Council says its own £30m savings claim is confidential

In March, a leaflet went through every letterbox in Putney along with people’s council tax bill. In it, Wandsworth Council told residents it had saved £30m on its new contract to run Putney Leisure Centre.

We asked to see the workings behind that number. Four months and a complaint to the Information Commissioner later, as well as five times longer than the law allows, the council has answered: it won’t tell us.

The council refused three of Putney.news‘ four questions under a Freedom of Information request. It claims that the figure – which also appeared in a Cabinet paper that it has also refused to release – were supplied by the leisure centre’s contractor, Places Leisure, “in confidence” and so letting anyone know how it had saved money “would be likely to constitute an actionable breach of confidence.”

That duty to its contractor, which is paid to run Putney Leisure Centre while the centre itself remains owned by the council, outweighs the wider public interest in knowing where our money is going, according to Wandsworth Council.

We intend to contest that logic on fairly simple grounds: it put the figure through every door in the borough, at public expense, and used it as an example of how well run it is: £30m saved. A number is either fit for a leaflet or it is a secret. It cannot be both.

This is also just the latest example in two increasingly worrying issues: how Putney Leisure Centre is being run, and how honest Wandsworth Council is with residents when it comes to what it is doing with our money.

The answered question

The one thing Wandsworth would confirm is how the saving was worked out. It is a cumulative total, measured from October 2025 to September 2035 – 10 years away – against the leisure contract budget in September last year, the day before Places Leisure’s new contract began.

That answer already raises concerns because, read plainly, it means the claimed £30m in savings assume that everything, including costs, will remain the same now as in 10 years’ time.

One of the biggest costs in running a Leisure Centre is staff. In the past 10 years, the National Living Wage has risen from £7.20 then to £12.71 now – an increase of over 37%. Another huge cost of running an leisure centre is energy prices: having the lights on, the machines running, the pool heated. In the past 10 years, energy prices have increased from 14.81 pence per kilowatt hour to a high of 28.39p – a 90% increase – before falling back to current levels at about 75% more than the 2016 prices.

Put more simply, using this unusual accounting method, Places Leisure could claim to make a £30m cost saving while actually costing the council and residents significantly more than it does under the previous contract. You would think a council would be wary of such a figure coming from the company that has most to gain from it, but instead it put it in a cabinet paper, then on a leaflet which it sent to every home in Wandsworth, and now claims it is confidential.

Our suspicion, of course, is that even basic scrutiny of this headline claim will reveal it to be worthless – raising questions over why it was used as a key justification in renewing the 10-year contract with Places Leisure, and why no one in the previous administration questioned its veracity.

Incidentally, a council webpage published in February attributed the same £30m in savings to “smarter long-term service contracts”, plural, not the leisure contract specifically. So it’s possible that the council is confused about where it believes its own savings are coming from. We won’t know until it is forced to provide the information.

A quick word on process

The council took 98 working days to respond to our request, 78 working days past its legal deadline. When Putney.news formally asked for an internal review of the delay in May, the council refused to do so – another breach of the law.

When we then added this request (WBC-FOI-12954) to a further six requests where the council has failed to provide any information or run an internal review and put it before the Information Commissioner in a systemic complaint, several weeks later we finally received the response outlined above. We will continue to challenge it.

The £30m leaflet went out eight weeks before the 7 May local elections, in the same envelope as a council tax bill that had risen 3.1%, from £990.07 to £1,020.35 for a Band D property. The same leaflet carried a “Council Tax Freeze” headline, language the council had dropped once already after the BBC called it misleading, then revived. Our fact-check of the leaflet in March rated all four of its claims false, including this one: the only £30m figure in the public version of the cabinet paper was money the council needed to spend, not money it had saved.

Cabinet Paper 25-177 itself commits to publishing the savings eventually: paragraph 24 says they “will be removed from budgets in future Council Tax setting papers.” The council’s own paper says the figure comes out in the end. The only question is whether the council releases it, or the Information Commissioner makes it.