Kemi Akinola spent four years as the councillor responsible for Wandsworth’s charities.
During that time, she promised local voluntary organisations something they badly needed: a dedicated body to help them find funding, share resources and navigate the council. The service was approved, tendered and then quietly cancelled.
This week, with Labour now in opposition, she launched a petition accusing the new Conservative administration of abandoning those same organisations.
The petition claims local charities face “zero funding or support.” It demands a dedicated cabinet role. What it does not contain is any account of what happened to the support she was supposed to deliver.
The record
When Labour took control from the Conservatives in 2022, Wandsworth was already recognised as one of the weakest boroughs in London for supporting its voluntary sector. Small charities and community groups lacked any central point of contact: no one to call for help with funding applications, no coordination between organisations working on similar problems, no dedicated route into the council.
Two months after taking control of the council, in July 2022, Akinola commissioned a report into what was needed. More than 200 local organisations took part. It was published in November 2023, and in July 2024, the council approved a service worth £330,000 a year to fix the problem and put the contract out to tender, a five-year deal worth £1.65m in total. “We are building a fairer and more compassionate Wandsworth,” she said.
Seven organisations bid for the contract. Three met the basic requirements. Of those three, none could actually deliver what the council was asking for at the price it was offering. “No further evaluation was completed,” the council’s own response to a freedom of information request states. The contract was cancelled. Officers took the decision quietly, without a council vote. The council told Putney.news: “There was no involvement of Councillors in the process.” The entire process had collapsed.
In the meantime, a separate contract with Wandsworth Care Alliance (which had been providing a basic coordination service for local charities since before Labour took over, at £180,000 a year) was coming to an end.
That too expired in December 2025, with nothing ready to replace it. An emergency meeting was held. The council said it was developing a new approach but nothing happened. The monthly record of contracts signed by the council shows nothing was approved and no contract has been awarded then or since.
Argument doesn’t hold
Richmond uses the same council procurement team as Wandsworth. In January 2026, Richmond hired a local charity support organisation for £224,588 over two years. No failed tender beforehand. No emergency meeting.
Moreover, the petition’s claim of “zero funding or support” doesn’t hold up. The council’s grants programme for local charities continues. A free shared workspace for voluntary organisations at the Town Hall is available throughout 2026. What the new Conservative administration has done is remove the named cabinet role, as announced when the new administration set out its structure in May. That is a legitimate concern. But it is a narrower claim than zero support, and it comes poorly from a councillor whose four years in charge left local charities without the one thing they were promised.
The petition also carries a Wandsworth Labour Party data-sharing consent clause.
A local charity worker who contacted Putney.news shared a letter they had sent to Akinola in November 2025, six months before the election. “Wandsworth Council presents itself as a listening council, yet my experience suggests this is not reflected in practice within the VCS sector. Trust is minimal, and confidence in the council’s willingness or ability to listen is fragile.”
Wandsworth’s charities have now waited through two administrations, a report, two failed attempts to hire a support organisation, the loss of the one service that existed, and an emergency meeting that came to nothing. They were promised help in 2022. They still do not have it. The new administration has not said whether it plans to change that. A petition about who cares more is not the answer.
I read Cllr Akinola’s petition with a heavy heart, and I suspect I am not the only person in Wandsworth’s voluntary sector who did.
The petition asks residents to be angry that the new administration has scrapped a named cabinet role. But those of us who actually work in this sector are angry about something rather more concrete: four years in which we were promised dedicated, structural support and ended up with none. The report was commissioned in 2022. It took until late 2023 to publish, until mid-2024 to turn into an approved service, and then the whole thing a £1.65m, five-year contract that was supposed to fix a problem the council itself recognised quietly collapsed at tender.
By the end of 2025 we had also lost the one modest coordination service we did have. Richmond, using the same procurement team, simply went out and commissioned a provider. We could not.
That is not bad luck. It is a delivery failure, and it sits with the person who held the brief.
I would go further. The VCS strategy published last year was, to those of us who read it closely, largely word salad: warm language, no measurable KPIs, no honest account of capacity or cost, no real architecture for the support it claimed to champion. Seasoned community leaders who attended the launch where the report was circulated as they sat down read that document and quietly concluded the game was up. It was so underwhelming and the launch was a damp squib.
What we got across those four years too often felt performative announcements, framing, badly convened and chaired meetings.
I accept Cllr Akinola was also carrying the Borough of Culture and the business brief, and that is a heavy load. But she carried it badly where it mattered most to us, and in doing so she lost the trust of people who had every reason to be her natural allies. We felt unheard by her and by her officers, one of us put exactly that to her in writing in November, months before polling day. That erosion of trust did not stay in the sector. It cost Labour votes it could not afford to lose, because the people she let down talk to their communities.
So I would gently suggest this – step back from the politics of who-cares-more, Cllr Akinola. Reacquaint yourself with your peers in the charity sector, listen to what we actually needed, and retire the performance. A petition is not the support we were promised and it is certainly not an account of why that support never arrived.
This all rings very true. Someone comes in – takes no account of services already in place and thinks they can do better, rather than harnessing existing resources even if when they could be expanded or improved upon. How much has this fiasco already cost us council taxpayers? Perhaps the councillor would like to enlighten us all about the cost of the report she commissioned in 2022. If she was working in the commercial sector, this waste of money with nothing to show for it, would not be tolerated.
How much did the report cost which this councillor commissioned?