the most recent settled count). Both are manual classified counts conducted on weekdays in June and July. The picture is striking.
The headline reading: Motor traffic on Putney Bridge in 2024 was 1.9% below its 2018 level. Modestly down, not 16% up. Cycling on Putney Bridge was 3% above its 2018 level ( the smallest cycling increase of any of the five bridges).
So the data does not support either Anderson’s “16% rise” framing or the claim that “cycling has surged on Putney Bridge”. At least not on the data we currently have. Key will be a traffic survey due to be carried out this summer (if the same pattern is followed).
The wider reading is interesting. Hammersmith Bridge carried 25,869 motor vehicles a day in 2018. After closure, it carried none. If that traffic had simply displaced onto the four neighbouring open bridges, those four would now collectively be carrying around 25,000 more vehicles per day than they did in 2018.
Instead, their combined motor traffic in 2024 was 20,428 vehicles per day lower than in 2018, a fall of 12.6%. The displacement Anderson described as a harm to Putney residents does not appear at the bridge-count level. Most of the traffic seems to have evaporated rather than rerouted.
The specific claim that closure has driven a measurable rise in motor traffic on Putney Bridge is not supported by the manual counts – but it does indicate yet again that the redesign of Putney Bridge junction – designed using data taken during the pandemic – is the cause of the additional congestion – which has become excessive.
We all know this to be true and it has been painfully obvious for 18 months now.
We will do a follow-up piece at some point that sets the data out properly. If you have a specific reference for the borough-wide traffic comparison you mention, we would welcome it.
The borough counts are available here:
https://storage.googleapis.com/dft-statistics/road-traffic/downloads/data-gov-uk/local_authority_traffic.csv
In addition to the longer-term larger funding plans I think we should also focus on what can be done immediately or in the short-term at lower cost. Pedestrians and those on bikes can – and do – use the bridge in numbers. Remains a gap for those with limited mobility which could be addressed by lightweight pods crossing the bridge and connecting to buses. This would help in the interim while the rest grumbles along. Can we all lobby for that?