Wandsworth Council’s full council meeting tonight is being asked to approve a plan its own committee voted down just last week.
The recommendation was put to a vote and lost. A few lines later in the same report, councillors are asked to approve the plan anyway.
The committee in question is a modest one: six councillors, no power to decide anything, no budget of its own, reporting back to the council or the cabinet. Its job would be to gather evidence and make the case for putting cars, buses and lorries back over Hammersmith Bridge, which has been shut to motor traffic since 2019.
The councillor whose vote against the proposal led to its defeat last week, independent Malcolm Grimston, is expected to object again tonight. He is the only councillor outside the two main parties. He told the committee last week: “I’m not voting against the concept of this. I am asking specifically that we defer it to the next meeting.”
The report was ready a week ago. Metadata on the paper itself shows it was prepared shortly after the meeting where it was voted down, yet it sat unpublished while the days ran out and was released to councillors only the day before tonight’s vote. The law expects council papers to be public at least five clear days before a meeting so people have time to read them.
The move is just the latest in what critics describe as a deliberate strategy by the current Conservative administration to avoid scrutiny: publish at the last minute and use its razor-thin majority to push it through. Every full council meeting since the May election has now had its main papers delivered at the last minute or not at all — tonight is the third in a row — and this is the ninth meeting since May at which councillors have been asked to decide something from papers they had no time to read.
The council has not explained why the papers keep arriving late. The issues not being fully scrutinised are not minor: the September meeting agreed to double council tax.
With a Conservative Mayor holding the casting vote, the administration could win tonight even if Labour and Cllr Grimston vote together — but that would require every member of the Conservative team to turn up and vote for it. If the item is pulled, it will be the administration’s own choice, removing the issue without risking losing the vote or having to explain why a finished report was kept back and published at the last minute.
Why it matters
The committee would make the case for reopening Hammersmith Bridge to traffic. The council’s report puts motor traffic over Putney Bridge up by more than a fifth since 2020, with bus waits longer by over half a minute. Residents say they struggle to reach Charing Cross Hospital.
A full repair would cost £300 million. Hammersmith and Fulham says it cannot find that, and the bid it has made instead asks the government for less than half that amount — to fix the bridge for walkers, cyclists and river traffic. It would not let a single car back over. Wandsworth refused to back that bid in August for exactly that reason. The government decides this autumn.
Both Cllr Grimston and the Labour opposition have indicated they will support the paper in principle but want time to consider the best way of approaching the issue before a new committee is set up. With the bridge closed now for over seven years, it is not something that requires immediate action — and a well thought-through plan is more likely to succeed than a paper prepared by one person and subjected to minimal scrutiny.
