Wandsworth Council spent nearly three years and almost £5m calling its Access for All scheme “Britain’s Best Concession Scheme.” The figures it fought for 14 months to suppress, released today after an ICO order, show fewer than 2,500 Wandsworth residents ever used it.
The figures are the council’s own. In 2024-25, 93 per cent of all scheme activity was on leisure centre bookings, despite the council offering everything from free event tickets to discounted bikes. Those 36,641 bookings were made by just 2,433 people, fewer than 0.7 per cent of the borough’s population, at an average of 15 visits each. Of the 12,000-plus members enrolled, roughly four in five made no booking of any kind.
This means the scheme’s headline numbers (100,000 bookings, promoted in press release after press release) counted the same small group going repeatedly. No council communication ever stated how many distinct individuals the scheme actually reached.
Where the bookings went
The scheme’s growth is concentrated. Tooting Leisure Centre accounts for more than a quarter of all bookings in both years and drove much of the overall increase. Tooting Bec Lido, which was closed for refurbishment in Year 1, added 1,744 bookings in Year 2 after reopening. That is a new offer rather than growth in existing use. Strip those out and the underlying increase is more modest.
Smaller venues showed stronger proportional gains. Wandle Recreation Centre more than doubled its bookings and Roehampton Sports and Fitness Centre grew 75 per cent, suggesting the scheme did reach new users in those areas. But from a low base.
The cultural and events offer tells a similar story. The council set aside 1,500 tickets for its summer concert series in Battersea Park; just 88 were taken, less than 6 per cent of the allocation. The exact figures for all three events are in the table below.
| Event | Allocated | Used | Uptake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Battersea Park Fireworks | 5,000 | 1,325 | 26.5% |
| Wandsworth Pantomime | 540 | 303 | 56.1% |
| Battersea Park in Concert | 1,500 | 88 | 5.9% |
For six of the eight service categories the scheme covers, the council told the Information Commissioner it holds no usage data. Those are: libraries, registration, bereavement, environmental, adult education, and baby box distribution. A £4.85m programme built across eight service areas can only count what it did in two of them.
What the council said
Between July 2024 and March 2026 the council issued six press releases on Access for All, each adding to a picture of surging success. The scheme went from “30,000 bookings already made” to “80,000 bookings” to “100,000 bookings.” It was described as “data-driven and feedback-led.” From April 2025 it was “Britain’s Best Concession Scheme,” a self-awarded claim that was never tested by any external body.
The scheme was also expanded repeatedly. Discounted Lime bikes were added. Free tickets to Secret Cinema were offered. School uniforms were included. In August 2025, the council announced that all children from Access for All families would receive free school meals, extending a benefit originally limited to the lowest-income households. Each expansion was announced with a press release. Each press release repeated the booking totals. None disclosed how many individuals those bookings represented.
24,260 → 36,641
2,123 → 2,433
The scheme featured in Labour’s 2026 election manifesto as a signature achievement of the administration. The ICO order that produced today’s data landed nine days after the election.
The Information Commissioner found the exemption the council used to withhold this data never applied. It was not that the public interest went against disclosure. The finding was that the legal basis for refusing did not exist at all. The September 2025 press release that described the scheme as “data-driven and feedback-led” was published the same month the ICO found no internal evaluation of the scheme had ever been completed.
A question the council has not answered
There is one more problem. When the council told the ICO its membership card “does not log individual usage,” that was the basis for withholding unique-user figures across the six categories with no data.
The compliance response published today discloses unique-user counts of 2,123 in Year 1 and 2,433 in Year 2. Those figures had to come from somewhere. Either the card does log individual usage, contradicting what the council told the regulator, or the counts were derived by querying which member IDs made bookings, which produces the same result. We have filed a further FOI request asking how the figures were produced.
So to summarise. A council spent nearly £5m on a scheme it called Britain’s Best. It issued six press releases about it. It put it in the election manifesto. It expanded it repeatedly when numbers failed to materialise (adding bikes, concerts, school uniforms, free school meals) and announced each expansion as further evidence of success.
It described the scheme as “data-driven and feedback-led” while conducting no evaluation of whether it worked. It spent 14 months fighting a regulator to avoid releasing the data. When forced to release it, the data showed the scheme had reached fewer than one in 140 residents of the borough it was supposed to serve.
The new Conservative administration has said it is reviewing committed projects without funding to deliver them. Access for All is among them.
