Wandsworth Council picks its next permanent chief executive tonight, the best-paid council job in England. There’s only one problem. The public is shut out of the room and told literally nothing: not who is getting the job, nor how that choice is made.
Tonight’s process has more in common with Rome than with local government. Six councillors will file into Room 122, the doors will close, and at some point a name will emerge. This is how a conclave elects a pope: sealed chamber, no questions, smoke signal, announcement. It is not how a democracy is meant to choose the official responsible for running all of its public services.
The post carries real weight. The chief executive runs two councils, Wandsworth and Richmond, and is responsible for delivering every service more than half a million people depend on. At £294,120, it pays £122,000 more than the Prime Minister and has topped England’s council pay table for years. The salary was approved at a Full Council meeting this spring, without debate and without a press release. Politicians set the direction. The chief executive decides how to deliver it: which contracts are signed, which services are prioritised, how the money is actually used.
Andrew Travers has run both councils as interim chief executive for 14 months. Tonight could make that permanent. Whether he is the only candidate, whether there is a shortlist of five or of one, what the councils are actually looking for in the role: none of that is public. There is no way for residents to tell whether tonight is a genuine competition or a formality.
What the papers show
The appointment report fills pages 5 to 18 of the public pack. Every page of it is withheld. Five appear in the document as blank pages, each stamped “Document is Restricted.” The remaining pages are not in the document at all. You know they exist only because the real numbers are included in the PDF agenda. Read it online and you would have no idea.
The law permits a council to keep the names of job applicants private. That is what the exemption is for. It does not permit a council to delete the criteria, the process, the priorities, or anything else about how the decision is being made. Standard practice is to publish the full process document and redact only the names. Wandsworth chose instead to restrict the lot, stretching a rule meant to shield a few names into a reason to remove every word about how the most powerful post in the borough is being filled.
One name does appear in the public pack. The agenda was signed on 10 June by Andrew Travers, for a meeting that will decide whether the permanent job is his.
Not the first time
This is not the first time controversy has followed the man who may be about to get the role.
Travers was chief executive of Barnet Council from 2012. On 5 May 2016, the wrong electoral register was sent to all 155 of the borough’s polling stations during the London Mayoral elections. Voters were turned away at the door. Four days later, Travers left the role by what the council described as “mutual agreement.” An independent inquiry followed.
He was hired as interim chief executive at Lambeth Council in 2017, and made permanent in July 2018. In February 2022, the day after the Housing Ombudsman published a critical report on the council, he announced he was standing down. His successor was appointed through an open process.
None of this is disqualifying. People leave jobs in difficult circumstances. The question is whether residents of Wandsworth and Richmond, whose money pays this salary, are entitled to know who they are appointing and on what basis. Tonight’s process says no.
Culture from the top
Culture is set from the top. The message sent by tonight’s meeting is that the chief executive and the council leaders of both boroughs are content with total secrecy on one of the most consequential decisions their councils make. Who gets to run all public services is not, apparently, something residents need to know about.
It is part of a longer pattern. Wandsworth’s constitution once required everything to be done in public, a standard steadily narrowed. The council went dark under the previous Labour administration. Since taking control in May, the new Conservative administration has cancelled every scheduled committee and held no public Cabinet while it tries to reorganise its constitution. The Conservative leader, Cllr Aled Richards-Jones, promised residents “transparent decision making” on taking office. So far, we have seen the opposite.
Putney.news put questions to Wandsworth Councils, both leaders, and the leader of the Wandsworth Labour opposition on Tuesday. In keeping with their secretive approach, none have replied. Once the appointment is made, residents can request the process (though not the candidates’ names) under freedom of information law.
The job was advertised in the open in autumn 2024, through the recruitment firm Gatenby Sanderson, with a closing date of 20 October. Nobody was appointed. When Travers arrived as interim the following April, the councils set out the full process: an open search, five applicants, two interviewed. No second public advertisement has followed.
The person chosen tonight will run the services every resident depends on, in the best-paid job of its kind in England. That choice is being made in a room the public cannot enter, from a report it cannot read, by a council that has grown used to telling residents as little as it can. On the most important appointment it will make this year, it has decided they need to know nothing at all.
The meeting is at 7pm, in Room 122 of Wandsworth Town Hall.
