Wandsworth Council wants to challenge a £84m cut in funding, and needs your help to do so

Wandsworth Council has asked residents to back its demand that the Government reverse an £84m cut to its funding. So far 130 of them have.

The council opened a survey on 28 August. Six days later 179 people have filled it in, in a borough of more than 330,000. Of those, 141 got as far as the question that matters, which is whether they support the council asking the Government to think again. One hundred and thirty said yes. Five said no.

The council needs those answers before it can lodge the complaint at all.

Behind the survey is the largest council tax rise the borough has ever faced. The Conservative administration says council tax will have to go up by 130 per cent even if its savings programme delivers everything it has promised. The Labour government’s working assumption is more than 80 per cent.

What it means is that you will be paying somewhere between £500 and £1,500 EXTRA next year if nothing changes. Wandsworth’s share of a Band D bill is £510 a year. A 130 per cent rise takes that to about £1,170. The Mayor of London’s share is unaffected, so a bill right now of £1,020 becomes something near £1,680.

The council’s own figure was due in July, promised under the confidence and supply agreement that keeps this administration in office. But then there was a by-election: it is now promised this month.

The council intends to make its case under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, a law that lets a council formally ask the Government to act. Government guidance sets out what has to happen first. A council must consult local people and try to reach agreement with them before it submits. It cannot rely on any earlier consultation on the same subject. And the department will ask to see the consultation, and the responses, before it considers the proposal.

The council’s leader, Cllr Robert Morritt, put it plainly in the announcement. “To enable us to submit a proposal,” he said, “we really need to hear from residents via our engagement exercise.”

The survey is not a question about what to cut. It is the agreement the council has to be able to produce before it is allowed to complain. It was announced in a press release, on the Friday before the August bank holiday.

What it asks, and what it doesn’t

The survey takes five to ten minutes. It asks whether you agree the council faces difficult choices, then asks you to drag eight spending principles into order, and eight approaches to saving money. It asks whether you support the approach to Government, and which of four things ministers should be asked for.

It does not ask which services should be cut. That decision falls to the council on 15 September, when an extraordinary meeting of the full council sits at 7.30pm to take it. Residents are ranking principles. The council is choosing what to close. No closing date has been published.

A third of the people who started never got to the end and support is high but falling. Among the first 100 responses, 95 per cent backed the approach and two opposed it. Among the 80 since, support is 87 per cent, and four have picked “neither support nor oppose”.

Two neighbours, the same law

Two boroughs face the same funding review as Wandsworth. Both are Conservative-run and are now consulting their residents under the same Act.

Kensington and Chelsea opened its Sustainable Communities Act consultation this week, five days after Wandsworth. It closes on 4 October. It puts a figure on the page: more than £100m over the funding period, and more than 40 per cent of the budget the council controls.

Its leader, Cllr Elizabeth Campbell, tells residents there what she is doing and who with. “Alongside Westminster and Wandsworth, I am proposing that this Council submit a proposal under the Sustainable Communities Act,” she writes. “To take this forward, I need your support.”

Westminster went earlier and wider. It launched what it called its biggest ever engagement exercise on public spending on 28 July, a month before Wandsworth, writing to more than 200,000 people by letter, email, notices in public buildings and social media. It asks residents which services they would least like to see reduced or scrapped. It publishes its own worst case: a £160m gap by 2029, and council tax rising by up to 200 per cent if nothing changes. The answers, it says, will feed into next year’s budget decisions.

Kensington and Chelsea also ran an eight-week budget consultation on this issue last year and took more than 400 responses. It published the numbers: 84 per cent understood why savings were needed, 48 per cent backed a 5 per cent council tax rise, 60 per cent supported a second homes premium. It published a formal analysis, and it keeps a “we asked, you said, we did” record against the budget it approved in February.

Wandsworth has published no closing date, no council tax figure of its own, and no undertaking to publish what comes back. That is not specifically the fault of the current administration; up until May, Wandsworth Council was in Labour’s hands, and that administration refused to acknowledge the coming increase and, remarkably, continued to claim it would freeze tax if voted back into power.

What residents said anyway

Fifty people have written something in their own words. Around ten named things they would stop: libraries and leisure centres, the Northcote Road summer pedestrianisation, traffic schemes, translation services, the council’s own leaflets, and two council-owned houses on Westover Road that one respondent says sell for between £1.7m and £4.8m.

One wrote about the sums at home. “I am facing a potential increase of £100pcm in council tax and as a single disabled worker would have to consider leaving my home and the borough after 10 years if it’s pushed through.” The same person wants bin collections and street cleaning protected, and the council’s marketing budget cut.

Another wrote: “I am naturally suspicious that this has surfaced from a council with this particular political make-up.”

Two said the survey could not be answered as put. “Many of these approaches are expressed in such general terms as to make them meaningless,” one wrote. Another called it “a very superficial survey”.

One asked for a vote. “Referendum on council tax increase, AS THE LAW states anything above 5%,” they wrote. There will be no vote, whatever the rise. The Government has confirmed it will not set council tax referendum limits for Wandsworth in 2027/28 or 2028/29, which leaves the council free to raise the bill by any amount in either year without putting it to residents.

The politics run both ways. One respondent wants the last Labour administration’s spending exposed. Another backs the cut: “Wandsworth Council Tax was kept artificially low for decades by the then-Conservative national government. Labour is right to take this away.”

A fourth wrote: “I adore that we have low council tax. It is fantastic. But when I tell people that I have two rubbish collections a week and a street sweeper that goes up Lavender Hill about 4 times a week they say it is excessive.”

Where residents were asked to rank, three results stand out. Asked what the Government should be asked for, they put keeping more locally raised money, meaning business rates, stamp duty and income tax, a long way first. Sixty-five of the 116 who answered put it top. Last of the four came more money for councils facing rising demand, ranked bottom by 45 people. That is the reverse of the principle the Government’s funding review rests on. All four will go to ministers as residents’ priorities.

Of eight spending principles, “targeting resources to specific communities or groups” was ranked last by 109 of the 162 who ordered them. Nobody put it first.

And asked to rank eight ways of managing the shortfall from most to least acceptable, they put using reserves last and raising council tax second to last. Those are the two levers the council actually has.

The council’s grievance is real enough. Its core funding falls by £84m, around 40 per cent, by 2029.

The survey is still open.

What you can do about it

Fill in the survey. It is at yourprioritiesforwandsworth.commonplace.is and takes about ten minutes. This is not a suggestion box. The Government will ask to see the responses before it looks at the council’s case, so whatever is written there becomes the borough’s recorded view, and at the moment that view has been supplied by 179 people. Two questions have free-text boxes where you can write anything you like, including the things the survey does not ask about. What you write appears on a public page but without your name attached. It may however be edited or held indefinitely “for moderation” by council staff. No closing date has been published, so there is no stated deadline and no guarantee of how long it stays open.

Go to the meeting. The extraordinary meeting of the full council is on Tuesday 15 September at 7.30pm, in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall on Wandsworth High Street, SW18 2PU. The public can attend. Wandsworth’s own rules do not let residents speak or ask questions at a full council meeting, so going means watching rather than taking part. The papers must be published at least five clear days beforehand.

Write to your councillors. They will be the ones voting on 15 September, and they are the only people in this process you can put a question to and expect an answer from. You can find yours, with their contact details, on the council’s councillor directory.