Wandsworth Council says it will pay for 24 new police officers, but how it plans to fund them is coming under increasing scrutiny, and may not be legal.
Cabinet resolved on 29 July to pay for two police sergeants and 22 constables with the money coming from the Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy (NCIL), the neighbourhood share of the wider levy that developers pay to fund one-off local improvements.
Cllr Peter Graham, the council’s Cabinet member for finance, told Full Council the officers will form a standalone team under council control, not tied to individual wards. The final cost is still being negotiated with the Metropolitan Police, with an update due in September.
The commitment comes as the council faces a projected £137m budget gap by 2028/29.
The Planning Act 2008, which created the Levy, lists the kinds of infrastructure it can pay for: roads, schools, flood defences, medical and sports facilities, open spaces. Police officers are not on that list. Policing appears only in separate guidance issued after the Act, not in the law itself.
Councils split their money into two pots that are supposed to stay separate. Capital money pays for one-off things like buildings and equipment. Revenue money pays the day-to-day running costs, including salaries. Wandsworth’s own website says it treats all NCIL income as capital. The Local Government Association’s guidance for councillors says staff costs are “almost always revenue expenditure,” and that councils generally cannot use capital income to cover it.
The question is not whether Wandsworth needs more visible policing. Nobody at the Full Council meeting where the plan was announced, or the Cabinet meeting that approved it, asked whether the council was allowed to pay for it this way.
Other London authorities have read the same rules differently. The City of London Corporation’s planning committee stated in 2014 that CIL money “can be used to fund the provision, improvement, replacement, operation or maintenance of infrastructure but cannot be used to fund… revenue schemes.”
Cabinet formally confirmed the plan a week later, in Paper No. 26-181, which Putney.news covered at the time as one of the evening’s more positive developments. That paper contains a section titled “Legal Implications.” It runs to one paragraph and does not mention the capital or revenue question at all. It says only that “future decisions” will need legal advice “as the proposals develop.”
Graham told Full Council the scheme was modelled on Westminster City Council, which he said had “directly employed nine additional police officers” in a similar arrangement. But Westminster’s own record of that scheme describes it as backed by “nearly £3m” of “Council investment.” The precise figure, from Westminster’s own Cabinet Member decision, is revenue expenditure of £2.92 million, funded through a three-year grant agreement with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. Neither Westminster’s press release nor its ruling Labour group mentions the Levy as a funding source.
There is already a well-established, uncontroversial route for councils that want to buy extra police officers. A Section 92 agreement with the Metropolitan Police lets a council pay from its ordinary revenue budget rather than a capital levy. It is the same route Westminster itself used. Havering used it in 2019, funding it “corporately” from its own budget, not developer money. It is slower, and comes with a bigger bill to day-to-day spending.
The new officers will not go to individual wards either. Graham confirmed to Cllr Stephen Worrall that the team would be “at the disposal of the council” rather than allocated locally. Neighbourhood CIL money is raised, and meant to be spent, in the areas that generated it. Putney.news has traced where Wandsworth’s development levy money actually goes before, and found much of it leaving the areas that raised it.
What residents were told
The same Cabinet paper notes that the previous, Labour-run administration also funded “a number of schemes, both revenue and capital,” from the same Levy. It does not say which schemes, or how much.
To be fair to Graham, when Cllr Worrall pressed him on the scheme’s mechanics at Full Council, on officer type, cost and which wards would benefit, he answered directly rather than deflecting. He confirmed the new recruits would be warranted police constables and sergeants rather than PCSOs, and was upfront that the final cost was still being negotiated.
Cllr Simon Hogg, the Leader of the Opposition, separately criticised the wider Spending Review process at that meeting for lacking “consultation,” “transparency” and “scrutiny.” His criticism was about the process in general. It did not address the legal question over NCIL funding specifically.
Putney.news put six questions to Cllr Graham on 7 August, including whether the council took legal advice before deciding NCIL could fund police salaries, and what its assessment is of the risk of legal challenge. This story will be updated with his response.
What you can do
- Ask your ward councillor what happened to your neighbourhood’s own NCIL-funded schemes. Contact details are at wandsworth.gov.uk/councillors.
- The council publishes an annual Infrastructure Funding Statement showing how CIL money is spent, on its CIL expenditure page.
- If you believe a specific scheme in your area was wrongly cancelled, you can complain to the council directly, then escalate to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which looks at whether councils made decisions the right way.
