An extraordinary meeting of Wandsworth Council has been called for tomorrow night, and once again the papers have not turned up. For the third meeting running, nobody outside the cabinet knows what is about to be said about how the borough is run or how it is paid for.
The largest item on the agenda is the spending review: in plain terms, how much council tax is going up next year. No report has been published which means most councillors won’t have seen anything. The same is true of every other item on the paper.
Item 5 is a Statement on Housing by the leader of the council, Robert Morritt. There is no report, and the agenda does not say what it is about. Item 7 is a Statement on the Spending Review by his deputy, Peter Graham, who is also cabinet member for finance. There is no report. Items 4 and 6 are questions to the leader and to cabinet members, which councillors must now put without knowing what has been announced.
Item 3 is the presentation of petitions. Items 1 and 2 are the mayor’s announcements and declarations of interest. The council’s agenda reports pack for the whole meeting runs to two pages, and those two pages are the summons and the agenda itself.
This is the third full council meeting since the Conservatives took office in May. For the third time, members will walk into the chamber without having read the business in front of them, and each time it has got worse. In May the papers arrived on the day. In July a 82-page report rewriting the constitution came out just hours before the meeting itself and what was actually discussed was released after the meeting had already started. As for tomorrow’s meeting, there are no papers as of Monday morning, and a rule the administration wrote for itself in July means none has to come.
Three meetings, three failures to put the business in front of councillors in time, at the point where the council is deciding how much more every household in the borough pays. That is no longer a scheduling problem. It is a question about how Wandsworth is being governed.
The rule that lets the paperwork follow the speech
Both statements are listed on the agenda as “To receive a Statement in accordance with Standing Order 38”. That rule did not exist before this administration. It was written into the council’s constitution on 22 July, in the package of changes the Conservatives brought forward, and it works like this.
The speech has no time limit. The leader of the opposition may reply at the same length. Other councillors may then ask one question each, of no more than a minute, and cannot be called a second time. At the end a motion may be moved commending the statement, and it is “put to a vote without debate”.
On the documents, the rule says: “Any accompanying documentation will be made available either before the meeting or at the statement’s conclusion.”
The paperwork is allowed to arrive after the speech.
Nothing is decided tomorrow. The council tax rate for April 2027 is set at the budget meeting early next year, and the only vote Standing Order 38 permits is the procedural one commending the statement.
What was promised, and when
On 26 May the Conservatives took office in a hung council with the votes of one independent councillor. The price was a written agreement, and its first clause is about money.
“The administration agrees to be honest at all times with residents about the council’s funding position,” it reads. “It will take the difficult decisions necessary to stabilise the council’s finances. In particular, the council tax rate required in April 2027 will be outlined in July 2026, as part of the Spending Review process. This will give residents time to prepare for changes to their bills.”
That is the first clause of the agreement that keeps the administration in office, signed by the then Conservative leader Aled Richards-Jones and by the independent councillor for West Hill, Malcolm Grimston.
July came. On 22 July the council received a Statement on the Spending Review from the cabinet member for finance. There was no document and no figure.
The agreement can be dropped by either side if the arithmetic of the council changes. It has not. Labour held Trinity by 127 votes in August, so the numbers that produced the agreement in May are the numbers today, and the promise stands.
Why a number might not come
Four days before the agenda was published, the council was already building the case for saying nothing.
On 9 September it submitted a proposal to the Government for the Autumn Budget, asking for the funding changes to be phased in over eight years instead of three. The council says the reforms cut its money by more than £80 million a year by the end of the settlement period, a 40 per cent cut by 2029.
Cabinet member for finance, Cllr Graham put it like this: “Nor should such dramatic changes be happening at this speed. The Government needs to look again at the problem it created, rather than forcing us to increase council tax. We need a more sensible settlement, a longer transition and more local control.”
That is an argument for waiting. It is also an argument that can be made tomorrow night without ever saying what the bill will be.
The administration already has a working figure, and has published one. In August the Conservatives put it on their own website: council tax “will need to increase by 130 per cent after the election”, even if the savings programme delivers everything promised. The same page put the Government’s own working assumption at more than 80 per cent. The council’s share of a Band D bill is £510 a year, so 80 per cent adds £408 and 130 per cent adds £663.
Groundhog Day
In May, Cllr Graham told the chamber, of papers that had landed that morning: “I accept that this process has been far from ideal, far from ideal for us and far from ideal for the opposition.” The Labour councillor Jo Rigby said the opposition could not “be rushed into signing it like a Tenerife timeshare”. Four months on, there is nothing to sign and nothing to read.
The meeting starts at 7.30pm tomorrow in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall, and is webcast. If a document exists, it may appear when the speech ends.
While I do not know what pressures the staff are under, I can only say that when I was a member of the staff of Parliament not geting the papers to the members on time was a massive professional failure. Occasional rows in the Chamber when it happens suggest this is still the case.