The permanent CEO of Wandsworth and Richmond Councils is expected to be selected in a closed-door meeting tomorrow, through a process that has been so opaque it may not be lawful.
Six councillors meet at York House in Twickenham at 6pm on Thursday. They are the same six who met behind closed doors at the meeting we covered last month, when the country’s best-paid council job first came up for decision. It pays £294,120 a year, more than any other council chief executive in England, to run every service that half a million residents across Wandsworth and Richmond rely on.
No appointment was confirmed at that meeting. What was decided, instead, is how the job will be filled. The committee’s own minutes record a resolution to go with ‘an internal process with full assessment’ rather than a fresh open competition.
Three options were on the table. The minutes do not say what the other two were, or why they were not chosen. They also do not say how many people were in the running for the job, or what criteria were used for the selection. Andrew Travers, interim chief executive since April 2025, is the only person already inside that process.
Other details a council confident in its process could publish without naming any candidates have also been withheld. There is no published timetable for when a decision is expected. There is no published job description or person specification setting out what the councils are looking for. The minutes refer to ‘the external consultant’s report’ without naming the consultant, what they were paid, or what they recommended.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has said publicly that the more senior a public official and the more public money involved, the more scrutiny their pay and appointment should attract, not less. On that measure, Wandsworth and Richmond have it backwards: the more senior and the more expensive the post, the less the public has been told.
Asked twice, told nothing
Putney.news wrote to the committee’s secretary on 19 June, pointing out that minutes confined to a bare resolution do not meet the council’s legal duty to keep ‘a reasonably fair and coherent record’ of a decision this significant. There was no reply.
On 1 July, with the 9 July agenda published and the same unexplained minutes tabled again for approval, we wrote a second time, repeating the request and asking for a written summary of the decision to be added before Thursday’s meeting.
There has been no reply to that letter either.
The letters raise two specific legal duties. One is a requirement, under Section 100C(2) of the Local Government Act 1972, to keep a written summary of decisions taken behind closed doors. The other, under Section 100D, is a duty to list the background papers a report relied on, even where the papers themselves stay confidential.
In the second letter, we asked the council to confirm that a summary would be added before Thursday’s meeting, and that the background papers behind Paper 26-155, the report due to be considered at that meeting, would be listed rather than the box ticked to say none were used.
Neither request has been answered and nothing has changed with the meeting due tomorrow. The press and public are excluded from the meeting, as they have been throughout the entire process.
This is not the first time the recruitment has stalled. A 2024 open competition, run through the recruitment firm Gatenby Sanderson, drew five applicants and interviewed two, and produced no appointment either. Two years on, the councils have moved from an open competition that led nowhere to a closed, internal-only process with no outside field at all.
Other councils manage this differently. Cheltenham, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Buckinghamshire have all named their chief executives at public meetings, with far less secrecy around the process than Wandsworth and Richmond have shown.
What Thursday’s vote actually settles, and what it doesn’t
Neither council can appoint a chief executive without a vote of the full council, held in public. That is the formal safeguard built into the law. But that vote only gets a name put in front of it. If Thursday’s closed meeting puts forward one name, drawn entirely from an internal process nobody outside the room has seen, the public vote that follows has nothing to choose between. The decision that matters will already have been made, out of sight, before anyone elected to represent residents gets a say.
Six people you can write to
Residents who want to raise this before that happens can write directly to any of the six committee members deciding it. For Wandsworth: Cllr Aled Richards-Jones, Cllr Simon Hogg and Cllr Peter Graham. For Richmond: Cllr Gareth Roberts, Cllr Jim Millard and Cllr Julia Neden-Watts.
