Labour's Pledges to the Wandsworth Electorate

Manifesto for Wandsworth

The Council

The council should be an active force shaping the local area for the common good. It should be a progressive:
• Employer – pay a fair London wage and have the best employment and contractual practices
• Community leader – consult and listen, and encourage progressive practices, such as Fairtrade
• Innovator – especially of green technology and carbon reduction
Wandsworth Tories can NOT do that. They do NOT listen or change. They do NOT innovate.

The Objective:

Everything we do will be targeted at safeguarding our children, our senior citizens and the environment: being fair for the many - not the few.

Children and Young People:

London Labour Boroughs have introduced free care for all 2-5 year old children: Labour Wandsworth will do the same.

Labour will continue the work on improving standards in both our primary and secondary schools.

The Tories have closed a dozen state schools, selling many of them to the private sector. This has left us with a shortage of primary places in many parts of the Borough and a major problem with secondary places in the Balham/ Northcote area, where both Clapham County and Walsingham Schools have been sold in the last 20 years and where the Battersea Labour Party has been campaigning for a new school on the Bolingbroke Hospital site.

Assisted by the Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme, Labour will plan to make sure there are good schools for everyone.

Affordable housing:

Affordable housing should not be an add-on to expensive developments along the riverside, with parking spaces priced at £15,000 a time. It is desperately urgent that housing is not just a choice between very expensive houses and flats, and Council estates. We need genuinely mixed communities, where families, as well as singles and couples, live, work and play together.

Council house sales have been very successful for many but Councils should have invested the proceeds in building more new homes. We must build high quality housing with a range of size, cost and tenure, with some rented and some for sale.

There is still much work to do to raise Council estates to modern standards – double glazing, for example, should be a standard. With the help of the Government’s Decent Homes Programme, Labour will tackle the work still not done by Wandsworth Tories.

The environment:

Wandsworth is faced with pressure from developers to put up mammoth tower developments in Putney, Clapham Junction, Nine Elms and all along the river-front. There is now similar pressure on the Springfield Hospital site in Tooting. The Tories have removed all height controls from their plans and the result will be unsustainable development. All this will change under Labour with human scale development built for the many - not the few.

Care for the ecology will be at the heart of all our planning policies; we will oppose unsustainable developments; the ecological impact of any development will be a decisive factor in our judgement on planning applications, as will the continuing development of the riverside walk and Wandsworth's open spaces.

We will clean up our streets and our estates. It is a disgrace that so many people are embarrassed to bring friends home because they are ashamed of the mess and the potholes in the streets and the conditions on many of our large estates.

It is even more disgraceful that some feel scared in their own neighbourhood. We must continue to press for more police and take back control of our streets.

Rents & charges

Wandsworth has the highest Council rents in the country - more than £10 a week higher than anywhere else. It is also putting up every other charge, for swimming pools, soccer pitch rentals, hall hire, by more than inflation – indeed meals on wheels for the elderly have gone up 25% more than inflation since 2006. The Tories even boast about this policy. We will not be able to change that overnight but we will not continue with a policy of major cost increases.

Fairness for all

Wandsworth Tories do not care what the lowest paid earn – again they boast about that. But they do pay the highest salaries and bonuses in the country. The bonus culture is rife in Wandsworth with the Chief Executive paid more than the Prime Minister and 25 other officers paid over £100,000 - more than any other comparable Council in the country. This year the Council budget assumes ZERO salary inflation, and yet the highest paid Council officers are getting average bonuses of over 7.5% - that means some employees will pay by losing their jobs, residents by higher charges and ALL of us by reduced services.

We will ensure that a Living Wage for London is paid to all our staff and we will end the bonus culture at the top.

The money?

Council Tax is no longer an issue. The Government has taken control of Council Tax across the country, with only 2 Boroughs, both Tory, of London’s 33 increasing the Tax this year. Nearly all the rest, like Wandsworth, have frozen Council Tax.

Inevitably this will put a restraint on our ambitions, but with everyone in the country tightening their belts it would be unfair not to expect the same from the Council. This means we will have to pay for our plans by cutting some things – for example, £2 million on senior staff salaries – and by re-allocating resources. The Tories can NOT do that. They have been there too long and they are stagnant.

Vote for a Labour Council, which will be fair for the many - NOT the few.