Hounslow Council and Lampton Group Deficits and Non-job Roles
Chiswick Homefields councillor Jack Emsley reports back
Cllr Jack Emsley
February 23, 2025
It’s budget week in Hounslow, with the council set to debate and vote on Labour’s plans for the borough’s finances over the next year. In the lead up to the debate there have been hundreds of hours poured into analysing the figures, scrutinising tax and spend proposals, and preparing to articulate what we as an opposition group would do differently.
Most will have seen the headline figures already - Hounslow Council is putting up council tax by the maximum allowed (4.99%), which is of course breaking Labour’s promise of no council tax rises in the first year of a Labour government. Aside from the hike in council tax, which will cost all of us about £100 extra on average, the council is also proposing a series of £12 million of cuts to services, including the quite frankly dangerous proposal to dim and switch off street lights across the borough to save £200,000.
The cuts and tax hikes come in order to plug a £30 million gap in Hounslow’s finances. Some of this gap is due to external factors - inflation has risen to 3% in the latest figures, which puts pressure on services, and Rachel Reeves’ National Insurance Hike is adding millions to the council’s costs (the government is only partially offsetting this, leaving local authorities nationwide scrambling to find an additional £1.1 billion (!) just to cover the tax increase, according to the Local Government Association.)
Some of the gap, though, comes from a series of decisions made by Hounslow Council which are costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money for very little return. The biggest of these money-pits comes from the council’s favourite white elephant - Lampton.
What even is Lampton?
For those unfamiliar, Lampton is a group of companies established by Hounslow Council in 2012 that deliver a range of services in the borough, from housing maintenance to waste and recycling. It’s a complicated beast, being a separate entity to the council yet wholly owned by the local authority. It is, in effect both outsourced services without the profit incentive and in-house services without the control. The worst of both worlds, basically.
Last year, Lampton Group made a loss of over £13 million. This is the latest in a long line of multi-million pound losses by this business. Despite some erroneous claims to the contrary, Lampton relies on our money to keep going, and the size of its losses means it’s eating up more and more of it - the budget being presented by Hounslow Labour on Tuesday has already earmarked £2.3 million in additional emergency reserves just to cover the group. Meanwhile, the latest Lampton business plan admits it may need additional cash to pay for wages and services which will need to come from Hounslow as the sole source of funds.
Successive Labour councillors tasked with steering the Lampton ship have failed to get a grip on the scale of the problem - if we’re having to dim streetlights and hike council tax just to keep Lampton going, is it really worth it? Instead of kicking the can down the road and continuing to throw money at this failing vehicle, isn’t it about time the council admitted Lampton isn’t fit for purpose?
Where else is our money going?
Lampton is a Gordian Knot that will take years (and a change in who runs the council) to unpick, but it’s far from the only egregious example of poor value for money. What else will Labour’s council tax hike be used to pay for?
For one, hundreds of thousands of pounds is being used to pay additional allowances to councillors. These so-called Special Responsibility Allowances are paid on top of the basic £12.7k each councillor receives, and are meant to reflect, well, additional responsibilities. Some of this is, in my opinion, justified - the Chair of the Pension Fund or Planning Committee does have a lot of extra work to do! But there are a large number of non-job roles that are simply not justifiable at a time when residents are being asked to pay more.
The worst example of this is the Cabinet Assistant Role - five Labour councillors are currently paid just short of £50,000 to deputise for council cabinet members. A recent Freedom of Information request revealed three of these cabinet assistants, including Chiswick’s only Labour councillor, have sent just one email as part of their role since starting in May last year. That’s £9,600+ to each of them for a single email! If the council was serious about making efficiency savings, it could start by scrapping these roles completely. Labour should be cutting non-jobs for councillors, not streetlighting levels.
The other area where immediate savings could be found is the council’s ‘Community Solutions Team’. The Community Solutions Team currently costs the taxpayer £800,000. Some of the roles it fulfils do deliver value, but some, such as organising Area Forums and ‘acting as the bridge between the council and community groups’, are the job of elected councillors – taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for this twice just because some councillors (such as Labour’s infamously absent Balraj Sarai) can’t be bothered to do the job they were elected to do.
Political Choices
On Tuesday Conservative councillors will be voting against Labour’s proposals to hike your council tax, dim our streetlights, reduce money spent on road maintenance, and cut the budget for planting trees. It’s a budget which will see more tax for worse services, and we think there are better choices to be made.
Cllr Jack Emsley
07977 396017
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY 2025
Council Meetings - Borough Council
- Tuesday 25 February - Budget Setting Meeting
- Tuesday25 March - Final Meeting of Council Year
There is public access for these meetings via a direct lift from the ground floor to the Council Meeting Room
6th Floor, Hounslow House, 7 Bath Road, Hounslow TW3 3EB
Council Meetings – Overview and Scrutiny Committee
6th Floor, Hounslow House, 7 Bath Road, Hounslow TW3 3EB
Council Meetings – Planning
Thursday, 13 February: Planning committee
Important Current Local Issues During weekends, residents can still access council services on-line or via emergency numbers:
To inform the council of an emergency, please call 020 8583 2222
CONSERVATIVE COUNCILLOR SURGERIES
Chiswick: Every Saturday from 9.30am to 10.30am at Chiswick Library (the eight Conservative councillors take this surgery in turn).
Gunnersbury: First Saturday of the month from 10am to 11am at The Gunnersbury Triangle Club, Triangle Way, off The Ridgeway, W3 8LU (at least one of the Chiswick Gunnersbury ward councillors takes this surgery).
CONSERVATIVE COUNCILLORS and CONTACTS
Chiswick Gunnersbury ward
Cllr Joanna Biddolph joanna.biddolph@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 703446
Cllr Ranjit Gill ranjit.gill@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 702956
Cllr Ron Mushiso ron.mushiso@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 702887
Chiswick Homefields ward
Cllr Jack Emsley jack.emsley@hounslow.gov.uk 07977 396017
Cllr Gerald McGregor gerald.mcgregor@hounslow.gov.uk 07866 784821
Cllr John Todd john.todd@hounslow.gov.uk 07866 784651
Chiswick Riverside ward
Cllr Gabriella Giles gabriella.giles@hounslow.gov.uk 07966 270823
Cllr Peter Thompson peter.thompson@hounslow.gov.uk 07977 395810
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