Wandsworth’s Conservative council has effectively shelved Labour’s regeneration plan for the Alton estate in Roehampton, voting through a budget that strips £9.5 million from the scheme at a full council meeting on Wednesday night.
The money was earmarked for a new building at Portswood Place, which was supposed to house the estate’s Family Hub and a nursery. The building had been costed at £19.5 million, meaning nearly half of its funding is gone — and the council has not agreed to spend the £10 million that remains.
Councillors were asked on the night whether the administration would build the plan that residents voted for a year ago. Cllr Matthew Corner, speaking for the Conservative administration, said the council was “committed to supporting regeneration of the Alton estate as set out in our manifesto” — but the budget vote took £9.5 million out of it regardless.
The missing building
The council has not said what will replace the Portswood Place building. At the meeting, the councillor in charge of children’s services said the current idea is to move the Family Hub into Block A at the estate’s entrance — and possibly the GP practice and Eastwood Nursery too, “if the designers can make it fit”.
Labour’s Cllr Annamarie Critchard, a governor of the nursery schools that include Eastwood, told the chamber that nobody had consulted the nursery about the idea. The council says it will talk to everyone affected before making any changes final.
The funding gap
The debate turned on numbers. Reporting of the council’s Cabinet papers put the scheme’s cost at £163 million, up from about £123 million before the vote — a rise of £40 million in six weeks. The grant assumed from the Mayor of London’s office, meanwhile, had grown from £16 million to an assumed £77 million, up £61 million.
Corner accused Labour of chasing “positive headlines”, telling councillors it was “all too easy to propose ambitious regenerations but fail to explain how they will be funded and delivered”. He also blamed Labour’s decision to tear up the earlier Conservative plan in its first year in charge for “years of unnecessary delay”.
Labour’s case was different. At a hustings six months before the May election, Roehampton councillor Jenny Yates said: “There is no funding gap. All the plans are in the council capital programme.” The Conservative candidate at the same event, Nick Austin, was blunter — his party would scrap the plan if it won, he said, because it could not commit to a scheme with a funding gap. The Conservatives won in May, and the budget vote on Wednesday did what he had said it would.
What residents voted for
A year ago, Alton residents were balloted on the regeneration plan. Of those who voted, 82.4 per cent backed it, on a turnout of 41.5 per cent — 1,158 of the 3,395 residents eligible to vote, roughly a third of the estate. A yes vote was needed to unlock grant funding from the Mayor’s office, and the council described the ballot as the largest of its kind.
On Wednesday, Labour’s Cllr Matthew Tiller, a Roehampton councillor who said there had been talk of rebuilding the Alton “for a large part of my life”, asked Corner to commit to the plan residents had voted for. Corner did not.
Two decades of promises
The Alton has been promised a rebuild for almost twenty years. The Conservatives drew up a masterplan and chose developer Redrow to carry it out — only for Redrow to walk away in August 2020, blaming costs and the planning system. Labour scrapped what was left of the plan in 2022, when it ran the council, and drew up its own version.
What is actually happening on the estate, according to council Cabinet papers, is limited: two play areas, one of them on hold, and the demolition of the old Co-op building. Block A, the site at the estate’s entrance that once held a Co-op supermarket, offices, homes and a youth club, won planning permission in March for 55 council homes alongside a new building with a library, GP surgery and youth space — but the permission came with a £12.6 million hole in the funding and an unresolved leaseholder legal claim over loss of light, which the council’s own lawyer told the planning committee must be settled before work can go ahead.
Corner’s jab at Labour drew a sharp response in the chamber. Labour’s Cllr Aydin Dikerdem, who ran housing until May, argued with Corner over which administration had started knocking down Block A. Just six years earlier, Corner’s own party had approved a scheme for the Alton that its own figures said was £73.7 million short.
For Roehampton residents, the immediate question is practical: the Family Hub and nursery that were meant to anchor the regeneration no longer have a building, and the council has not said what comes next. The vote caps a busy year for Wandsworth’s new Conservative administration, which has already clashed with its own planning committee over the Hammersmith Bridge plan and set up a dedicated housing directorate to get on top of repairs and safety across its housing stock.
