A leaflet dropping through letterboxes on the Ashburton Estate tells residents their council’s housing plans are dead. “The development won’t now happen,” it says. “No half measures. No backtracking.”
There are three problems with that.
The leaflet accuses Labour of failing to listen to local people; it does not consult them itself. It announces a cancellation; no cancellation has happened. It needs the support of an independent councillor to state the claim; it does not have it.
The borough has around 4,000 children in temporary accommodation and the plans the leaflet cancels were designed to address exactly that. Residents may have views on the trade-off. The leaflet isn’t interested.
Putney.news checked the council’s published decisions register and forward plan. There is no decision recorded cancelling Ashburton or the associated Whitnell Way scheme. We asked all three councillors who signed the leaflet, and the Cabinet Member for Housing quoted on it, to identify which decision they were relying on and where it is recorded. None of them replied. There is no decision.
And the Conservatives do not have a majority. The voters gave Wandsworth a hung council in May: 29 Conservatives, 28 Labour, one independent. The administration holds the chamber on the casting vote of the Mayor and the confidence-and-supply support of that one independent councillor. The constitutional terms of that arrangement are not settled until full council on 22 July. Until then, by the administration’s own design, key decision-making is paused.
The hung council’s reality check
Without the support of the one independent councillor on Wandsworth Council, the Conservatives have no majority. Malcolm Grimston holds that position and he is concerned that such a leaflet undermines the fair functioning of government, telling Putney.news: “If and when it does come before Scrutiny, I wonder if anyone will believe that any comments, however constructive, will be received in an open-minded fashion by the Cabinet?”
It is a pointed question from the man the administration cannot govern without, and it goes to the heart of the leaflet’s own claim. An administration still waking up to its political reality, making announcements as if it had won a majority it does not have, may find the answer uncomfortable.
May’s result did not hand the Conservatives a mandate to govern as if they had won. It produced a council that cannot move without Grimston’s support, a constitutional settlement that is unresolved, and scrutiny committees that the administration itself switched off on its first night until July on the basis that no key decisions would be taken before then.
It falls to Grimston, Putney’s political conscience in this hung council, to apply the standard the leaflet sets for itself. “The Conservatives have listened to local residents,” it says. He is asking when.
What a cancellation actually requires
The Conservatives have opposed Ashburton development for years. Cllr Nick Austin, a signatory of the leaflet, is the same councillor who stood up at a planning committee in February 2025 and called the Whitnell Way scheme “a disaster waiting to happen.” That committee approved it anyway, 6–4, against 153 objections.
That approval matters. Cancelling a consented, council-owned scheme is not solely a political act, it is a legal and administrative one. The council owns the land. The council made the planning application. The council holds the planning permission. Withdrawing from that scheme requires a decision by the council as landowner, a decision that has to be taken, recorded, and made available for scrutiny.
The four Ashburton plans (Innes Gardens, Hayward Gardens, Cortis Road, and Whitnell Way) together represented 111 homes, all social rent. The plans have been contested political terrain since the 2024 West Putney by-election. We reported on the housing crisis they were meant to address earlier this month.
His own standard
In opposition, Cllr Matthew Corner attacked Labour for making “decisions behind closed doors” and called for “clear leadership, transparency and accountability.” He is now the Cabinet Member for Housing quoted on the leaflet, saying the scheme “won’t now happen” as “one of the first things we have done.”
He was asked to identify the decision behind that claim. He did not respond.
We have checked Labour’s housing record and the Conservatives’ ahead of the election. The same standard applies to both. On this question, the record is mixed in both directions. The Ashburton plans were genuinely unpopular, an attempt to fit too many homes onto limited green space that residents valued, and Labour’s resistance to substantive engagement with those objections was a real failure.
The charge in the leaflet is fair. But the leaflet makes listening the measure of political credibility. By that measure, an announcement delivered through a letterbox, with no consultation, no process, and no record, does not clear the bar it sets.
What you can do
The 22 July full council meeting is where the housing strategy is due to come before elected members and the scrutiny committees are due to be restored. Members of the public can attend in person at Wandsworth Town Hall. The democratic overhaul is due to formalise what scrutiny the new administration will be held to.
