A £3.7 million Wandsworth Council contract to replace staff laptops and monitors has sat unchanged on the council’s decision-making schedule for more than a year, with no one managing it and no decision in sight.
The contract covers thousands of laptops, desktops and monitors for roughly 5,000 staff across Richmond and Wandsworth. The decision was due on 11 April 2025. That deadline passed over 12 months ago. No alternative procurement for IT equipment has appeared on any forward plan published since.
We asked the council five questions about the contract’s status, including who is now responsible for it and what provision is being made for staff equipment. The council did not respond.
The item has appeared on 21 consecutive forward plans. Every entry is identical. The same title. The same description. The same contact officer. The same decision date, 11 April 2025, that was already a year out of date when the most recent plan was published.
Nothing has been updated because there is nobody to update it. The item is a zombie, still walking across the council’s records, but with no one behind it.
Why it froze
In August 2025, we revealed that the procurement paper recommending the contract had been co-authored by Mark Chambers, the council’s IT Support Manager, who also sat on the national e-auction board that would oversee the purchase. The paper ruled out all other options. Wandsworth said it had found “no conflicts” after Chambers completed a declaration of interest form.
One month later, according to his LinkedIn profile, Chambers retired after more than 13 years at the council. Nobody picked up the work. In the eight months since he left, the forward plan entry has rolled forward on autopilot, unchanged and apparently unmanaged.
The rest of the public sector moved on
The government framework Wandsworth chose for this purchase works. Other councils have used it to buy IT equipment during the same period. The Crown Commercial Service, which ran the auction process, has itself been reorganised into a new body, the Government Commercial Agency, since 1 April 2026. The agency Chambers sat on the board of no longer exists in the form it did when the procurement paper was written.
Meanwhile, Wandsworth faces a projected budget gap of £137 million over three years and is banking on a £45 million transformation programme that its own chief executive has called “a broad, reasonable aspiration.” Whether the frozen contract is deliberate penny-pinching or institutional paralysis, the result for staff is the same: no new equipment, no visible plan, and a council that will not answer questions about it.
