The cabinet member now responsible for Putney’s junction walked it with residents this month. By their own group’s account, nothing was committed. Three promised fixes remain undone, and the council’s works page has not been updated in nearly three months.
Cllr Daniel Hamilton, Wandsworth’s Cabinet Member for Transport since the Conservatives won the council in May, joined a Putney Action Group walkabout of the junction and the High Street. With him were Cllr Ethan Brooks, the local ward councillor for Thamesfield, and Henry Cheung, the council’s Assistant Director of Engineering, who has attended every previous walkabout and led much of the technical discussion at each one. PAG organised the walk. No commitments emerged from it.
It was the third such walkabout in seven months. The first was in December, the second in January. The fixes, as documented here in June, still aren’t done.
A pattern across three walks
The first walkabout was on Monday 9 December 2025. Then-transport cabinet member Cllr Jenny Yates joined council leader Simon Hogg, Cheung, and senior TfL staff on a walk that was memorably interrupted by a scaffolding lorry reversing into the hotel development site, blocking the road for five minutes while the group watched. Two days later, Yates responded to a Conservative motion in the council chamber without mentioning the walk at all.
The second was on Friday 17 January 2026. Cheung and the Director of Traffic Engineering Nick O’Donnell led, joined by Brooks, Putney MP Fleur Anderson for the first 20 minutes, and representatives from PAG and local residents. Cheung walked through recent timing changes and came with diagrams of options under consideration. The junction remained congested throughout.
The pattern is familiar: genuine engagement, no commitments, no follow-through on the outstanding physical works.
It is important to note that the junction redesign was a Conservative project from 2017, and the scheme was approved unanimously under Labour in September 2023. While local councillors have been open about how the junction design has fundamentally failed and resulted in extreme congestion for nearly two years, the Conservatives are now in the position of having to decide what to do about the situation. The test, as it has always been, is delivery.
Three jobs. No dates.
The council maintains a webpage listing outstanding junction works. It was last updated in April. Three jobs remain on that page. None has a firm completion date and it remains unclear – some would say questionable – whether they will collectively resolve the traffic problem.
The Putney Station lane reassignment (changes to traffic lanes near the station) was listed as due to complete in May 2026. That date has passed. The page carries no update. A consultation on the queue-jumping issue that the council promised by June has also not appeared.
The removal of the traffic island opposite Snappy Snaps, which would free up two northbound lanes, is described as “in the final stages of approval with TfL. Construction dates are difficult to commit to at this stage.”
The full inset of Bus Stop M, next to TK Maxx, remains blocked by a BT phone box. One of two phone boxes has already been removed. The box and why it matters has been covered in full here.
The scrutiny gap
On 11 February this year, before he became Cabinet Member for Transport, Hamilton sat on the Transport Overview and Scrutiny Committee and put a formal request on the record.
“This remains an issue of huge public concern,” he said. “So can I just formally request that we keep this on the agenda for future meetings, because I think it is one that residents want to see real action on.”
Hamilton now runs transport for the borough. The committee he addressed in February will next meet on Thursday 24 September 2026.
The June meeting was cancelled following the election. No junction scrutiny has taken place in the interim, and none will until September; a gap of around seven months from his standing-item request.
There is a further constraint. Cheung has said that making any changes to the junction would require “a Cabinet Member direction” and “a very similar committee process” to the unanimous approval it received in September 2023, as reported here. That Cabinet Member is Hamilton.
The new administration has been in office for less than two months. The case for patience is real. But the outstanding works predate the election, the works page has been frozen since April, and Cheung has been clear about what is required to move things forward.
What happens next
The next public moment for scrutiny is the Transport Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Thursday 24 September 2026 at 7.30pm. Papers have not yet been published.
Residents can write to their ward councillors or to Cllr Hamilton directly at cllr.d.hamilton@wandsworth.gov.uk. The council’s junction works page is at wandsworth.gov.uk.
For many Putney voters, this was the defining issue of the May election. Three walkabouts. No dates. The page still says May. The calendar says September.
