Wandsworth’s General Purposes Committee meets this evening to consider scrapping a package of rules recently introduced by the previous Labour administration.
The anti-democratic effort introduced in two sections in 2024 and 2025 excluded the public, opposition councillors and even its own councillors from taking part in council business in favour of centralising power in the hands of the council leader and his executive team. They were developed in secret and with minimal scrutiny, resulting in drafting mistakes that made a mockery of the council’s decision-making processes.
As a key condition to signing a confidence-and-supply agreement that would allow the Conservative a governing majority, independent councillor Malcolm Grimston insisted that many of the changes be reversed. A special council meeting is expected to vote on the package on Wednesday.
What’s changing, at a glance
- Scrutiny committees come back. Six of them – Transport, Health, Housing, Children’s, Environment, Finance – return with the power to see Cabinet decisions before they’re made, not after.
- The single stacked oversight committee goes. Labour had replaced six scrutiny committees with one, which could only review decisions after they’d already been taken. The process was used once and served as the low point in the previous administration when a head teacher was silenced from defending against the closure of her own school. It’s gone from tonight, replaced by an 11-member standing committee.
- Motions are freed from the whip. Councillors can now raise a ward issue at Full Council without asking their party’s permission first – Labour had previously used the rule to silence Grimston in the council chamber.
- Written questions overhauled. Four per councillor per cycle, answered within 15 working days, published for everyone to see.
- The motions deadline is cut. From five working days’ notice to three, and from a 10am to a midday cut-off. Nobody asked for this one. The council did it anyway.
- Absence rules relaxed. A formal pairing system, and named substitutes on committees, for councillors who can’t attend.
Does this deliver what Grimston negotiated?
Mostly, yes. Every headline item in his May agreement – the scrutiny committees, the written questions overhaul, the whip-free motions, Leader’s Question Time – is in tonight’s papers as specified.
Three things aren’t. The deal promised every councillor access to full council papers without needing to sit on the right committee first; that provision isn’t anywhere in what’s being voted on. It promised opposition speakers a guaranteed role at Cabinet meetings and public deputations there too; the rules that would carry that right aren’t part of tonight’s package.
A members’ charter – a code of conduct for how councillors treat each other, one of Grimston’s three conditions in May – is also missing from the deal.
The bit that doesn’t add up
The report also proposes scrapping the Deputy Cabinet Member role introduced in May last year while also defining it for the first time in the constitution.
Controversially, the Deputy Cabinet Member posts were created by former leader Simon Hogg in a transparent effort to secure loyalty from his own backbenchers: paid positions that appeared from nowhere and were awarded to councillors who, coincidentally, had voted for him in a leadership challenge just weeks earlier.
The positions were described as an “expensive bribe” by the new and current cabinet member for finance Peter Graham.
It’s hard to explain why the council would define a role it was scrapping, unless it formed part of what has been described as “difficult and frustrating” negotiations between the parties and there was a desire to retrospectively lend legitimacy to the new, scrapped position.
Still a closed box
The measures are a pull-back from the worst of Labour’s changes, but they don’t represent a step forward. They restore scrutiny, but don’t open the council up. Residents still have limited rights to speak at committees; and Wandsworth remains a Cabinet system where a small group of councillors decide, and everyone else scrutinises from outside.
Four miles away, under the same chief executive, Richmond runs it differently. Richmond moved to a full committee system in 2019. The committees aren’t a scrutiny layer, they’re where decisions actually get made. Any resident can register to speak at any committee by noon the day before. Any resident can ask a question at Full Council; thirty minutes of every meeting is set aside for it. Richmond shares the same officers, same chief executive, same borough boundary a few streets over: the difference is a political choice, not a resourcing one.
By concentrating power in a handful of people, Wandsworth Council produces the kind of power dynamics that create a toxic working environment that is visible at most committee and council meetings and which councillors themselves have become increasingly vocal about.
Correction, 9am: When describing the impact of the General Overview and Scrutiny Committee (GOSC), we originally noted that the head of Bradstow School was prevented from defending the closure of her school. What we meant of course was that she was prevented from defending against the closure of her school. This has since been corrected.
