Details of the agreement to run Wandsworth Council are emerging, and they represent a significant improvement on what came before.
A confidence and supply agreement negotiated by independent councillor Malcolm Grimston sets out how the hung council will work. It restores councillors, from all parties, to a genuine role in scrutinising and influencing what happens at the council. Under the previous Labour administration, that role had been systematically stripped away.
The agreement was negotiated by Grimston, who holds the single independent seat that neither party can govern without. He signed it with Conservative leader Aled Richards-Jones the day before the Annual Meeting on 27 May. It reverses many of the anti-democratic changes we documented at length under Labour: scrutiny committees weakened, opposition voices shut out, council meetings turned into managed performances. The new agreement commits the incoming administration to undoing much of that.
What the agreement does
Labour get the chairs of the Environment and Children’s scrutiny committees and the Audit Committee. They hold at least 48% of seats on every ordinary committee. Their spokespeople sit in on every cabinet meeting and take part in discussions on each item.
Committees will examine key decisions before cabinet takes them, not after. Pre-decision scrutiny, which the previous administration abolished, is restored. A new Leader’s question time will be held at full council. All councillors, regardless of party or committee membership, will get access to the papers they need to do their jobs.
The constitution itself will be rewritten, in a process that requires agreement across party lines. That means the standing orders that silenced Grimston and two other independent voices in the chamber last December cannot survive without his consent. He negotiated that condition from the party that imposed those rules on him.
None of this is in place yet. Labour have refused to nominate members to any committee, a protest at the way a committee paper was handed to them on the night of the Annual Meeting rather than in advance. All six scrutiny committees are suspended until July. The oversight body currently in operation is staffed entirely by Conservatives. The first night was chaotic. The agreement that was supposed to prevent that chaos was already signed. These things happened anyway.
July is when the real test comes.
Who is in the cabinet
Richards-Jones leads a nine-member executive that reflects who delivered the Conservative majority. Six of the nine come from the Battersea constituency bloc, which gained seven Conservative seats in May. Peter Graham is Deputy Leader and takes Finance. Matthew Corner goes to Housing, Daniel Hamilton to Transport, Ethan Brooks to Environment.
Two new portfolios have been created: Tom Pridham as Cabinet Member for Opportunity, and Caroline de La Soujeole as Cabinet Member for Enforcement. Neither brief has been publicly defined yet.
For readers in Putney, Brooks matters most. He represents Thamesfield ward and is now accountable for rubbish collection, recycling, street cleaning and parks, including to his own constituents. George Crivelli, East Putney ward, takes Children’s Services, inheriting an Ofsted outstanding rating awarded just weeks before the election.
One notable absence: Will Sweet, Richards-Jones’s ally through the internal Conservative leadership battle, won his seat in Nine Elms and has no cabinet role. Former Conservative council leader Ravi Govindia, who ran Wandsworth for twelve years, was also re-elected and also holds nothing.
Grimston’s position
Malcolm Grimston holds one seat. He is not in the cabinet. He is not taking any party’s whip. What he holds is a veto.
He sits on the General Purposes Committee, which must approve every constitutional change before it reaches full council. That committee is two Conservatives, two Labour, one Grimston. Nothing in Wandsworth’s constitution changes without his agreement. He has given Richards-Jones a working majority for the administration’s day-to-day business. He has given neither side the ability to change the rules without the other.
His ambition, as he has stated it, is to use that position to push both parties toward working together. On the first night of the new council, with papers arriving at the last minute and Labour walking out of the committee process, that ambition already looked like work in progress.
Whether July delivers what the agreement promises, reconstituted committees, a rewritten constitution, Labour genuinely embedded in oversight, will determine whether the agreement means what it says, or whether the first night was a preview of the next four years.
I too had hoped that with the hung council and slim majorities both parties would focus on working together for residents. I also thought Malcolm Grimston’s position would be a steadying hand. Hope I won’t be disappointed.