The ‘cheapest borough in London’ says taxes may need to rise 230%

In February, a leaflet from Wandsworth Council came through my door announcing that for the fourth consecutive year the borough was freezing Council Tax.

This week, the same council sent me a notice pointing to a page on its website titled, simply, “Financial crisis.” It says that without action, the council’s share of my bill, and that of every household in Wandsworth, would need to rise by 230%.

Wandsworth has been the totem of low-tax local government since the Thatcher era, when the borough became the Conservative Party’s flagship. It was proof, its admirers said, that a council could run lean and charge residents next to nothing.

Labour’s capture of the borough in 2022 ended 44 years of Conservative control and was read at the time as a watershed for inner London. The party spent the next four years defending this position rather than dismantling it, freezing the council’s share of the tax each year and campaigning on it hard.

As late as December, then-leader Simon Hogg was telling residents his administration would refuse new government freedoms to raise bills beyond the 5% referendum cap, noting “it’s the right thing to keep Council Tax as low as we can.”

May elections

The local elections in May 2026 left no party in overall control: Conservatives 29 seats, Labour 28, with the balance held by independent councillor Malcolm Grimston.

A minority Conservative administration under Aled Richards-Jones took office and immediately launched a comprehensive Spending Review, aimed at what it describes as a £137 million budget gap, the largest forecast deficit in the borough’s history.

The new crisis page lays out the problem in full. Wandsworth is receiving £19 million less from central government in 2026/27 than the year before, the first instalment of cuts the council says will reach £84 million a year by 2030, with no additional funding for inflation or rising demand.

The budget set in March relies on £50 million of reserves to balance this year alone, reserves the council projects would be exhausted entirely by 2028 if nothing changes. Borrowing, on current plans, would climb to £1.14 billion by 2035.

The government has seemingly granted Wandsworth the power to raise council tax by whatever is needed to balance its books, and the council claims that doing nothing else (no other cuts) would require a rise of 230% by 2030.

It should be noted that this figure is hypothetical – it’s what the increase will be if the status quo remains as is today. The figure also applies only to the council’s own share of the bill, the Greater London Authority precept, which makes up a substantial slice of what Wandsworth households actually pay, sits outside it.

A 230% rise in the local share would not mean my bill, or anyone’s, trebling.

But they also show that a council can’t be run on historical precedent and vibes alone. Most notably, Whitehall has changed how it spends its money.

Wandsworth’s famously low bills were never purely a triumph of thrift. The borough has benefited from transitional funding protection dating back to the 2013 reform of local government finance, a temporary shield that somehow survived for more than a decade while other councils absorbed the changes.

Last summer, the council’s own Finance Officer, Fenella Murray, admitted to a committee that without an extension of special treatment under the government’s Fair Funding Review, bills could need to double or treble.

The government’s provisional settlement, published in December, confirmed that money is being redistributed towards more deprived areas, and Whitehall’s own modelling assumes wealthy boroughs like Wandsworth will raise council tax sharply to compensate.

What happens next?

The Spending Review’s initial findings will be presented at the Full Council meeting on 22 July, at 19h30 in the Council Chamber at Wandsworth Town Hall.

The new administration has pledged to protect what it calls core neighbourhood services such as weekly bin collections, street sweeping, and fly-tipping removal. Everything else, it seems, is on the table.

The 230% will almost certainly never appear on my bill. Its purpose is to make a series of cuts to the bone feel painful rather than catastrophic.

But for the first time in living memory, the question in Wandsworth is not whether the cheapest borough in London stays cheap. It is what we will lose to keep it that way.

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