Band D would go from £1,020 to £1,978, a rise of £958 or 94 per cent. The council's final Spending Review names April 2027, and the vote comes in March.

Wandsworth Council has put a figure on the council tax rise it says it will need. A Band D bill of £1,978 a year from April 2027. That is £958 more than the £1,020 most households in the borough pay now, and a rise of 94 per cent.

The number is on page 5 and page 38 of the council’s final Spending Review report, published on 15 September.

Nothing is decided. The report is a plan, the charge has to be voted through by Full Council in March 2027, and the council is still asking the Government to change its mind. On 18 September the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said she had instructed lawyers to look at challenging the Government over the funding cut behind it. No claim has been filed.

Update, 21 September 2026. Three days on, the legal challenge has not moved. No claim has been filed, and the Conservative Party’s own news pages carry nothing about Wandsworth, council tax or local government funding, the most recent release there being dated 17 September. The council has issued no further statement since 17 September either. What we have added below is the council’s own case, made in a joint letter to the Prime Minister on 16 September, and the date the fight now turns on: the Budget, on 28 October.

What the council’s report says

The report is the council’s own document, not a campaign leaflet, and it is blunt:

  • The council will “plan on the basis of Wandsworth’s share of council tax rising to £1,468 in 2027/28”.
  • Including the Greater London Authority precept, that makes an indicative total Band D bill of “approximately £1,978”.
  • The whole increase lands in one year. The modelling “assumes that the increase is made in 2027/28, with no further increase in the Council’s share in the following three years”.
  • The trigger is the funding settlement: Wandsworth “will lose £84m a year of core government funding by 2030, a reduction of around 40%”.
  • The final decision “will be taken by Full Council in March 2027 as part of the statutory 2027/28 budget setting process”.
  • Because the scale is so large, the council says it “will write to residents now to give as much notice as possible so they can plan ahead”.

The council’s own news statement of 15 September puts the same £84m in local terms. It is “more than all of our spending on parks, libraries, leisure centres, bin collection and street cleaning”.

Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance Peter Graham said: “We promised that we’d be honest with residents. Council tax will need to rise unless Government thinks again. And it must think again.”

Where the 94 per cent comes from, and what it hides

Half of a Wandsworth council tax bill is not Wandsworth’s. The 94 per cent is the rise in the whole bill, including the Mayor of London’s precept, which is not going up under this plan.

2026-27 Indicative 2027-28 Change
Wandsworth Council’s share £510 £1,468 up 188%
Greater London Authority precept £510 £510 assumed unchanged
Total Band D bill £1,020 £1,978 up 94%

Figures from page 38 of the Spending Review report. Our own council tax bands page has the precise 2026-27 split: £509.84 for the council and £510.51 for the GLA, £1,020.35 in total.

So the council’s own charge would almost triple. The 94 per cent that has travelled round the national press is the smaller of the two numbers, because the GLA half dilutes it. The report also warns that £1,978 is not a ceiling: “The final amount will depend on the GLA precept set for 2027/28,” which the Mayor sets separately.

One more thing worth being precise about. Badenoch told Newsnight the Government “has taken away 40% of their funding”. The council’s own wording is narrower. The 40 per cent is of core government funding, not of everything the council spends, which is also paid for by council tax, retained business rates, rents, fees and charges.

What each band would pay

Paired bar chart of Wandsworth council tax by band. For each band the grey bar is the 2026-27 charge and the dark red bar is the indicative 2027-28 charge. Band A rises from £680 to £1,319, band B from £794 to £1,538, band C from £907 to £1,758, band D from £1,020 to £1,978, band E from £1,247 to £2,418, band F from £1,474 to £2,857, band G from £1,701 to £3,297 and band H from £2,041 to £3,956.
Current charges are the council's published 2026-27 figures for the main part of the borough. The 2027-28 column is our calculation from the £1,978 band D in the Spending Review report.
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The council has published one figure, for Band D. Every other band is a fixed proportion of Band D, set in law by the Local Government Finance Act 1992, so the rest of the table follows arithmetically. Band A is six ninths of Band D, Band H is twice it.

Band 2026-27 Indicative 2027-28 Increase
A £680.23 £1,319 £638
B £793.60 £1,538 £745
C £906.98 £1,758 £851
D £1,020.35 £1,978 £958
E £1,247.10 £2,418 £1,170
F £1,473.84 £2,857 £1,383
G £1,700.58 £3,297 £1,596
H £2,040.70 £3,956 £1,915

Two caveats on that table, both ours. The 2027-28 column assumes the GLA precept stays where it is, which the council itself flags as uncertain. And homes in the Wimbledon and Putney Commons levy area pay a separate levy on top, £41.38 at Band D this year.

For a Band D household paying over ten instalments, the monthly figure goes from £102.04 to about £197.80.

Even at £1,978, the report notes, the bill would be “considerably lower than the current year national average charge of £2,392”. Wandsworth currently has the lowest average Band D bill of any billing authority in England.

Help with the bill

The report sets out what happens to the Council Tax Reduction Scheme, which is the part most likely to matter to the households least able to absorb this:

  • Support of “up to around 50%” of the bill for eligible working age households, with continued support for pensioners.
  • Income bands widened “so that more low income working households can receive support as council tax rises”.
  • A multi-year taper, so any reduction in support is gradual rather than a cliff edge.
  • More than 15,000 households, about 10 per cent of the borough, expected to receive help.
  • The cost of the scheme rising from £11.1m to £16.2m by 2030/31.

In his foreword, Peter Graham says the council plans “to nearly double our support through the Council Tax Reduction Scheme next year, while ensuring that everyone of working age pays something”. Those two figures fit together: if the bill roughly doubles and the percentage of support holds, the cash written off roughly doubles with it.

Badenoch was interviewed by Matt Chorley on BBC Two’s Newsnight. Her words were carried identically by the Press Association wire, as published by the Enfield Independent, and by the Independent’s report. We are quoting the broadcast interview, not those articles.

She said: “I think it is outrageous that Wandsworth Council is having to put up council tax.” She continued: “It is because the government has taken away 40% of their funding. So we have actually instructed lawyers, as the Conservative Party, to see if we can challenge the Government on this decision.”

Asked about the borough’s low bills, she said: “I think if you suddenly have a nearly 100% increase in your council tax, you would be extremely worried.”

Read the words carefully. Lawyers have been instructed “to see if we can challenge”. That is an opinion being sought, not a claim issued, and the party has not said what decision it would challenge or on what ground.

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson, quoted in the same reports, said: “Local authorities decide the level of council tax they wish to set, but we are clear that in doing so they should put taxpayers first.”

As at 21 September that is still where it stands. No claim has been filed, and the Conservative Party’s own news pages carry nothing about Wandsworth, council tax or local government funding. The most recent item there is a speech by the Shadow Chancellor on 17 September.

The council’s own challenge: £5bn out, £217m back

The council is fighting this too, and not in court. On 16 September the Leader, Robert Morritt, signed a joint letter to the Prime Minister with other London borough leaders. The council has not named the other signatories.

The argument is that Wandsworth pays in far more than it gets back. These are the council’s own figures, and no national report of the row has carried them:

  • Residents paid £4.6bn in income tax in 2023/24. The council puts that at nearly £14,000 a head, three and a half times the national average.
  • They paid £285m in stamp duty on property sales in 2024/25, which the council says is the fourth highest of any local authority and about 2 per cent of the national total.
  • Businesses in the borough paid £158m in business rates, the 36th highest nationally.
  • Unemployment in Wandsworth is 3.7 per cent, against 4.6 per cent nationally.
  • Those three taxes come to over £5bn a year. The council received £217m in revenue funding from the local government finance settlement, which it calls “four pence in every pound”.
Bar chart of the council's own figures. Paid in each year: income tax £4.6bn in 2023-24, stamp duty £285m in 2024-25 and business rates £158m. Came back from Government: £217m of revenue funding, which the council describes as four pence in every pound.
Every figure here is the council's, from its 16 September letter to the Prime Minister. The three taxes are collected nationally, not by Wandsworth, and are not money the council ever holds.
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One caveat worth stating plainly, because the council does not. Income tax and stamp duty are national taxes, collected by HM Revenue and Customs and spent across the whole country, not local revenue diverted elsewhere. No council anywhere gets back what its residents pay in income tax. The figures measure how much Wandsworth contributes, not a debt owed to it.

Morritt’s letter also puts a cash figure on this year that the Spending Review report does not. He says the council “already received £19m less in funding this year and will be receiving £84m a year less by 2030”. He said Wandsworth residents “are proud to play our part in supporting the UK, but now we are being robbed”, with “our money taken to subsidise badly run councils in other parts of the country”.

Peter Graham, in the same release, said: “The Government is forcing Wandsworth to increase Council Tax, which it knows is the only realistic way to recover funding.”

The second bill, in 2028

The same release flags a separate charge heading for the same households. The High Value Council Tax Surcharge, widely called the mansion tax, is set to begin in April 2028 and the council says it would cost some Wandsworth homeowners an extra £2,500 to £7,500 a year. The council’s objection is not only the amount: the surcharge would be collected by councils but the money kept by the Government, so Wandsworth would bill for it and see none of it. Four boroughs, Wandsworth, Richmond upon Thames, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, wrote jointly to the Chancellor about it on 14 September.

The date it turns on

The letter’s ask is specific and it is tied to a date. “Ahead of the Budget which will be announced on 28 October, we insist that this funding cut should be withdrawn.” The Chancellor confirmed 28 October as the Budget date in a letter to the Treasury Select Committee in July.

That is the next real test of any of this. If the funding settlement is unchanged on 28 October, the council’s March 2027 budget is set against the numbers it has already published.

The rule that put Wandsworth here

The mechanism is not hidden. It is in the Government’s own response to the Fair Funding Review 2.0 consultation, and two paragraphs explain why the lowest-taxed borough in England is the one being asked for the biggest rise.

First, the safety net assumes councils tax to the limit. The Government “will continue the existing policy that any protection available through funding floors assumes local authorities use the full council tax flexibility available to them” (paragraph 9.4.16). A council that keeps its charge low is still treated in the sums as though it had not.

Second, permission to go above the referendum cap is rationed by how cheap you already are. The Government says it will consider requests case by case and “will not agree to requests for additional flexibilities from authorities where council taxpayers are already paying above the average bill” (paragraph 9.2.8).

Wandsworth’s bills are the furthest below the average in the country. That is precisely why it qualifies for the flexibility, and why the council can plan a 94 per cent rise without holding a referendum.

The council says it is fighting on. Its report commits it to “use all available routes to challenge the impact of the funding settlement”, including a Treasury submission for the Autumn Budget and a Sustainable Communities Act proposal with Westminster, Richmond upon Thames and Kensington and Chelsea. We covered that Sustainable Communities Act route in August.

The number has moved since July

This is the second figure the council has published. Its initial report in July implied a 71 per cent rise, spread over two years, because the Government’s transitional protection assumed 4.99 per cent plus £150 in each of 2027/28 and 2028/29. We reported that in August.

The final report replaces it with a single 94 per cent rise in 2027/28 and nothing further for three years. The council attributes the change to “the additional demand and inflationary pressures facing the Council” identified since July.

One vote, and the administration is a seat short

None of this happens without a majority at Full Council in March 2027.

The Conservative administration does not have one on its own. After the May election and the Trinity ward by-election on 27 August, the council’s 58 seats are held by 29 Conservatives, 25 Labour, three Labour and Co-operative and one Independent Member. A majority is 30. The council has confirmed the Conservatives “has a confidence and supply agreement with an Independent councillor to form a majority”.

A 94 per cent council tax rise will therefore pass or fail on a single councillor’s vote, unless the funding position changes first.

What it means for you

  • Nothing changes on your bill this year. The current charge runs to 31 March 2027. Your band and what you pay now are on our council tax bands page.
  • Expect a letter. The council has said it will write to residents now rather than wait for the budget, so an envelope about this is not a scam.
  • If money is tight, check the reduction scheme before April. Support is being widened, not cut, and the council’s council tax support pages are where to apply.
  • You can respond now. The council is running an engagement exercise on which services matter most, at yourprioritiesforwandsworth.commonplace.is, and says the answers will feed its Sustainable Communities Act proposal.
  • The first date to watch is 28 October, the Budget. That is the deadline the council itself has set for the funding cut to be withdrawn, and the point at which the March 2027 figure either firms up or changes.
  • Then March 2027, when Full Council sets the charge on a single Independent councillor’s vote.

Sources

Updated 21 September 2026: added the council’s 16 September joint letter to the Prime Minister and its contribution figures, the mansion tax surcharge, the 28 October Budget deadline, and the position of the Conservative Party’s legal challenge as at that date. Nothing in the original report has been changed.