Independent councillor Malcolm Grimston has accused Putney’s MP, Fleur Anderson, of misleading residents over council tax, demanding that she prove her figures or take them back.
Anderson emailed constituents last week after the current Conservative administration warned Wandsworth residents that it would double their council tax next year. She argued in her email that the previous Labour administration had “built up strong reserves” when it ran the council, and would have capped tax rises at 5%, as opposed to the currently 94% proposed.
Cllr Grimston takes issue with that and his reply – published as an open letter – asks Putney’s MP “in what sense depleting the reserves by some £90 million can be described as ‘building up’ these reserves.”
Grimston’s vote is the reason the Conservatives can govern at all, after May’s election left the council with no overall majority. His price for that support was a written promise: the administration would “be honest at all times with residents about the council’s funding position.” His letter to Anderson makes the same demand:
“It is incumbent on all of us to be as honest as possible when making political arguments.”
Grimston’s letter states the financial situation plainly: reserves “fell by £90 million from over £200 million to a projected £114 million at the end of 2026/7.”
His underlying numbers check out. Council Paper 26-63, published by the outgoing Labour administration in February, shows the council’s usable reserves falling £21.6 million in 2025/26 and a further £50.3 million the year after, the exact numbers in Grimston’s letter. Total reserves have gone from £193.9 million to a budgeted £121.9 million over two years.
Grimston takes the argument further. If Anderson’s 5% cap is right, he wrote,
“You are arguing that over the next three years over £400 MILLION of the money which would be raised by the Conservative proposals would actually be unnecessary.”
The rise itself is the largest by any English council since council tax began: 94 per cent on the total bill, 188 per cent on the portion Wandsworth actually controls, taking the average household’s payment up £958 a year.
Grimston, an academic researcher who has held the West Hill seat since 1994, has checked this kind of claim before. In March last year he called the previous administration’s own tax-freeze claim “entirely and absolutely indefensible.”
Anderson’s account echoes a claim Labour’s council leader, Cllr Simon Hogg, made in the chamber the same evening: that £45 million in savings could have held the rise to 5 per cent. He was challenged to produce the costings. He has not.
Putney.news has also written to Cllr Hogg asking him to provide evidence that his plan exists after being challenged in public by the cabinet member for finance to produce his costings, with his spending plan being decried as a “figment of imagination”. Cllr Hogg has not responded.
Grimston puts reserves at a projected £114 million by next April, £8 million below the council’s own £121.9 million forecast, and blames “further overspends inherited by the new administration.” No published document backs that figure yet.
At the time of publication, Fleur Anderson MP had not responded.
Wandsworth’s full council is due to set next year’s council tax rate in March.
I’m one of Fleur’s constituents. I have not received an email from her.
You would have had to agree to receive an email from Fleur Anderson – data protection laws etc – but the message was sent to all the constituents on the MP’s mailing list.
I am assuming that some of the reserves were used to fund the Access For All Scheme? I did make a request for details of the cost under the Freedom of Information Act when it was first introduced, much to my incredulity, but was only ever told that the accounts were not yet complete. Of course my question was never followed up when the accounts were available.