Mark Justin enjoyed every minute of being a Wandsworth councillor but has reached a surprising conclusion now he’s left town hall: all 58 of the borough’s councillors should be abolished.
Justin represented Nine Elms from 2022 until May. He was elected as a Conservative and stood for Reform UK at this year’s election, finishing seventh of ten candidates in the ward with 150 votes.
“I loved it. Probably the best four years of my life, and I’ve done a lot of things,” he told Putney.news this week. “But having seen it, been on the inside, knowing how it works… abolish it tomorrow. It’s a f**king waste of time.”
We caught up with Justin, a businessman, as he hosted the 17th beer festival at Le Gothique, the Victorian venue in Wandsworth he has owned and run for 40 years. We were talking beer and life in Wandsworth when the conversation steered into his time on Wandsworth Council – an institution he confessed he had no love for in all the years he had been setting up and running his businesses.
Full Council, where all 58 of the councillors he would abolish meet, has six regular meetings a year. In Justin’s experience the debate that dominates these sessions have little or no value or purpose. “Whatever the debate is, the ruling people win,” he said. Inside a party group, he notes, “you don’t know which way to vote until you’re told.”
Expertise
Justin sat on the council’s planning committee until he was removed from it in December 2025, four months after leaving the Conservatives. But he’s conflicted as to why he was there at all. “I’m not an architect,” he said. “How is it possible that I can go to a full planning meeting and decide on your extension?”
Conversely, in the one area where he was expert, it worked against him. Licensing is an area of law he knows inside out having run a restaurant, bar and events in Wandsworth for almost 40 years. “The one thing I know everything about”, he notes. That, it turned out, was a problem for the council. He was told, he says, to stop making the council’s officers look bad with his questions.
He gives one example: in December 2023 he sat on the three-councillor panel that heard Tesco’s application to sell alcohol at a new Tesco Express on Falcon Road in Battersea. He had seen a 16-year-old on the till at a nearby Tesco who, he says, did not know the age-check rules, and he pressed the company on how it trains staff to challenge underage buyers.
Tesco told the panel that new staff are trained in age-restricted sales before they work a till, and that all staff are retrained twice a year. He knew it wasn’t true, and said so, but the licence was granted. Afterwards, Justin says, a blunter message reached him second-hand: “Don’t f**k with Tesco.”
Councillors are paid a basic allowance of close to £12,000 a year. But, he warns, that is never going to attract “the right person”; someone who can make the complex decisions that a modern London borough needs and who brings a broader level of understanding and professionalism to the job.
“You don’t need 58 councillors,” he said. In their place he suggests one elected mayor with a team of maybe four people under them, leaving the running of things to the council’s full-time staff, whom he calls “very hard-working, excellent people”.
Could Wandsworth switch to an elected mayor?
Not any longer. A law that came into force in June bars it. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act, which Parliament passed in April, stops councils bringing in new elected mayors, and a council run by a leader and a cabinet of councillors, as Wandsworth is, can no longer switch to anything else.
Wandsworth has a ceremonial mayor already, chosen by councillors each year, who holds a casting vote in a tied chamber. Justin wants a mayor elected by voters, and in charge.
Five London boroughs have one: Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Newham and Tower Hamlets. The new law leaves them in place. Croydon was the last to join them, and its residents made it happen. A petition signed by 5% of the borough’s voters forced a referendum in October 2021, and 47,165 people voted for an elected mayor against 11,519 who wanted to keep the old system.
Justin has no time for petitions. He says they have almost never decided anything, and he won’t sign one. The same Act has now closed the route Croydon took: a petition can force a vote on switching to a leader and cabinet, but no longer on switching away from one.
The one councillor Justin says he respects is Malcolm Grimston, Wandsworth’s only independent, who represents West Hill. Justin calls him “the best councillor by a country mile”.
Grimston took 4,081 votes in May, more than any other candidate in the borough, and now holds the balance. The Conservatives run the council with 29 of the 58 seats, one short of a majority, under a deal with him. Justin says he once put it to Grimston that, in a hung council, “wouldn’t it be lovely” if he were the one who decided. “And we’re there now.”
Justin joined Reform in August 2025, after the local Conservatives dropped him as their Nine Elms candidate in favour of Will Sweet, a former leader of the party’s group on the council. Party insiders said at the time that the group’s then leader, Aled Richards-Jones, orchestrated the switch to secure Sweet’s vote in any challenge to his leadership.
Justin had expected his reselection as a sitting councillor to be “a rubber stamp”. Instead, he says, five people he had never heard of voted him out. Sweet took one of the ward’s two seats in May.
Justin is not against local government. Councils, he says, “can actually do more for you” than national government. “It was great to be a politician for four years,” he said. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”
