For 18 months, one Wandsworth councillor has been saying what the other 59 could not, or would not.
Malcolm Grimston is the councillor for West Hill, first elected in 1994 and returned as an independent at the last three elections. He belongs to neither of the two parties that have spent 40 years telling residents the lowest council tax in England was their achievement.
In March last year, when the Labour administration sent a leaflet to every home announcing a council tax freeze, he stood up and called it “entirely and absolutely indefensible” on the simple grounds that the bill had, in fact, gone up.
“It doesn’t look like you’re actually trying to level with the residents of the borough,” he told then council leader Simon Hogg. When local elections in May this year put Cllr Grimston in the unusual position of deciding which party could run the council, he told the Conservatives the same thing. The first point in the deal he brokered with the Conservatives so they had a workable majority is called “Council finances” and states, plainly:
“The administration agrees to be honest at all times with residents about the council’s funding position. 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.”
A by-election saw the Conservatives push that July announcement to this week. And then, on Tuesday night, they finally named the number, and a political firestorm broke out. Everyone in Wandsworth is going to see their council tax double next year.
Grimston called it “a horrendous thing for any of us to face.” While the bill itself will go up 94%, since half of what we pay goes to the Mayor of London (a figure the council has no say over) the real increase in council tax is double even that: 188%.
It is the largest council tax rise in history. The previous record for a council’s own share was Westminster’s 158% in 1995; and the previous record for a whole bill was 59%, in Wellingborough in 1996. Second place? Wandsworth in 2003 when bills went up 45% after the Conservatives had slashed council tax prior to an election and ramped it up again afterwards – a political tactic that was ended when the government revived its power to cap council tax increases – see the graph below.
Unless central government decides to backtrack under its new prime minister and chancellor, which looks unlikely, we will all have to start paying the extra cost in a few months’ time.
Cut before polling day, put back after
Wandsworth Council’s own share of a Band D bill, £ a year, in cash, 1993 to 2026. Years with a borough election are shaded.
Source: MHCLG, Band D council tax figures 1993 onwards, live table published March 2026.
Wandsworth, the council that made itself famous for having the lowest tax in the country and then bragged about it for decades, has now found itself in the national spotlight because it has made low tax such a part of its identity.
The biggest one-year rises since council tax began
Every council in England, every year since 1993, ranked. Wandsworth’s 2027 plan would be a record on both measures, and Wandsworth already holds second place on both, each time restoring a bill it had cut before an election.
Band D, cash terms, year on year, billing authorities only; ranks are the position in the full list of every council and year. Source: MHCLG, Band D council tax figures 1993 onwards (live table, March 2026), Putney.news analysis, 19 September 2026. Wandsworth 2027/28 from the Spending Review Final Report p39.
The fallout is large and ongoing. A typical Band D home, a flat or small house now worth roughly £550,000 to £750,000, will need to find an additional £958 on top of its normal £1,020 council tax bill. It is more for more expensive houses, of which there are many in Wandsworth.
We should note that nothing has been decided yet. The rate is set at a budget meeting in March and the first instalment falls in April. The government has repeatedly changed its position, albeit in the wrong direction for Wandsworth residents, during the “Fair Funding Review” process and it could do so again, especially in the face of a campaign that has now reached the top of national politics: Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch gave an interview this week saying the party had “instructed lawyers” to challenge the decision.
The fact is that a large tax bill is coming, and that has caught the attention of even the most politically averse residents, just in time for them to watch politicians behave in exactly the way that puts them off in the first place.
A separate piece will answer the practical questions. It is fair to say however that there are four main questions: why so much? Why did nobody warn residents this was coming? Is the Conservative administration making things worse than they need to be? And how come our council tax was so low in the first place?
Let’s answer each.
Why is it going up so much?
Every council in England gets the majority of its money from two places: a grant from Whitehall, and the council tax it charges its own residents (plus things like fines and licences). The grant works like a means-tested benefit. The government works out how much each council needs to spend, then how much it could raise from its own residents, and pays the difference. The UK has one of the most centralised financial systems in Europe and a very large number of people, including the new prime minister Andy Burnham, are not keen on it and want to see change.
In theory, the more a town needs the funds, the more it should get. But that figure has to be calculated somehow, and for 30 years the formula assumed that every council charged a modest bill, well below the national average, when it worked out how much each could raise for itself. A borough of expensive homes was therefore funded as if it were a borough of cheap ones. The councils that gained most from this were the ones whose homes were worth most, which is why the lowest council tax in England is found in inner London and not in a cheap town in the north.
As a result, council taxes have drifted to the point where wealthier inner London areas, of which Putney is one, are paying far less in council tax than other parts of the country. There have been several efforts over the past 30 years to correct the situation but none of them have stuck. The Starmer government decided it finally would. And it decided it would do so aggressively: slashing funding for some councils and giving three years to adjust, two of them with the referendum rule lifted. And then, for good measure, writing in financial pain points to ensure compliance.
Wandsworth Council and its councillors have known this is all coming since December 2024, when the government first announced the review. We have been writing about it for 18 months. And yet most residents were caught by surprise this week when they finally heard the news. And that is for the very simple reason that it wasn’t in the political parties’ own interests to tell anyone – the very thing that Cllr Malcolm Grimston put down on paper in his confidence-and-supply agreement with the new administration: “The administration agrees to be honest at all times with residents about the council’s funding position…”
Displaying the kind of hypocrisy that politicians have a gift for, the previous Labour administration in Wandsworth – most brazenly in former leader Cllr Simon Hogg and former housing cabinet member Cllr Aydin Dikerdem – is now accusing the Conservatives of having hidden the facts from voters, even though they went out of their way to do so in the months leading up to the May election.
Here are the cold facts: the money that central government provides to Wandsworth will fall by £19m this year, £79m by 2028/29, and £84m the year after. Wandsworth’s own report calls it “the largest cash reduction in funding in the country over the next three years”. It leaves a huge hole in council finances that has to be filled somehow. Now we know how the Conservatives intend to do just that.
The Conservative administration knows that the political cost is real and so it is challenging the government under a piece of legislation that requires it to survey local residents. And so, nearly two years since the plans were announced, residents have finally been asked for their views in an online survey.
Among the more than 1,500 residents who have now answered the council’s summer survey was a disabled resident who wrote that an extra £100 a month would mean leaving a borough they had lived in for ten years.
Another 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.”
Among the comments are two that get to the heart of resident confusion and frustration. “Wandsworth Council Tax was kept artificially low for decades by the then-Conservative national government. Labour is right to take this away,” wrote one.
Another refused to accept its legitimacy: “Referendum on council tax increase, AS THE LAW states anything above 5%.”
Typically, if any council wishes to increase its council tax by more than 4.99%, it is true that it has to hold a referendum of its residents. It is a way to keep councils honest as well as recognition that any increase larger than 5% can cause real hardship. But in its determination to bring in the change as quickly as possible, the government decided it would remove the referendum rule for two years for the six councils most strongly affected by its changes. Wandsworth is one.
That means, in effect, that the council can increase council tax as much as it wants next year and the year after without seeking residents’ views. The government did not order the rise. It did something quieter: when it worked out how much protection Wandsworth would get, it assumed the council had already put bills up by 5% plus £150 a year, and paid protection on that basis. The protection that sounded like £54m a year was worth £7m. A council that refused to raise its bills would have got exactly the same grant and a hole £47m deeper.
On the government’s own assumptions Wandsworth’s share of the bill would have gone from about £510 to about £886 over the two years. The council has chosen £1,468. The difference, about £580 on a Band D bill, is the part of the rise that Wandsworth decided.
How did we not know?
Both parties had the figures for a year, and neither used them in public for the same reason: in Wandsworth, low council tax was never one policy among many. It was the thing each of them stood for. For 40 years it was what the Conservatives were proudest of, and when Labour won the borough in 2022 it kept the boast rather than the honesty. Saying the bill would double meant admitting the boast had been paid for by Whitehall all along, and there was an election in May.
The government published its plan in June 2025. In August, Simon Hogg, then Labour leader of the council, wrote privately to ministers about a funding “cliff-edge” and “radical service cuts”. The letter was not released in response to a Freedom of Information request, but was published by his Conservative opponents on polling day in last month’s by-election. Hogg has not disputed it.
By October, the council’s own medium-term strategy used the words “cliff edge” itself, and we reported that council tax would need to at least double. When the settlement arrived in December, Kim Caddy, a Conservative councillor, read its condition aloud to Hogg in the chamber, the line about protection depending on councils using their new powers, and asked whether he would raise council tax by the maximum. “No, of course not,” he said. “We will be keeping the same low council tax.”
Seven weeks later, on 10 February, Hogg announced what he claimed was a council tax freeze for the fourth year running and said the borough had “some of the highest financial reserves in London”.
His budget paper used the word “freeze” eleven times.
On page 77 however it showed the council would be short by £62m in 2027 and £92m in 2028, with £122m left in reserves to cover it. And on the page that set the council tax, it showed what the council would have to collect from residents if it stopped using reserves: £76.6m this year, £143.2m next year, £178.4m the year after.
That is an 87% rise and then a 133% rise, in Labour’s own paper, under a headline that said freeze. A household that read the leaflet was told its bill was frozen. The paper behind the leaflet said the same household would need to pay the council about £440 more the following year and about £680 more the year after that.
The council’s own officers did not pretend otherwise. The chief executive, Andrew Travers, told the finance committee that the £45m of savings the budget relied on was “a broad, reasonable aspiration to get us going”. Angela Ireland, then cabinet member for finance, called the plan a “brutal use of reserves to plug any gap”. The cabinet approved the government’s own projection for the council’s share, about £930 by 2030, in under six minutes, as an item for information.
In March the UK Statistics Authority wrote to Hogg to say residents would take “frozen” to mean their bill had not gone up, when it had, by 3.1%, the first such letter it had sent to any English council leader. Labour’s manifesto repeated the freeze anyway. Ireland’s last word, at the last meeting before the election: “Whatever happens we will maintain a low council tax. It will still be the lowest in the country. But that’s my guarantee.”
Labour lost control in May, and the Conservatives who replaced them ran the same play from the other side. The new leader, Aled Richards-Jones, announced a spending review without mentioning council tax. The review reached cabinet on 30 July: it cancelled 253 planned council homes, ended holiday food vouchers for 10,000 children and narrowed the council’s duty to house homeless families, and it gave no figure for the bill, the one thing the agreement with Grimston had promised for July. Peter Graham, the cabinet member for finance, said the pre-election rules for the Trinity by-election prevented him from giving one. They didn’t: the rules began the following day.
The by-election was then fought on a number nobody would say. The Conservatives’ own website said council tax “will need to increase by 130 per cent after the election”. Labour’s leaflet, printed in Conservative blue with a scratch-off panel, revealed “160%” and offered “the same low Council Tax” for a Labour vote.
The figure promised for July arrived on 15 September, in a 42-page report Graham told the chamber would be available “when I sit down”.
He did not dress it up: “For this Conservative administration, with a proud record of decades of careful financial management, it is a last resort. It is, quite frankly, not what any of us on this side of the chamber entered politics to do.”
Labour’s newest councillor, Shirin Georgiani, who won the by-election on the 160% leaflet, used her first speech to apologise to the ward for the figure. “I think it’s going to be 190.”
Are the Conservatives making it worse than it needs to be?
Whitehall’s figure was about £886. The council’s is £1,468. The difference, about £580 on a Band D bill, is the part of the rise Wandsworth chose, and the report that chose it has no paper number and no officer’s name on it. It carries no statement from the council’s chief financial officer, no legal advice and no assessment of who it affects most, the three things every formal council decision must have. It describes itself as a set of “policy intentions” to be “brought forward through the Council’s decision making process for scrutiny and approval”. The committees that scrutinise the council’s decisions meet this week to examine a document that is not one. The plan binds nobody yet.
The plan closes a gap of £223m a year by 2030. The government’s cut accounts for £84m of that. The rest is inflation, spending commitments the new administration inherited, rising demand for care and housing, and its own new priorities, including £4.9m a year for 25 police officers.
Against the gap the report sets £79m of savings. Page 6 says £63m of those have been identified or decided and £16m are “further savings to be identified in later years”. More than half of those “savings” come from two places: cutting the cost of housing homeless families by £20m a year and reducing adult social care spending by £15m. It is not certain these cuts are even possible: the report’s own conclusion says the later years “carry higher delivery risk”. Cllr Grimston, who has read it line by line, calls the savings “optimistic”.
Taken as a whole, aside from the £5m the administration now feels obligated to put into new police given that it was a central election commitment, the Conservatives’ figures are a fair account of the position, if the savings arrive, including what will be painful cuts in welfare.
The question then turns to the decision to pile the full increase into a single year when the government has given Wandsworth the right to increase council tax without restraints for two years. Is this a purely political decision taken so the Conservatives only have to infuriate voters once rather than two years in a row and so increase their chances of remaining in power at the next election? Yes and no.
As finance cabinet member, Cllr Peter Graham’s case for pushing the whole rise at once is that the council has “only a two-year window” in which it can raise tax above 5% without a referendum, and spreading the rise across both years “would leave no reserves at all, with a risk of the full council falling back into that position of crisis”.
We ran the figures and he’s not wrong. If the council did spread the increases over two years rather than one then – based on the figures – the reserves would get dangerously close to zero and stay there. It is a political decision however: the Conservative administration has decided that it wants reserves at roughly £75m and we will all be paying upfront for that stability.
The issue of reserves is the single biggest ideological difference between the two main parties. It has been a running political fight between them and can be put quite simply: the Conservatives prefer a much higher level of reserves so the council has greater stability and flexibility, and Labour see the reserves as held money that could be used to improve the lives of the poorer and struggling residents of Wandsworth.
Within the highly partisan environment of Wandsworth Council, however, those positions have become extreme: the Conservatives are willing to take the whole rise in one year to keep reserves at about £75m, and Labour’s approach when in power the past four years was so over-the-top that council officers were warning that the council was past its own financial risk limit and naming a Section 114 notice, better known as council bankruptcy, as a possible consequence. Even on Tuesday night, Labour’s Annamarie Critchard asked why the administration was “trying to scare everybody” when, she said, it had inherited “a fully funded budget”.
Reserves peaked at £205m in 2023. They stand at £162m, will be below £100m by March, and under the plan settle at about £76m, a level the report itself calls “minimal”.
The council’s own chart of the path it was on under Labour carries a dotted line, labelled “Previous” which would have seen a 5% rise each year, £45m of claimed savings, and reserves used to cover the rest.
On that line reserves fall to about £50m in 2028 and below zero in 2029. Below zero is the point at which the law requires the council’s finance officer to stop all new spending and the government to send in commissioners. Labour’s plan, drawn by the council’s own officers, runs out of money inside the two-year window.
Surprisingly, Putney’s MP Fleur Anderson weighed in on the issue this week and adopted the local Labour line by arguing that the council should keep rises within 5%, “use reserves responsibly to smooth the transition”, find savings first. “I especially do not believe Wandsworth should respond by asking residents to pay such a large increase all at once.” Anderson voted for the funding settlement in the House of Commons on 11 February.
To make it plain just how precarious Wandsworth’s finances are, we have modelled the different paths that have been outlined. It is possible for a council to run out of reserves and still function but it comes with a very real cost and, in Croydon’s case, a large tax rise anyway. Croydon has declared itself unable to balance its books three times since 2020; in 2023 the government allowed it a 15% council tax rise without a referendum, and deep service cuts followed.
Three people called the timing political this week, from three directions. Anderson MP: “the way the Conservatives have chosen to respond to it is a political choice”. Cllr Hogg, to the Financial Times: “purely political”. The council’s leader, Cllr Robert Morritt, to the same paper, of the government: “deliberately targeting” low-tax councils.
The arithmetic does not say which of them is right. It says one step is defensible on the council’s table; that two steps were affordable at a one-off cost of £33m to £66m from reserves; and that the choice between them was made in a document nobody has been asked to sign.
Why was it so low in the first place?
It is worth noting briefly that the underlying claim that Wandsworth’s taxes are so low because of how efficiently the borough is run does have an element of truth to it – or used to, 40 years ago.
The Conservative council elected in 1978 was among the first in the country to put refuse collection out to tender, in 1983, then street cleaning, then most of its other services, and a study of the period puts the savings at about £6m a year, roughly £20m in today’s money. It also sold more of its own homes to tenants, earlier, than most councils.
It was pioneering and most councils have since done the same. But it was always a slightly overblown claim. Wandsworth has been living off past glories for far too long and in many respects its systems are now just as outdated as the ones it used to mock back in the 80s when Margaret Thatcher famously called it her favourite council.
When council tax replaced the poll tax in 1993, the government also paid Wandsworth £33.8m to stop its bills jumping in the first year, a quarter of all the money it paid London councils for that purpose, an MP told the Commons at the time. Wandsworth’s own efficiency accounted for a small part of its low bills and Whitehall’s money covered the rest. Don’t take our word for it: the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Institute for Government have each reached the same conclusion.
Thirty-three years of the gap, and the year it closes
The whole Band D bill, including the Mayor of London’s share, in Wandsworth and on average across England, £ a year in cash.
In 1993 a Wandsworth Band D household paid £119 a year less than the English average. By 2026 it paid £1,363 less. Source: MHCLG, Band D council tax figures 1993 onwards (live table, March 2026); Wandsworth Spending Review Final Report p39 for the 2027 plan.
Even after the painful tax increase that we all face, Wandsworth will still be below the London average. There is no magic “Wandsworth Way” in 2026 but the council still talks about it as if there were.
Where £1,468 lands
Each London borough’s own share of a Band D bill in 2026/27. The Mayor’s £510.51 sits on top of all of them. Wandsworth is shown now and under the plan.
After the rise Wandsworth’s share would be eighth lowest of 33, at 94% of the London borough average. Other boroughs will also rise by 2027/28, most by up to 5%. Source: MHCLG, Council tax levels set by local authorities in England 2026 to 2027, Table 8a.
This week’s announcement of a huge tax rise has come as a shock to residents; but its roots were in what Wandsworth Council has told itself for 40 years and has clung onto long after it stopped being true. The politicians are to blame for not having the courage or skill to bring the council back to modern realities, and their communication of the financial realities brought about by the Labour government’s decision to finally reset council funding after 30 years of failed efforts has been nothing short of shameful.
Even now, Wandsworth Labour has made a political calculation to promote the increase in council tax as something to blame on its rivals rather than an opportunity to move forward into a better, future reality. That kind of politics more than anything is what holds us back.
What happens now?
Nothing was decided on Tuesday. The rate is set at a budget meeting in March. A letter from the council leader to every household is in the post. A consultation on the reduction scheme for low-income households is due this month; on the council’s figures, a working-age household paying nothing today would pay about £989 a year.
The council’s challenge to the government is open and its own budget assumes the challenge fails. The scrutiny committees meet from Monday with a document that commits nobody to anything. For a household the dates that matter are these: the reduction scheme consultation this month, if you pay a reduced bill; the budget meeting in March, when the rate is fixed; the first instalment in April, when a Band D direct debit of about £102 becomes about £198.
Four questions have been put and not answered. What does the dotted “Previous” line on the council’s chart assume? Where does the £48.8m of “invest to save” spending in the plan’s first year sit, inside the gap the tax rise pays for or in reserves, as the report’s text says? Was a two-year rise modelled, and what did it show? And will the council’s share really stay frozen at £1,468 until 2031, as the plan assumes, when the government’s yardstick will have moved to £2,265 by then?
But the truth is that politicians are only the top layer. The institution itself, Wandsworth Council, has roots that sink deep into the borough we call home. The doubling of council tax should be seen for what it is: a tectonic shift in Wandsworth Council’s own understanding of itself; a sudden dawning of reality.
Done right, it offers a chance to reinvigorate this part of London. And as residents, we will have a crucial part to play. We are, after all, the ones picking up the tab.
It is assumed that Wandsworth council got in someway an undue advantage during all this years and that the government cut of the grant was fair. I would be interested about an article regarding this so he can help résidents to understand more of the local financing policies that were applied to them. Nonetheless the sudden increase due to previous government is not well advised. It would have been better to reduce gradually the grant rather than leaving council with no choice but to increase steeply the council tax. Personally it raised 3 questions : 1)how to ensure fairness in central government grant to borough? 2)Do we wish that London borough support each other financially and to what extent? meaning wealthier borough receive less than poorer one 3) is council tax system outdated and if a new system can ensure a more stable financing and a fairer way of taxation for all résidents