Westminster City Council’s planned new waste depot in South London will cost nearly £7mn more than originally planned, according to a Cabinet member report published this month.
Originally estimated to cost £6.6mn, the project is now predicted to cost over of £13.5million.
Westminster City Council is building the facility at Mandela Way, just off Old Kent Road in the London Borough of Southwark, in its transition to a fully electric waste fleet. Once completed, the depot will provide waste and recycling vehicle storage, electric charging infrastructure, maintenance workshop, along with a staff offices and welfare accommodation.
The new Westminster Tory administration has slammed the opposition Labour party, who signed off the project’s provisional budget, of “yet another due diligence failure”. However Labour accused the Conservatives of “manufacturing outrage”, saying the provisional budget was always subject to a ground survey which ultimately uncovered issues that would have affected the foundations.
Westminster City Council Leader Paul Swaddle said: “Labour signed off Mandela Way without ever checking the ground it was built on. Nobody did the basic homework, and Westminster taxpayers are now footing an extra £7.97mn bill for it, taking the previous Labour administration’s total waste to £56mn.
“That is taxpayers’ money that could have gone towards delivering A City That Works for All: safe streets, a clean city and local services that residents rely on.
“This is at the same time as the Labour government is slashing £100mn from the council’s budgets. Time and again, our review proves the same thing: same old Labour cannot be trusted with public money.”
Leader of the Opposition, Councillor Ellie Ormsby, has defended the original £6.6mn figure, saying as it was based on early feasibility estimates.
Councillor Ormsby said: “The Mandela Way ‘blunder’ is a desperate attempt by the Conservatives to manufacture a story after their politicised contract review failed to find the smoking gun they were looking for.
“This decision was not ‘buried’. It was set out publicly in a Cabinet Member Report published in January, which made clear that the original £6.6m budget was based on early feasibility estimates. That is precisely why the forecast was described as ‘notional’ and ‘provisional’, and dependent on the outcome of ground investigations.
“Those ground investigations subsequently uncovered unexpected subsurface conditions requiring significant changes to the foundations and drainage. As a result, costs increased as the site and project requirements became better understood.
“The Conservatives should stop manufacturing outrage and instead focus on the findings of their own review and the improvements Labour made to contract management.”
The original early feasibility estimate of £6.6mn for the Mandela Way project was approved by Westminster Labour in May 2024. This was part of a joint £7.6mn budget for Mandela Way and a cleansing depot at Harewood Avenue in Marylebone.
The latter project, originally estimated to cost £1mn, also ran over budget leaving only £5.549mn for the waste depot, but earlier this year additional funds were signed off.
The new depot at Mandela Way needs to be completed by September 2027, in time for the start of the council’s new waste and management contract. This means that there is no more room for delays to the project.
Once completed, the depot will provide full electric vehicle charging infrastructure for around 40 new refuse collection vehicles, as part of the council’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2030. This is in contrast to Kensington and Chelsea, which opted to buy new diesel waste vehicles because they are cheaper, despite their own climate commitments.
The decision on Mandela Way is subject to a call-in period which ends on 3 September 2026.
Westminster Council decision: Mandela Way Electrification and Capital Works Approval.
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