For years, Hammersmith and Fulham built part of its political identity around keeping council tax comparatively low while attempting to protect local services. Now that strategy is colliding with a radically different funding landscape.
The west London Labour-run council is warning that, under current projections, it could need to increase its own council-tax element by as much as 150% in 2027/28 to maintain services and broadly balance its budget. The figure is a scenario in a council report—not an announced tax rise.
For a Band D household, the most dramatic scenario would mean an additional £29.11 a week on the Hammersmith and Fulham portion of the bill.
That number becomes easier to understand when the council’s finances are viewed from the other direction.
Government funding received by Hammersmith and Fulham was £150.5m in 2025/26, according to the council’s report cited in the current coverage. The council says this is projected to fall to £72.4m over the following four years.
The government’s explanation is fundamentally different.
Under the revised funding system, councils with historically low council-tax levels can receive less central-government support, with the policy designed to direct more resources towards authorities judged to have greater need. The government specifically identified Hammersmith and Fulham among six authorities with exceptionally low Band D council-tax levels and granted them additional flexibility for 2027/28 and 2028/29.
So the unusual situation facing the borough is this:
A low-tax council is being given greater room to raise local revenue at precisely the moment its central funding is being squeezed.
The council has modelled several possible outcomes.
A 100% increase in its council-tax element would still leave an estimated £46.1m budget gap.
A 125% increase would reduce that gap to approximately £20.6m.
Only the 150% scenario, according to the current assumptions, would broadly balance the budget.
But there is an important distinction: these are financial scenarios, not a final decision to impose a 150% increase.
The council’s current 2026/27 budget, for example, approved a much smaller 2.99% increase in its council-tax element, alongside the adult social-care precept.
Hammersmith and Fulham’s Labour administration argues that the borough’s relatively low tax bills were not simply the product of receiving generous public funding. It says years of aggressive savings and cost-cutting helped keep taxes down while services were maintained, and points to its economic-growth programme as evidence that the borough has generated substantial private investment and employment.
Critics of the funding reform, meanwhile, argue that deprivation calculations do not adequately capture the pressures faced by some London boroughs.
The government takes another view: it says councils remain responsible for deciding their own council-tax levels and has emphasised the overall scale of funding available to local government.
That leaves residents facing a very different question from the familiar annual debate over whether council tax should rise by a few percentage points.
The question now is whether a funding system designed to move money towards areas with greater need can simultaneously force historically low-tax councils to ask their residents for dramatically more money.
For Hammersmith and Fulham, the answer could become visible on household bills in 2027.
And the extraordinary 150% figure may ultimately prove less important than the financial pressure that produced it.
