In his foreword to Hillingdon Council’s 2025/26 Performance Report, Leader Cllr Steve Tuckwell wrote that performance management “allows our residents to hold us to account, ensuring we are meeting local needs and spending their money wisely.”
Presenting the same report to Cabinet in late June, Deputy Leader Cllr Richard Mills added his own declaration about transparency, stating that by openly reporting both successes and challenges, the Council is “reinforcing its accountability” and ensuring that “residents have greater confidence.”
It was a reassuring message that aligned perfectly with the Council’s long-standing motto: Putting Residents First.
Unfortunately, the Council’s actions over the past two months tell a completely different story. Following the May elections – which the Conservative administration won with an increased majority despite not publishing a manifesto – the Council has embarked on a systematic rewrite of the Constitution.
The result? Financial scrutiny has been gutted, debt write-offs no longer require a Cabinet vote at any level, and the democratic right to petition the Council has been severely restricted. And when residents tried to push back, they were insulted as cowards who just “shout online.”
May: Gutting Financial Scrutiny
The rollback of accountability began at the Annual Council meeting in May. The Council abolished the Audit Committee and stripped routine financial and budget monitoring away from the wider Select Committees.
Instead, financial scrutiny was consolidated into a single, smaller “Audit, Finance and Performance Committee.” Despite standard political balance rules dictating a 3-2 split for five-member committees, this vital committee was stacked with four Conservative councillors and just one Labour councillor (with no representation for the Reform UK group).
At the same meeting – in the shadow of the Cowley Meeting Hall scandal – the Council also changed the rules on debt. Previously, any individual debt write-off over £50,000 required a formal, public Cabinet decision. Now, no debt write-off requires a full Cabinet vote, at any level: write-offs up to £500,000 are decided by officers in consultation with the Cabinet Member for Finance, published as a Chief Officer Decision Notice, and even larger sums go only to that single Cabinet Member, not the whole Cabinet.
When residents submitted a valid 143-signature petition asking the Council to restore proper financial scrutiny, it was dismissed. The Council’s excuse? That the petition sought to overturn a decision that had already been “taken democratically.” Residents had no advance warning that this change was coming – it appeared only in the agenda published a couple of days before the meeting, buried among dozens of other constitutional reforms and mentioned in no manifesto. The petition was therefore only raised after the decision had already been taken, asking the Council to reconsider it. The Council refused to engage with that at all.
July: Pulling Up the Drawbridge on Petitions
Knowing they’d had no real warning in May, residents were ready when the agenda for the July Full Council meeting was published.
Buried in the papers was a proposal to drastically erode the Council’s Residents’ Petition Scheme. The administration proposed:
- Increasing the threshold for local and planning petitions from 20 to 50 signatures.
- Increasing the threshold for borough-wide petitions from 100 to 500 signatures.
- Abolishing automatic public Cabinet Member hearings for qualifying petitions, replacing them with a written response or a site visit.
- Removing speaking rights for planning petitions where applications are delegated to officers – though the Council says this specific change is required by national planning reform, not a discretionary local choice.
This was a blatant move to make it harder for residents to secure a public hearing and speak directly to elected decision-makers.
Determined not to be caught out again, the Hillingdon Alliance of Residents’ Associations (HARA) launched a new petition to stop the changes. It quickly gathered more than 160 valid signatures from Hillingdon residents, comfortably surpassing the 100-signature threshold then in force for a borough-wide petition. It was formally submitted to Democratic Services before the Council meeting.
We also submitted a Freedom of Information request demanding the data and cost-modelling used to justify these threshold increases.
The FOI Revelations: No Evidence for the Changes
The administration claimed the petition changes would save time and money, describing it as a “streamlined” and “intelligent intervention”. However, the response to our FOI request exposed that these claims had virtually no evidential backing:
The Council admitted it “does not hold any recorded data, time assessments or cost estimates quantifying the average officer time, Member time or financial cost associated with facilitating an individual petition hearing.”
When asked how they decided on exactly 50 and 500 signatures, the Council confessed the “proposed thresholds are a local proposal,” and that benchmarking against other boroughs “was not the factor used for determining the local scheme.”
The “intelligent intervention” process replacing public hearings is based on a single document: a briefing paper from 2013, describing a narrow practice used historically for transport and traffic petitions specifically. That document’s own stated benefits include the aim to “reduce the volume of petitions entering the petition process” – the only documented precedent the Council could produce for the mechanism now being applied to every type of petition in the borough.
The Council justified changing the thresholds due to digital growth, noting – accurately, this is genuine data – that e-Petitions had increased from 13 in 2015/16 to 53 in 2025/26.
In short: the Council had no cost models, thresholds it cannot show its working on, and the only documented precedent for the process replacing public hearings explicitly lists reducing the volume of petitions as one of its benefits.
The “Shouting Online” Insult
Because HARA’s petition was submitted before the vote, the Council could not claim residents were trying to overturn an already-made decision. So, how did the administration handle a valid petition submitted ahead of time?
They insulted us.
Speaking at the July Full Council meeting, Deputy Leader Cllr Richard Mills brushed aside our submission as a “small petition.” He then launched a direct attack on the residents’ associations and community groups attempting to hold the Council to account:
“Let me be clear, Madam Mayor. This administration has been returned by our residents with an increased majority and a clear mandate to deliver for our borough… And we will not be held back by those continually looking to block progress either by those rejected at the ballot box or even more so those who continue to shout online without having the courage to put themselves forward and face the electorate.”
It is a stunning contradiction. In June, the administration claims to welcome accountability. In July, when residents use the Council’s own democratic petition scheme to provide that accountability, they are dismissed as cowards “shouting online.”
Days later, Democratic Services formally rejected the petition. Since they couldn’t use the “already voted” excuse from May, they invented a new one: they stated that the Leader had given “full consideration” to our petition before the meeting, decided to proceed anyway, and pushed the vote through. Therefore, “no further action will be taken.”
What happens next?
The message from the new administration is clear. They have a larger majority, they have no manifesto to bind them, and they view public scrutiny as an inconvenience to be managed, rather than a democratic necessity to be welcomed.
By raising petition thresholds and scrapping public hearings, the Council has ensured that difficult questions about finances, planning, and public assets will be much harder to ask in a public forum.
We will continue to hold this administration to account. We may not have stood for election, but as residents, taxpayers, and voters, we do not need to be on the ballot paper to demand transparency from those who are.
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