Council tax will double in April, up by an average of £1,000

Council tax in Wandsworth will double this April unless central government reverses its funding cuts, the council’s finance chief told councillors last night.

Cllr Peter Graham, deputy leader and cabinet member for finance, said a typical Band D bill will rise by £958, from £1,020 to £1,978, a 94% increase. The rise would land in a single step in April 2027.

The increase would make Wandsworth’s council tax one of the sharpest rises any council has ever imposed in a single year. The borough has had the lowest council tax in the country for decades. For most households the change means several hundred pounds more a year. For the average Band D property it means finding an extra £96 a month.

Graham said central government has cut £84m a year from the council’s funding, rising each year to that level by 2029. Combined with other pressures, he said the four-year budget gap has grown from £184m to £215m. The council has found £79m of savings, he said, leaving a gap of £143m that “at this stage can only be met through higher council tax”.

A single rise was necessary, Cllr Graham argued, because the government has given Wandsworth only a two-year window in which it can raise council tax above the normal 5% cap without a referendum. Spreading the increase over two years, he said, “would leave no reserves at all, with a risk of the full council falling back into that position of crisis”.

The rise is not yet final. Wandsworth’s actual council tax rate for April 2027 will be set at a budget meeting next spring. In the meantime, the council is formally challenging the government’s funding settlement and has launched a consultation asking residents to back that challenge. Every account holder will get a letter about the increase before April. The council also plans to nearly double spending on its council tax reduction scheme, while requiring everyone of working age to pay something towards their bill for the first time since 2022.

What each band would pay

The table below shows current and future council tax, based on the council’s published 2026/27 figures and the £958 Band D rise Graham announced. It does not include the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators levy, which applies in parts of Putney and Roehampton, or the Greater London Authority’s share, which is unaffected by the council’s decision.

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Was it necessary?

Graham built his case on the previous Labour administration's own figures, not his party's, he stressed. In February, before the election, the then-Labour administration set a budget projecting a £184m gap over four years if council tax did not rise. Cllr Simon Hogg, the Labour leader at the time, said he could find £45m a year in savings.

"If you believed that, as his budget, then do the maths," Graham told the chamber. "184 minus 45 equals 139. If you assume the tax increase, it's 164 minus 45 equals 119." Either figure, he said, is more than the council has left in reserves.

Graham said the outgoing Labour administration spent almost half of the £206m in usable reserves it inherited in 2022, including £50m in the current financial year alone. He said Wandsworth's reserves, which peaked at £205m in 2023, now stand at £162m and are projected to fall below £100m by the end of this financial year. The council plans to stabilise what remains at around £76m.

His language for Hogg's position was blunt and at points insulting. He accused the former council leader of living in "an alternative universe" and said: "If only our heads, like his, were upside down and buried in sand, reality would cease to matter."

He told Hogg directly: "First you burn through the reserves and then you put it on the credit card, hoping you can kick the can down the road for long enough to make it somebody else's problem."

Hogg, he said, "didn't just drive this council towards financial bankruptcy" but "this borough's discourse into a state of moral bankruptcy".

Hogg's response, and the record

Cllr Hogg, now leader of the opposition, told the chamber the rise was "cruel and selfish and very political" and accused the administration of concealing its plans. "It is absolutely wrong that you've concealed your intention to double council tax," he said. "This is being done with no mandate, with no scrutiny, and you are not putting it to a referendum of local people."

But in the same speech, Hogg also said: "Every single figure you've quoted tonight, as you accept, was in the public domain. It was available before May." The confidence and supply agreement that put the Conservatives into office, signed in May and published by Putney.news, committed the administration to setting out the April 2027 rate in July.

Hogg also told the chamber that under Labour "you paid the lowest council tax in the country". In March, the UK Statistics Authority wrote to him over his claim to have frozen council tax because bills had in fact risen, and rebuked him for the claims - the first time the UKSA has ever done so to a council leader - and just one of several claims that were found to be false.

He said the £80m funding cut is "clearly a serious challenge, but we have time". But Cllr Graham responded by holding up a letter Cllr Hogg had sent a year earlier, in a letter to government ministers, warning of a funding "cliff-edge" and said the alternative was "radical service cuts".

Hogg said the council still has "more than £100 million in the bank". Council figures given at the meeting put reserves at £162m now, projected to fall below £100m within months, in a year in which the gap alone is larger than everything left in reserves.

Hogg set out a Labour alternative to the proposed doubling of council tax: cutting payments to landlords housing homeless families, reducing duplication in corporate services, and increasing council tax by no more than 5% a year. Graham said only £7m of the £45m in savings Hogg's own budget assumed had been identified by May.

An independent check

Cllr Malcolm Grimston, the independent councillor for West Hill, is the councillor whose vote keeps the Conservative administration in office. Under the confidence and supply agreement he signed with the party in May, he is committed to vote with the administration on the budget and council tax.

Grimston used his own arithmetic to test both sides' claims. If Labour's savings figures were real, he said, the £84m in government cuts represents "almost exactly a 100% increase in the council tax", meaning the council could in theory looking at scrapping council tax altogether rather than raising it.

A 188% rise in the council's own share of the bill, he said, was "a horrendous thing for any of us to face". He asked what happens to councils that do not act: "Has the government bailed those councils out, or is it increasingly saying if you make the mess, you clean the mess up?" Graham replied that the government "has not been in the habit of bailing anybody out until the point at which they send in commissioners and they take control".

Graham challenged Hogg directly to produce evidence for his savings claims. "Show us the costings," he said. "It's not in any council document, it's not in any document you provided to anyone else to check, and I don't believe that document exists. And if it does exist, bring it to us. If you've got some idea we've missed, we'll implement it."

Answering a question later in the meeting, he said: "No officer has seen any of these costings. No one has seen this. It is a figment of imagination."

Other Labour councillors backed Hogg's account. Cllr Judi Gasser said the party "did have a plan" and could have made the changes "with compassion and fairness". Cllr Annamarie Critchard said Labour left the council "a fully funded budget" for this year.

Cllr Georgiani, the Labour councillor elected in last month's Trinity by-election, used her first appearance in the chamber to correct her own party's figures. "I just need to apologize to the residents of Trinity who we misinformed about a hundred and sixty percent increase," she said. "I think it's going to be 190."

Putney.news put the costings question to Hogg, asking him to provide the savings plan Graham says does not exist. He has not responded.

Graham's closing word on Hogg, delivered under his right of reply and in personal terms, was unsparing: "It is toxic. It is the toxicity he created. And the sooner he and this brand of politics is gone, the better off everyone in this borough will be."

The rest of the meeting

The finance row came at the end of a meeting that began in a calmer register. Robert Morritt, the council's new leader, apologised to tenants and leaseholders for the state of the council's housing service and said the administration wants to move the service from its current C3 regulatory rating to C1. That C3 rating was set under the previous Labour administration. Recruitment for a new housing executive director will begin after Thursday's staffing committee.

Underneath the calm, the evening carried a run of small reality checks. The council's own final report on its finances, which Graham said explains the £143m figure, was not published in advance of the meeting and only became available, he told councillors, "when I sit down" at the end of his statement. Earlier in the meeting, Labour's Judi Gasser said some families given free school uniforms this year received second-hand items with other children's name tags still in them, and that the scheme ran out early. Cabinet member George Crivelli disputed both points, but Cllr Gasser was adamant and is rarely wrong on the details.

Cllr Grimston also raised the case of an 86-year-old widower in his ward, who had lived in his home for 47 years and was sent a letter warning he faced eviction for occupying a property larger than he needed. The council later told Grimston it had never intended to act on the letter. Morritt said he would personally apologise to the resident and called it an example of "a cultural challenge" in how the council communicates with vulnerable people.

E-bikes, policing, and what happens next

Councillors were told a new charter for hire e-bike operators goes to the transport scrutiny committee next week, with powers to remove badly parked bikes within two hours. The council currently has more than 200 designated parking bays, with 200 more planned, though 20 to 30 are still waiting on Transport for London's permission to use red routes.

On policing, cabinet member Caroline de La Soujeole confirmed the council still intends to fund 25 additional police officers, one more than promised in July. She gave no figure for the cost and said a full report, including detail on how officers will be funded and deployed, will go to the community safety scrutiny committee on 5 October.

Nothing was decided at last night's meeting. The actual council tax rate is confirmed only at the budget meeting next spring. Before then, the council's consultation on its funding challenge remains open, and Overview and Scrutiny Committees are due to examine the detailed figures in the coming weeks. The government could still change its funding settlement in the meantime.

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Update, 10am: In an earlier version of the story, we noted that Putney.news had reported on Cllr Hogg's false claims to have frozen council tax and they were subsequently criticised by the UK Statistics Authority. The construction of that sentence could have led a reader to believe that the UKSA wrote as a result of our reporting, rather than in response to a complaint put in by others. So we have removed the wording and inserted links to our original reporting in both cases.