Six councillors met behind closed doors on Thursday night to fill England’s best-paid council job. Residents have been told nothing. Not what happened in the room. Not who else was in it. Not how many people are in the running.
The meeting was of the Joint Staffing Committee, the handful of councillors who handle senior appointments across Wandsworth and Richmond. Its agenda was hiring a permanent chief executive on £294,120 a year – the highest paid in the country – to run every service half a million people rely on across the two boroughs.
The press and public were shut out, and the report on the table, Paper 26-131, was withheld in full, every page either blank and stamped “Document is Restricted” or missing from the public pack altogether. No candidate count. No criteria. No minutes.
Yesterday, we asked the council a simple question: who is your chief executive? The response noted that a council committee had met “to discuss the process for appointing the new CEO”, with “a full announcement” to follow once “a new CEO is appointed”.
So we asked at what stage the process was, if the appointment would be confirmed in public, and why the council was not following the usual open competition – which it did as recently as 2024. We received no response.
Public vote, private choice
The council’s answer is technically correct. By law, a council’s chief executive can be appointed only by a vote of the full council, held in public, so nobody was formally appointed on Thursday. But it is the committee that chooses the name put to that vote. The six councillors who met in secret are the ones who effectively decide. The committee has another meeting planned for 9 July so it may make the decision there; or it may have already decided. No one knows and the council won’t tell anyone either.
This, incidentally, is not how most councils act.
Other councils simply do this in the open. Cheltenham confirmed its chief executive in open session, announced by the mayor. Newcastle-under-Lyme agreed its appointment at full council, and said the search had drawn 28 applicants. Buckinghamshire confirmed and named its new chief executive after a public meeting in February. Public confirmation, a named appointee, the numbers on the record: that is the norm. Wandsworth and Richmond, who advertised this very job openly only two years ago, are the outlier.
The name will come out. The law allows nothing else: a chief executive cannot be appointed in private. The only question is why a council that must take this decision in public is working so hard to keep everything around it in the dark.
