Wandsworth pays its councillors under £10 an hour. Here’s what that costs us

The election is over. Wandsworth now has its most interesting council in a generation: no overall control for the first time in the borough’s modern history, with an independent holding the balance. What happens next depends almost entirely on who is in that chamber and whether they are capable of something more than party management.

Which brings us to a key question: who becomes a councillor, why, and what would it take to attract the people Putney actually needs?

This is the third piece in the Putney 2030 series. The first proposed a new Thames crossing to separate pedestrians and cyclists from the Putney Bridge junction. The second revealed the hidden tunnel beneath Putney Bridge and the connected waterfront Putney could have. Those were arguments about infrastructure. This one is about something more fundamental.

Part 3: The councillors Putney deserves

Here is a thought experiment.

Take the person who chairs the audit committee at your company. Or sits as a non-executive director on the housing association that owns half the flats on your street. Or serves on the board of the local NHS trust. They have financial expertise, strategic judgement, and the ability to read a complex report and ask the right questions of the people running the organisation. They get paid somewhere between £20,000 and £50,000 a year for perhaps a day or two a month.

Now imagine asking them to oversee something ten times more complex: an organisation managing schools, housing, social care, parks, roads, planning, waste collection and more, with a budget running into hundreds of millions. For £11,663 a year.

That is what we ask Wandsworth councillors to do.

And then we wonder why we don’t always get the governance Putney deserves.

Who becomes a councillor

The national picture is striking once you look at it.

The average English councillor is 60 years old. The average age of the population they serve is 40. Two thirds are male. The role is dominated by retirees, the independently wealthy, and committed political activists: people who either don’t need the money, or whose primary motivation is the party rather than the place.

This is not an accident. It is the direct, predictable output of a system that pays under £10 an hour for a role that demands 22 hours a week.

A 38-year-old finance professional with a mortgage, two children and a demanding job cannot give 22 hours a week to public service at that rate. Not because they don’t care about their community. Not because they wouldn’t be brilliant at it. But because the economics are simply impossible.

So they don’t stand.

The people who do stand are self-selecting in ways that matter enormously. Research by the Local Government Chronicle found that one in five serving councillors had taken a pay cut to do the job, and 27 per cent had left employment entirely because they could not combine it with council responsibilities. One council leader described the reality candidly: “I did work full time alongside being a council leader as the role wasn’t paid enough to live on. In the end I resigned. But if I lose my seat, I’ve got almost nothing.”

That is not a sustainable model for governing a borough of 340,000 people.

The professional hiding in plain sight

Here is the reframe we need.

A Wandsworth councillor is, in almost every meaningful respect, a public sector non-executive director. They don’t run the council. The chief executive and their senior team do that. Councillors scrutinise, challenge, set direction, represent the community, and hold the executive to account. That is exactly what a NED does.

Putney is full of people who do this for a living. They sit on NHS trust boards, company audit committees, university councils, housing association trustee boards. They are skilled at reading complex financial reports, challenging professional management, and working constructively with people they disagree with to reach decisions that serve a wider purpose.

They are exactly the people local government needs most.

And the current allowance structure is almost perfectly designed to keep them away. It does not just underpay the role. It signals, loudly and clearly, that the role is not serious. That it is a political bauble. A stepping stone. A hobby for people who have the time. Not something a professional would consider alongside their board portfolio.

Imagine instead that being a Wandsworth councillor was understood, and compensated, as the civic NED it actually is. That the community could approach professionals directly and say: we need your skills, we value your time, we will pay you appropriately, and this genuinely matters. That standing for council was something a 40-year-old chartered surveyor, or a 35-year-old NHS manager, or a 45-year-old tech entrepreneur might actually consider, not despite their professional success but because of it.

The quality of decision-making in that chamber would be different. The conversations would be different. The outcomes for Putney would be different.

What the numbers reveal

Look first at what Wandsworth pays its own councillors, and the incentive structure buried in those numbers.

Every councillor starts at £11,663 a year. Beyond that, the scheme’s priorities reveal themselves. The five deputy cabinet member posts, created in May 2025 with no defined performance criteria and no explanation of what had gone wrong with the scheme they replaced, each attract a special allowance that takes their total to £21,275. As we reported at the time, the posts were created weeks after a leadership challenge, pushed through on a casting vote, and an opposition councillor called them “an expensive bribe.” Those allowances sit above the independent panel’s maximum recommended rate.

Scrutiny committee chairs, the councillors whose specific job is to hold the executive to account, earn £23,667 in total. Their allowances sit below the independent panel’s minimum recommended rate.

In any well-governed board, committee chairs earn a premium over regular members, the additional responsibility warrants it. In private sector equivalents, an audit committee chair typically earns between 1.5 and 2 times the standard non-executive fee. That logic holds here too. The distortion is not that scrutiny chairs earn more than political appointees. It is that the independent panel’s range for accountability roles starts at £15,523 and Wandsworth pays £12,004, while the maximum for political roles is £9,314 and Wandsworth pays £9,612. Maximum for loyalty. Below minimum for accountability. The incentive is structurally inverted.

For comparison nationally: Birmingham pays the highest basic allowance in England at £18,876, and its own independent panel warned in 2024 that even that rate was “not high enough to attract people to the role.” Scotland treats councillors as public officeholders and pays a statutory salary of £25,982. Edinburgh’s council leader earns £64,043.

Wandsworth pays £11,663.

Then there is the chief executive. Wandsworth’s Andrew Travers earns £294,120 a year, the highest salary of any council chief executive in England, 64% above the national average of around £179,000. The council chief executive at North Devon, at the lower end of the national range, earns £97,664.

There is something worth pausing on here. This piece is about councillors, not officers. What the chief executive earns is a separate argument. But the juxtaposition matters: a council that pays the most for its officer and the least for the elected members supposed to hold that officer to account has its priorities encoded in those numbers. The graphic alongside this piece shows both facts together, and you can draw your own conclusion.

A phased commitment

The new council should commit now to increasing councillor allowances, not immediately but transparently and credibly, over this term.

The phasing matters. A pay rise effective from next month helps no one who is not already a councillor. The people this is designed to attract need to see the trajectory clearly, believe it is real, and have time to plan. A professional in their late thirties, weighing up whether to stand at the next election in 2030, needs to know now that the role will be properly compensated by the time they might take it up.

The proposal: announce in 2026 that allowances will increase to £35,000 for every councillor in 2028, with scrutiny committee chairs receiving an additional £20,000 special responsibility allowance, taking their total to £55,000. That figure is not arbitrary. It is benchmarked against what investment trust non-executive directors earn for comparable governance work: an average of £36,228 for board members and a committee chair premium of between 1.5 and 2 times the base rate. A scrutiny chair at £55,000 sits at 1.57 times the proposed basic. It is within established NED norms, and it rewards the right role.

At the same time, the five deputy cabinet member posts created in 2025 should be scrapped. They were never justified, they reward political loyalty over accountability, and abolishing them saves £48,060 a year in special allowances.

Pair this with active outreach, doing what any serious organisation would do when it needs to attract talent. Identify the skill gaps. Map the professional community. Make the case directly to people who have those skills: this role is serious, it pays properly, it matters, and your community needs what you know how to do.

The net additional annual cost, after the Deputy Cabinet Member saving, is approximately £1.45 million. Against a General Fund budget of £288 million, that is 0.5 per cent. It is less than 5 per cent of what Wandsworth spends each year on agency staff. It is not a serious financial obstacle. It is a political choice, one that previous councils of both parties have consistently avoided making.

Why this moment matters

On 7 May, Wandsworth returned a hung council for the first time in its modern history. Conservatives won 29 seats. Labour won 28. One independent holds the balance.

That independent is Malcolm Grimston, a nuclear energy academic who has represented West Hill for over 30 years, completes more than 1,000 pieces of casework a year, and sends a monthly bulletin to 8,000 residents. He resigned the Conservative whip a decade ago when his party proposed closing Southfields Library. He ran a campaign. He has stood as an independent at every election since. The library is still open. As our profile of him published yesterday showed, he treats the role as serious professional work because he is a serious professional.

He is also, right now, the most important person in Wandsworth politics.

The hung council makes the quality of individual councillors matter in a way it has not for years. Majority control can function (and often does, badly) with party operators who follow whips’ instructions. A hung council requires something entirely different: people capable of genuine negotiation, principled compromise, and collaborative problem-solving across party lines. The skills, in other words, of an experienced non-executive director rather than a political loyalist.

If this council term demonstrates anything, it will demonstrate whether Wandsworth’s current elected members can rise to that challenge. The argument for changing how those members are recruited and compensated will be settled, one way or another, by what happens in the chamber over the next four years.

The evidence from years of scrutiny failures suggests the current model is not delivering the oversight the borough needs. Grimston’s record shows what is possible when someone decides to treat the role seriously.

The foundation argument

This is the third piece in the Putney 2030 series, and the one that underpins the others. Better bridges, a better waterfront, a better high street, better parks: none of these happen by accident. They happen when the people responsible for governing the place have the skills, the independence, and the professional commitment to make them happen.

The next two pieces will look at the high street and Putney’s green spaces, two more areas where the raw material is exceptional and the ambition has consistently fallen short.

But this piece comes third because it is the foundation of all of them. Better bridges, a better waterfront, a better high street, better parks: none of these happen by accident. They happen when the people responsible for governing the place have the skills, the independence, and the professional commitment to make them happen.

The vision for Putney in 2030 is not limited by money or by technical possibility. It is limited by governance. And governance starts with who is in the room.

Putney has the people. It just needs a system that lets them serve.

How important is this to Putney’s future?

PUTNEY 2030 | Issue 3 of 5 | putney.news