UPDATED A Putney resident told the council’s transport chief last night that he had spent months stuck in traffic on Putney Bridge Road while his father was dying of Alzheimer’s. Jenny Yates, Labour’s cabinet member for transport, replied that the council had been “surprised by the level of congestion.”
That exchange set the tone for the first hustings of the local election campaign, covering Thamesfield and East Putney wards. Around 150 people filled the room for an event organised by the Putney Society, chaired by its president Jonathan Callaway. Four candidates appeared on stage. Reform UK, which has three candidates standing in each ward, sent nobody.
Labour did not send a candidate from either ward. Yates, who stands in Roehampton, appeared as the party’s representative. The three other candidates on stage were James Wilson (Liberal Democrat, Thamesfield), Ethan Brooks (Conservative, Thamesfield) and Hana Manthorpe (Green, East Putney).
Traffic dominated. Three of the five pre-submitted questions concerned the Putney Bridge junction redesign, and what followed was the sharpest exchange of the evening.
How we assess candidates: Every candidate at every Hustings is scored on six criteria. Read our methodology.
Who had a plan and who had a script
Wilson was the most specific. Asked how he would get TfL to fix the junction, he said: “How do you get TfL in the room? Very simply, you do your job.” He outlined direct engagement with TfL’s commissioner and Sadiq Khan’s office, and argued the current administration had failed to use the political levers available to it.
Manthorpe cited the signal timing data. Putney Bridge Road, she told the room, gets just 25 seconds of green time in every 104-second cycle. “That isn’t enough,” she said. She was right. An independent engineering review by AECOM, published last November, confirmed that signal timings at the junction had never been implemented as designed, with Putney Bridge Road losing 21 seconds per cycle from the approved model.
Brooks committed to returning £300,000 to reverse elements of the scheme “if we have to.” Then he made a claim that unravelled in front of the room. His predecessor as Conservative transport lead, John Locker, had “never signed it off,” Brooks said, referring to the junction scheme.
Two people in the audience who had been present during the design phase contradicted him immediately. One confirmed Locker had been part of the stakeholder group that developed the scheme. Brooks tried to hold the line, insisting Locker had never formally “signed it off.” A resident provided the explanation: Locker hadn’t signed it off because he was voted out. The room laughed. The council’s own post-implementation review names the then cabinet member for transport as a participant throughout the design phase. The Transport Committee voted unanimously to approve the final design in September 2023, with Conservative members voting in favour.
Yates defended Labour’s record, citing bus route additions on routes 170, 85, 220 and 270. But we reported last November that TfL withdrew route 424 from Putney entirely, citing “congestion on Putney High Street.” A survey of 763 residents found 92 per cent of bus users said journeys had got worse since the junction redesign.
She also committed to a growth plan for Putney High Street. The council’s own published growth plan documents name only Tooting. Putney is not mentioned.
What checked out and what didn’t
Every claim made on stage was checked against the available evidence. Wilson scored highest overall, with one significant exception: his claim that Wandsworth Liberal Democrats had achieved “real progress” on the District line. Our investigation in March found no programme, no funding, no contract and no committed date from Network Rail.
Manthorpe’s technical claims on junction data were confirmed by the independent AECOM review.
Brooks’s financial claims on Labour’s spending drew on his party’s manifesto, which cites the council’s Budget Paper 26-63. However, he used the wrong baseline year for reserves, understating Labour’s inheritance by £7.2 million. Yates’s claim that Wandsworth has the lowest council tax in London was rated misleading: the total bill residents pay rose by around 3.1 per cent this year. The national statistics watchdog wrote directly to the council leader last month finding the freeze claim had “the potential to mislead,” the first such rebuke to a council leader in 18 years.
The moment that stayed
The sharpest policy exchanges will matter in three weeks. But the evening’s most memorable moment came from the stage, not the audience, and had nothing to do with traffic.
Manthorpe, in her closing statement, talked about growing up in a stable home with access to good schools and healthcare. “I now realised that I wasn’t special,” she said. “I was just lucky.” It was the most personal moment of the night, and the room responded to it.
What happens next
The voter registration deadline is midnight on Monday 20 April. You can register at gov.uk/register-to-vote. Photo ID is required to vote on 7 May.
The next hustings covers West Putney and Roehampton, tomorrow evening (Wednesday 15 April) at 7pm, Holy Trinity Church, Ponsonby Road. Putney.news will report from both events.
Reform UK had six candidates across Thamesfield and East Putney. None of them came. One Reform candidate was spotted in the audience. He is standing in Southfields.
Correction, 14 Apr, 8am: We misspelled the meeting chair’s name. It is, of course, Jonathan Callaway, not Calloway. We have also increase the rough attendee count to 150 from 100 based on feedback from people who counted.
Addition: 14 Apr, 3pm: We have published our methodology for how we assess candidates and linked to it in the story.
Update, 16 Apr: The Liberal Democrats subsequently contacted us. They note that their proposed use of ANPR cameras is part of a wider policy and for selective use only. On the issue of council tax, they provided the following statement: “The Liberal Democrats are committed to keeping council tax as low as possible. What is clear is that Wandsworth faces a significant funding black hole over the coming years, a direct result of the Labour government’s revised funding formula. Therefore, it would be wrong to make specific promises before we’ve seen the full picture.
Jenny Yates did give a specific comment on the High Street – she said the Labour government’s new Pride in Place reforms will give the council greater powers to seize empty shops and block gambling and vape shops, which Wandsworth Labour will use on Putney High Street.
As an undecided voter I went along to last night’s hustings. Unfortunately, I came away still undecided. There were compelling individual points made, but no one candidate stood out. Given they had advance warning of the topics to be covered I felt some of the responses were a bit woolly. It was disappointing that Labour did not have a local candidate on stage, but I can understand the logic, given the current level of feeling around the Putney traffic situation. However, if we are being asked to select representatives for our ward, then surely it’s important for our local candidates to be present on stage to talk about how they would represent our individual wards (6 seats across 2 wards) within the wider context of Wandsworth (58 seats across 22 wards). I’m at a loss as to why Reform were unable to field a representative, given they have 6 candidates standing in the 2 wards. Surely not all of them were out canvassing last night. I look forward to reading the Putney News’ fact checking of all 5 party manifestos. In the past it has been a 2 way contest for the borough, but I suspect this time around the council will be more politically diverse.
I was not able to get along to the Hustings as I have been battling with the incompetent bureaucracy of this country for weeks now trying to deal with an executorship, and trying to overcome continued obstacles. However it is interesting that the only communications I have had personally have been from Conservatives – not one other party has bothered so far. They either think it is not worth the effort or that they have no regards whatsoever for the local people they purport to represent.
As someone who was there at the meeting this account is vastly off the mark. Jenny was by far the clearest and most able to speak on each issue as cabinet member. She was on stage because of how many questions were put on the traffic issues around Putney. The writer of this article a former Lib Dem Candidate in Putney is not an impartial writer and take this very nice looking accuracy chart with a heavy pinch of deep sea water salt!
The editor’s political background is disclosed directly above this comment section, and on every story. We published our full scoring methodology today: https://putney.news/election-how-we-score-hustings/. The fact-check ratings are sourced and evidenced; we’d welcome specific challenges to any of them.
Easy for the Green candidate to score highly by your metrics when all she did was list off a load of statistics about the area and offered no actual solutions for how her or her party planned to address them. At one point she said the traffic lights at one part of the junction should be staying green for many seconds longer to let cars through, without realising other parts of the junction would therefore have to be on red for longer – she has no clue!
She was also the only candidate to not respect the Putney Society’s format: she cut in and answered a question during somebody else’s allotted question time. Surprised she has received such a glowing review from Putney News.