Putney MP Fleur Anderson has launched a petition to stop Wandsworth Council scrapping the Alton Estate regeneration, as a council-wide spending review puts the scheme’s future in doubt.
Residents backed the plan in a ballot only last year. The Conservative administration that took control of the council in May is now reviewing what it can still afford, and before the election it told voters it might scrap the scheme. That review is due to report to the council’s Cabinet this month.
Anderson’s petition asks the council not to ‘scale back or stop or delay’ the plan. Roehampton residents voted 82.4% in favour last October, though on a turnout of 41.5%, so only about a third of those eligible actually backed it.
The review covers ‘all spending across the council, including major projects’, as the administration tries to close a £137m budget gap, the largest in the council’s history.
A contract to demolish, a building still standing
The clearest sign of how shaky the plan has become sits at the entrance to the estate. In April, the council signed a £359,690 contract with Alpine Demolition to tear down the former Co-op building on Danebury Avenue, the site of the plan’s first phase, Block A. Three months on, the building is still standing.
The delay is not simple idleness. Knocking the building down would commit the council to what is meant to replace it: a nine-storey block of 55 council homes, with a library, GP surgery, youth space and community hall. The council does not yet have the money to build it.
The wider £100m plan needs £77m from outside the council that it has not secured. That gap only appeared in council papers six weeks after the ballot, so residents did not see it when they voted. A separate claim from a leaseholder at Hersham Close, over loss of light, also has to be settled before work can start.
Demolishing the Co-op, then, means starting a project the council cannot yet pay for and has not yet cleared in law. So it has paid to knock the building down, and left it standing.
What the Conservatives said before the election
At a hustings on 15 April, weeks before the vote, the Conservative candidate Nick Austin was asked about the plan. Labour’s candidate said it was funded and on track, with no funding gap. Austin said the Conservatives would ‘scrap the plan if elected’ and noted that his party ‘cannot commit to a scheme with a funding gap’.
The Conservatives won the following month. Since then, the party has used leaflets to tell residents it will scrap Labour’s plans for the nearby Lennox and Ashburton estates. Neither leaflet mentions Alton.
In both cases, the council has not confirmed that any formal decision has actually been taken. On Lennox, announced this week, it would not even say whether the whole scheme or just its tower block had been dropped.
Austin’s warning is still the only thing anyone in the new administration has said in public about Alton, and he said it before a single vote was counted.
What is happening now
Some parts of the estate are moving. The play areas at Downshire Field and the Alton Activity Centre are being rebuilt, with a contractor on site since November and the work due to open this summer. Focus Hall, the community hall, reopened in February, one of two rare signs of progress on an estate long used to delay.
The homes are the uncertain part. Block A won planning permission in March but has not been built, with the funding gap and the legal claim still hanging over it.
Anderson said she had since met the Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Matthew Corner, and welcomed what she called his commitment to Block A. She said he was reviewing the rest of the plan, and that she had pressed residents’ case for the full scheme.
‘I hope that the new administration will honour the ballot and deliver the plan without cut-backs or delays,’ she told Putney.news. ‘To do anything less than the full plan would be to let down Alton Estate residents. They voted overwhelmingly for the plan last year.’
We asked Cllr Corner for a response; he has not provided one. It is not clear whether the commitment Anderson described means keeping a planning permission the council has already granted, or actually paying to build Block A despite its funding gap.
How the plan got here
Roehampton has waited more than a decade for the Alton to be rebuilt, through a run of schemes that came and went. In October 2020, the council approved a large one: 1,108 new homes, heavy demolition, and most of them for private sale.
But the developer, Redrow, had already pulled out before the vote. The Mayor of London and residents’ groups attacked the scale of demolition and the shortage of affordable housing.
Labour took control in May 2022 and scrapped it. After a review, it swapped that scheme for the current Alton Renewal Plan: fewer homes, less demolition, and more social and council housing. That is the plan residents voted for, and the one Anderson is now fighting to protect.
The pattern underneath has not changed. A plan backed by one administration can be reworked or dropped by the next, and residents get no say in that. They only get to vote on the plan put in front of them.
Where residents can act
Anderson’s petition is open now. Residents can also contact their Roehampton ward councillors – who failed to response to questions sent to them by Putney.news – or watch for the council’s Cabinet agenda for 29 July, which will be the first sign of whether Alton is up for a decision. The agenda is due to be published about a week beforehand.
