Councillors have voted down a plan for a committee to get Hammersmith Bridge reopened, even though the councillor whose vote decided it supports the idea.
They did so because the Conservative administration published the paper on the day of the meeting, too late for them to read it properly. It is the eighth meeting since May at which councillors have been handed their papers late.
The paper went up on Wandsworth Council’s website at 6pm Tuesday night, just 90 minutes before the General Purposes Committee met at the Town Hall. The other three reports for the same meeting had been online for eight days.
The law expects council papers to be public at least five clear days before a meeting. Anything later can only be taken if the chair rules it urgent “by reason of special circumstances”. The urgency this time was the administration’s own timetable: it wanted the bridge committee set up at full Council next Wednesday.
Malcolm Grimston, the independent councillor whose vote settles any split on the committee, asked for one more meeting to go through it.
“I’m not voting against the concept of this,” he said. “I am asking specifically that we defer it to the next meeting.”
Labour’s two councillors on the committee said the paper had reached them minutes before the meeting, or not at all.
Council leader Robert Morritt, who chairs the committee, apologised for the timing and offered a ten-minute break to read it, which Labour turned down. Then he put the plan to a vote. “All you’re actually doing is delaying us from getting on with the work,” he said.
Labour’s Rex Osborn told the meeting the administration was “slowly sliding into a state of ineptitude and chaos”. His colleague Jo Rigby objected to the private “backroom chats” that produced the paper. Deputy leader Peter Graham agreed with the complaints about how it had been published, but called Labour’s objection “humbug” and “pure hypocrisy”: the two Labour members, he said, had previously voted for rules letting papers like this go straight to full Council with no committee debate at all.
Every full Council meeting since the May election has had its business arrive late – either on the day, during the meeting, or not at all; in September it was the third full Council in a row to meet without papers. In July this same committee met with both its papers listed “to follow”. One was titled “The Printing of Council Papers”. On Monday, the report Cabinet relied on to sign off £79 million of savings went online at 1.30pm for a 6pm meeting.
Every change to the council’s rulebook must pass through the General Purposes Committee, and it is the one committee where the Conservatives cannot win a vote on their own. Its five seats are held by two Conservatives, two Labour councillors and Cllr Grimston. That was written into the deal that put them in office on a hung council of 29 Conservatives, 28 Labour councillors and one independent.
Cllr Grimston said so himself at the start of the evening, while defending the administration against the first complaints: the opposition had “a majority on this committee, so we can’t really be tripped up by it”.
The bridge plan can come back to the committee at its next meeting, which has no date; Cllr Morritt said it would not meet for “quite a number of weeks”. The three other reports on the agenda, published on time, were all agreed.
Members can read the nine things the Hammersmith Bridge committee was meant to do and what Cllr Grimston made of them, the reason Cllr Morritt gave for the late paper, and the full list of eight meetings since May at which papers have been late.
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What happens next
Full Council meets next Wednesday, 21 October, at 7.30pm at the Town Hall, Wandsworth High Street. Its agenda and papers will appear on the council’s meetings website, democracy.wandsworth.gov.uk, where the law expects them at least five clear days beforehand.
Meetings are webcast live at wandsworth.public-i.tv. Tuesday’s General Purposes Committee is available to watch there in full.
You can find your ward councillors, and their email addresses, on the councillors pages of the same meetings website. Ask them when they received the papers for next week’s meeting.
I was House of Commons Committee Clerk for decades. Members not getting papers in proper time for a meeting was vanishingly rare, at worst. Something has clearly gone very wrong with the administration at Wandsworth.