At a time when Hillingdon is under serious financial pressure, the Council has slashed routine financial scrutiny. Here is why residents are fighting back.

At the same Annual Council meeting where Hillingdon changed the rules on sealed contracts and debt write-offs, it also changed the way financial scrutiny is organised. This may turn out to be the most important change of all.

The Council has created a new Audit, Finance and Performance Committee. It says this will provide a stronger, clearer forum for audit, finance, performance and corporate oversight.

But the membership tells a different story.

Each ordinary Select Committee has seven members, split 4 Conservative, 2 Labour and 1 Reform. The new Audit, Finance and Performance Committee has five voting members, split 4 Conservative and 1 Labour, with no Reform councillor and a vacant independent non-voting chair.

So Hillingdon has gone from several committees where opposition councillors could routinely ask budget questions, to one smaller committee with one opposition councillor. That is not a technicality. That is fewer elected representatives regularly looking at the numbers.

Audit vs. Scrutiny

There is also a more basic problem. Audit and scrutiny are not the same thing.

Audit asks whether systems, controls and governance arrangements are working. Scrutiny asks whether decisions are good enough, whether services are being delivered properly, whether savings are realistic, and whether Cabinet Members are being held to account. They overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Combining audit, finance, performance and scrutiny in one smaller committee may be administratively neat. But neatness is not the same as democratic accountability.

At a time when Hillingdon is under serious financial pressure, residents need more visible scrutiny, not less. More councillors asking questions, not fewer. More service-level budget challenge, not one smaller committee where the numbers can be contained in a tighter space.

The Scrutiny Paradox

The strangest moment came later the same evening.

Councillor Peter Smallwood voted for the constitutional package that created the new committee structure. The recorded vote lists him among those voting in favour. Then, minutes later, he stood up to praise the very scrutiny system being displaced.

He told the chamber that the Select Committees had “really stepped up the level of scrutiny and challenge across the Council”. He said one of the clearest examples was “the continued strengthening of financial scrutiny”, with members spending more time examining budget assumptions, financial pressures and the long-term sustainability of services.

He also praised the rollout of specialist financial training, saying it had helped members gain more confidence and depth on complex financial issues.

Read that again. The Council spent the year training councillors to scrutinise the finances better. Councillor Smallwood praised that work in public. And then the administration voted to move routine financial scrutiny out of the wider Select Committee structure and into a smaller committee with fewer opposition voices.

That is not “modernisation” residents can simply accept on trust. It is a contradiction staring everyone in the face.

The Banerjee Resignation

The concern is no longer coming only from opposition councillors or residents’ associations.

Councillor Kaushik Banerjee, elected as a Conservative councillor for Ickenham & South Harefield, has resigned the Conservative whip and will sit as an independent. In an email to residents, he said he had concluded that remaining under the whip would no longer allow him to represent residents “in the honest and independent way they deserve”.

He warned that Hillingdon faces serious financial and structural challenges, and said residents deserve “far greater honesty and strategic direction”. Most directly, he wrote:

“I have also become increasingly concerned that scrutiny within the administration is too often treated as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. There appears to be a belief that controlling the narrative can substitute for confronting the underlying issues themselves… That is not sustainable leadership. It is managerial avoidance presented as financial prudence.”

That matters. Because it goes straight to the question residents are asking: is Hillingdon’s new scrutiny structure designed to welcome difficult financial questions – or to keep them in a smaller, more manageable space?

The Council says scrutiny has been strengthened. But within days of the vote, one of its own newly re-elected Conservative councillors resigned the whip, warning that scrutiny was being treated as an inconvenience.

Sign our Petition

Residents should not need to be constitutional experts to see the problem. Hillingdon is under financial pressure. Residents are paying more through charges and fees. Services face increasing strain. Public confidence has been damaged by the Cowley Meeting Hall questions.

This is the moment for more scrutiny, not less.

A residents’ petition does not need to accuse anyone of wrongdoing. It simply needs to ask the Council to restore proper financial scrutiny. We are launching a formal petition titled “Restore proper financial scrutiny across Hillingdon’s Select Committees“.

It calls on Hillingdon Council to:

• Restore regular service-level budget monitoring to Hillingdon’s Select Committees, so that more councillors across more service areas – including more opposition councillors – can scrutinise Council finances openly and regularly.
• If the Council keeps the new Audit, Finance and Performance Committee, we also ask that its voting membership be expanded to include stronger opposition representation, including representation from all opposition groups on the Council.

This is not party politics. It is about public accountability. The evidence points to fewer committees, fewer councillors, fewer opposition voices, and fewer places where residents can watch the numbers being challenged.

Hillingdon Council should restore financial scrutiny across the Select Committees – and put more eyes back on the money.

Get Notified When the Petition Launches

Because the official petition is currently going through the council’s setup process, it is not yet open for signatures.

Fill in your details below to receive an immediate email notification with the direct link to sign the moment it goes live:

Read More

• The illusion of engagement: Stolen credit, slashed scrutiny, and refused handshakes
• Theo’s Café Update: A missed deadline, an ICO investigation, and a Police report
• After Cowley Meeting Hall: Hillingdon rewrites the rulebook to move debt out of sight
• Fewer eyes on the money: Why residents should challenge Hillingdon’s new scrutiny system

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