Wandsworth Council spent two years calling Access for All “Britain’s best concession scheme.” When it finally asked the people using it what they thought, just 22 answered and nearly half said they had run into problems.
The council ran the survey at the end of 2025 and never published it. Putney.news obtained it through freedom of information. Around 50,000 Wandsworth residents were eligible for the scheme. Despite offering everything from free meals and swim lessons to cheap Lime bikes and fireworks tickets, only 12,000 ever enrolled and fewer than 2,500 ever used it.
The previous administration talked about the £5m programme in the most hyperbolic terms while knowing that it had feedback from just 22 people.
The “Britain’s best” superlative appeared at least 29 times across press releases, Cabinet meetings, a magazine sent to 159,000 homes and the Labour group’s 2026 election manifesto. No external assessment was ever cited. No award, no independent benchmark.
In September 2025, then leader Simon Hogg presented a report to Cabinet on the scheme that cherrypicked data and exclaimed: “The scheme’s success so far speaks for itself.”
His cabinet member for the environment, Paul White, went further. “Access for All has been very successful and been very, very central to the way this council wants to address our public,” he said. “And it’s the biggest and most generous concessionary offer in the country.”
The truth was quite different.
What the 22 said
The headline result was, in fairness, strong. Seventeen of the 22 said they would recommend the scheme; four would not. That is a net promoter score of +59, which is genuinely high.
But nearly half (10 of 22) said they had faced challenges. The most common problem, reported by seven people, was not knowing about the offers available. Four said signing up was difficult. Three said offers were not there when they needed them.
Members described, in their own words: applications going astray, event tickets advertised but hard to actually obtain, access codes issued too late and a sign-up process that put people off before they even started.
What the council told the regulator
The survey was already complete when the Information Commissioner ruled earlier this year that the council had no valid basis to withhold the scheme’s usage data. In the course of that investigation, Wandsworth admitted it holds no internal evaluation of Access for All. The administration never bothered to assess its own flagship programme.
That failure in basic governance, it turns out, was a persistent trait of the previous administration.
It promised 1,000 new homes and then claimed at election time – falsely – that it had built 500 of them (true figure: 90). It promised a new support system for charities and spent two years designing one, only for it to collapse when it met reality, leaving them with nothing.
When the council’s approval figures fell 13%, it hid the survey and then cancelled the annual process that had been running for 14 years rather than face more of the same. When complaints jumped 238%, it claimed, falsely, that the increase was in line with national figures. And it persisted with a nonsense about frozen council tax for so long that not only the BBC but also the UK Statistics Authority called it out.
With a track record like that, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that “Britain’s best” concession scheme also turned out to be a paper facade.
