Labour leader of cash-strapped town hall spent £700 on a door sign and £600 on personalised greeting cards, new Tory successor reveals

By MARTIN BECKFORD, POLICY EDITOR Published: 23:06, 20 August 2026 | Updated: 23:12, 20 August 2026 The Labour leader of a cash-strapped town hall has been accused of wasting thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money on a rebranding exercise before he was ousted, including £700 on a door sign. Cllr Simon Hogg, who ran Wandsworth Council until his party was beaten by the Tories in May, spent another £600 on personalised greeting cards. His spending spree, uncovered by the incoming Conservatives, also included £825,000 on a leader's office with six staff and a delivery unit, plus £25,000 on a second office in the south London borough's HQ. The Labour administration even paid £84,000 for consultants to lobby the Labour government over funding. But it ended up with 'the worst cash settlement for any council in the country', according to new leader Cllr Peter Graham, who is now forced to consider record council tax hikes to balance the books. He told a meeting: 'It is a joke, but is one that is sadly at local taxpayers' expense.' Cllr Graham showed fellow councillors the costly greeting cards and metal door sign featuring the revamped Wandsworth logo ordered by his predecessor. 'If he'd like to make out a cheque to the general fund, he can have it back as a souvenir,' he said. Tory leader of Wandsworth Council Peter Graham with the £700 door sign ordered by his Labour predecessor Simon Hogg The Tory leader reeled off a long list of other branded merchandise produced by Labour including tote bags (£6,925), water bottles (£7,790), baseball caps (£1,760), umbrellas (£1,575), T-shirts (£8,339) and mugs (£890). External signs around the town hall cost £11,324 while the refurbishment of its reception including uniforms for staff cost another £10,569. But the Labour administration also secretly planned to move to a new office in Nine Elms, and the Tories have had to spend £240,000 tearing up the deal. 'The council owns the town hall. It pays no rent for using it. The option pursued was to pay rent while leaving the town hall, a listed building, as a white elephant,' Cllr Graham told the meeting last month. Former Labour council leader Cllr Hogg accused him of making 'plainly misleading statements about the council's finances'. He said the town hall had been the 'worst office building in Wandsworth' and said his successor's 'weird rummaging through our emails to find out about logos' was 'really embarrassing'. As the Mail told yesterday, the Tory council – long famed for its low council tax – is now considering hiking its share of bills by as much as 160 per cent to make ends meet. Party leader Kemi Badenoch accused the previous Labour administration of leaving the town hall with a £137million budget gap while ministers have cut its funding by 40 per cent.