Wandsworth Council has finally released detailed statistics on its flagship £5 million Access for All programme after months of refusing Freedom of Information requests – revealing that while the scheme has generated nearly 30,000 leisure centre visits, exactly two people have taken advantage of discounted fishing permits and precisely zero residents have hired council halls.
The comprehensive data, published in a Cabinet paper [pdf] this week, chronicles a programme that began with the noble aim of getting low-income residents into gyms and pools, but has since expanded to include virtually everything the council charges for – with predictably mixed results.
A tale of two statistics
The figures tell a story of bureaucratic optimism meeting reality. Since April, over 6,500 residents have embraced the leisure offerings with enthusiasm, generating 29,775 visits to gyms and pools. Putney Leisure Centre alone recorded 9,448 visits, while Tooting Bec Lido proved irresistible during the summer months with 3,397 discounted visits.
The council has not said how many unique users are enrolled in the program, which makes it hard to judge its actual reach and success. The Tooting Bec Lido visits, for example, could represent thousands of different residents enjoying subsidised swimming, or just a few hundred people making repeated visits.
The council’s ambition to provide “opportunities which make Wandsworth special” has produced some rather specialist results:
The Popular:
- 29,775 leisure centre visits
- 3,397 Tooting Bec Lido visits
- 1,010 people purchasing £3 tickets for Country on the Common
The Less Popular:
- 2 fishing permits (despite months of availability)
- 2 allotments (in a borough where waiting lists typically stretch for years)
- 0 hall hires (a round number that speaks volumes)
- 3 art school enrolments (suggesting limited appetite for subsidised creativity)
The evolution of ambition
The Cabinet paper reveals a programme that has “constantly evolved” – council speak for “we kept adding things when people didn’t use what we’d already offered.” What began as a focused leisure scheme in July 2023 has metastasised to cover virtually all council services by April 2025.
The timeline suggests increasing creativity in finding ways to boost participation numbers. Recent additions include partnerships with e-bike companies Lime, Forest and Voi (because nothing says social inclusion like half-price scooter hire), and a suspiciously timed appearance of 1,289 school uniform vouchers in August’s statistics.
The scheme now encompasses everything from discounted wedding ceremonies – apparently romance blooms more readily at 50% off – to free birth certificates, suggesting the council has taken a rather expansive view of what constitutes essential support.
Despite billing itself as a programme for “building a fairer borough,” the statistics reveal some uncomfortable truths about who’s actually benefiting. While 9.26% of eligible Universal Credit recipients have signed up, only 2.28% of Pension Credit recipients – among the borough’s most financially vulnerable – have joined.
The pattern repeats across other groups: just 1.27% of Attendance Allowance recipients and 2.77% of Employment Support Allowance recipients have accessed the scheme, suggesting the council’s data-driven approach may need recalibrating.
The accounting
The council has deployed £2.98 million of its £4.85 million Access for All reserve, working out to approximately £450 per person who has signed up. Given that this figure includes those who’ve claimed a single free birth certificate alongside regular gym users, the cost-per-meaningful-intervention may be rather higher.
The council’s repeat refusal to provide this data, despite being asked for it through multiple FOI requests, only to release some of it voluntarily at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, suggests it is actively trying to manage how the programme’s impact is perceived.
For example, while it notes that 440 people have used library services through the scheme – a figure that presumably the council is proud of – is only gives an overall number for the service that has been used the most: visits to the borough’s leisure centres.
A council spokesperson said the scheme would continue to “evolve” – a word that appears 14 times in the Cabinet paper – with plans for a survey to understand what other services residents might want discounted.
Given the current trajectory, we can presumably look forward to subsidised parking permits, half-price dog licences, and perhaps eventually discounted council tax – though that might rather defeat the point.
The programme has been recognised by the Local Government Association as “innovative and best practice,” though they may not have seen the fishing permit statistics when making that assessment.
Sounds like a council working hard and trying something new to serve the community. Why the cynicism? Sounds narky to me.