For most of my adult life, I was a spectator to politics rather than a participant. I rarely paid attention to what happened in Westminster — the differences between political parties felt marginal, the outcomes largely the same. That all changed in 2023 when I moved back home to London after spending a few years working in Singapore. There, taxes are lower yet everything runs smoothly. Back home in London, I was paying much more tax and getting a lot less. Missed bins. Crumbling roads. Endless strikes. Hardly world-class public services, as my Japanese wife, who I met in Singapore, regularly reminded me.
So when I found out in February last year that my council tax was going up again, I decided to go along to a council meeting for the first time in my life. I went to the budget meeting, expecting a clear explanation for why bills were rising and what residents were getting in return. I didn’t get one.
Misleading the public
I discovered my council, Tower Hamlets, brings in roughly £100 million a year in council tax. The five per cent rise in council tax was sold as necessary and unavoidable, yet it only raises around £5 million. In the context of a council planning to spend well over a billion pounds across the next few years, that’s peanuts.
I work in financial consulting, looking at how teams, departments and processes operate, and find ways to deliver better results for less money. You do this by cutting waste, improving productivity and simplifying how things are done. That balance is achieved every day in the private sector. Yet in local government, we’re repeatedly told it can’t be done.
And if you’re trying to find a few million in a large organisation, you start with discretionary spending and outsourcing. Consultants. Lawyers. Professional services. Recruitment agencies. Contractors. Marketing.
Such costs are often necessary. But unlike core staffing or operational infrastructure, they can usually be reduced, renegotiated or delivered differently. In corporate efficiency drives, they’re reviewed first because leadership has direct control over them.
So I downloaded Tower Hamlets council’s 2024 spending data and went through it line by line. On those categories alone, the council spent around £45 million in a single year. Suddenly, the £5 million council tax rise was put into perspective. I then looked at Newham, the council next door for a comparison. They spent roughly £50 million on the same things.
This is how councils mislead the public on where their money actually goes
What made it worse was the way councils label the spending. If they hire a consultant to advise on a housing project, for example, it’s often recorded as “housing” spend and not a “consulting” spend.
This is how councils mislead the public on where their money actually goes. You might assume that the money they spend on housing is going into building homes, but only a proportion actually makes it to the front line of that service. Until I started this work, there was no easy way to compare council spending side by side. This made it difficult for residents to know whether, for example, they were paying higher council tax for worse results compared with a neighbouring council. After realising that ordinary people needed a way to hold their councils accountable, I decided to build one myself.
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I sent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to around 200 major councils across Britain and started working through the line-by-line spend of each of them. In doing so, I opened a can of worms bigger than I ever could have guessed.
I thought gathering basic financial information from our councils would be relatively quick and straightforward. It wasn’t. It opened my eyes to how badly many of them are run.
I submitted the FOI requests at the start of December last year, asking councils how much they had spent since 2020 on consultants, lawyers, recruitment firms, agency staff and marketing. The 88 councils that have responded revealed spending of around £9.9 billion on those categories alone. That includes 14 London councils, which spent more than £3 billion altogether.
They said they simply can’t work out how much they have spent
It’s been over two months since I sent the requests, yet more than 100 councils nationwide are still delaying or have refused to give the figures. The most common reason? They said they simply can’t work out how much they have spent. Most well-run businesses would be able to get that information in minutes.
Instead, councils told me that this spending is buried inside service budgets, like housing, care and homelessness, meaning consultant fees and legal bills are lumped in with front-line services.
When buying a property, or negotiating a contract, at some point you are going to have to pay a lawyer. But rather than class this as a legal fee, your council will claim it was a housing expense, and it gets classified as such.
The council is not technically doing anything illegal, but it misleads the public on how much money truly makes it to front-line services. The only way to separate it, they said, would be to go through invoices line by line going back several years. At best it would take weeks, more likely months to figure out.
That’s tens of billions of pounds of public money, and they can’t tell you where it really went. They can tell you what department it was charged to, but have no idea if it was spent on front-line services or middle men.
The capital’s most opaque boroughs
Of the £12.6 billion spent in the first seven months of 2025 in London councils, more than £1.1 billion of payments were redacted. That means the public cannot see who was paid, and for what. Even more striking was where those redactions were concentrated. Around £700 million of that £1.1bn came from just three councils: Croydon, Ealing and Newham.
I then turned my attention to London. I assumed I could pull all 32 boroughs’ published spending data into one basic reporting tool and compare them.
Instead, every single council reports differently. Different column headings. Different levels of detail. Some change format month to month. One borough might list five data fields. Another might list 25.
Even the names for spending categories vary. Legal fees can be referred to as anything from “outside counsel” to “solicitors”. Tower Hamlets alone had more than 300 different payment categories. Multiply that across London and you’re dealing with thousands of variations for the same kinds of spend.
What are they hiding?
When I finally standardised the London data, one figure jumped out immediately. Of the £12.6 billion spent in the first seven months of 2025, more than £1.1 billion of payments were redacted. That means the public cannot see who was paid, and for what.
Even more striking was where those redactions were concentrated. Around £700 million of that £1.1 billion came from just three councils: Croydon, Ealing and Newham. Digging deeper, Croydon had redacted more than half of all the payments it made, Newham had redacted more than 40 per cent, and Ealing more than a third.
The average London council redacts around 8.6 per cent of its payments, which is on average around £40 million per borough
For context, the average London council redacts around 8.6 per cent of its payments, which is on average around £40 million per borough. There are legitimate reasons for some redactions. If a council gives your grandmother £5,000 towards care costs, you wouldn’t expect their name published online for the world to see.
But the scale in those three boroughs is far beyond the norm. And when you combine that with their financial positions — roughly £3 billion in debt between them, Croydon’s repeated effective bankruptcies, Newham’s audit failures and oversight, and Ealing’s reported £800 million-plus long-term debt — the disparity is hard to ignore.
When I published the figures, the reaction was almost immediate.
Croydon’s Mayor, Jason Perry, launched an internal review and admitted their redaction process had been “overly sensitive”. He said Croydon would change its transparency policy and republish the data so that redactions were closer to the London average of 8.6 per cent.
It was encouraging to see a mayor take responsibility. Though six weeks on, the revised data has yet to appear.
Ealing’s response was rather different. When approached by the media, a council spokesperson said “the source of those figures is unclear”. That surprised me, given that the redacted spend figures they were challenging were taken directly from the spending spreadsheets published on Ealing council’s own website.
Newham declined to respond at all, either to me or to journalists. The silence was notable for a council that has faced failed audits and remains under a Best Value Notice, meaning the Government has concerns over its financial stability and governance. To be clear, I am not accusing any of these councils of illegality. But if I were a resident in a borough carrying close to £1 billion in debt and my council were withholding between a third and half of all payment data, I would expect clear answers.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Havering council has tagged payments to one of its recruitment and workforce suppliers as “telephone expenses”.
Some simply refuse to say what the money was for.
Some don’t redact payments at all, instead they simply refuse to say what the money was for. Westminster council did not list a purpose for £122 million worth of payments in the first half of the financial year.
And this is before even getting to my own borough of Tower Hamlets, where auditors Ernst & Young have raised serious concerns about contracts that cannot be located, bypassed procurement rules, and opaque payments on major care contracts. The council has been approached for comment.
This is painstaking work. I do it in my spare time, around a full-time job and looking after my five-year-old daughter. But it matters, because transparency should not be optional.
Councils tell us taxes must rise because there isn’t enough money for front-line services. After what I’ve uncovered over the past year, I struggle to accept that.
There is certainly enough money. The real question is how it’s being spent.
