What the recent wave of council announcements tells us about the May elections

Wandsworth Council has been busy. Twelve press releases in twelve days, announcing improvements, investments and initiatives across the borough. New wardens here, a refurbished library there, road crossings improved, an underpass renovated, a gate restored, a grant for a local rugby club.

Read them as council communications and they tell you what the administration has been working on. Read them as a political map and they tell you something more useful: exactly where Labour is worried about losing seats in May, and what losing those seats would mean for control of the council.

The seats Labour cannot afford to lose

Labour won Wandsworth Council in 2022 on a wave of narrow victories, some of the tightest margins in London. A handful of losses would hand control back to the Conservatives. The announcements this month map almost exactly onto the wards where that risk is concentrated.

Balham is the sharpest case. Labour holds one of its three seats by 26 votes. This month: new neighbourhood wardens targeting antisocial behaviour, and a children’s library refurbishment. Two announcements. One ward. 26 votes in it.

Wandsworth Town is similar. Labour won two of the three seats in 2022 and came within 33 votes of the third. This month: the Swandon Way underpass renovation, road crossings, improved lighting. Two announcements, one ward, 33 votes between them.

Each announcement carries a Labour councillor’s name. Each covers an improvement residents can see from their street. None of this is accidental.

Under pressure from two directions

Labour’s electoral threat does not come from one direction.

In West Putney, West Hill and East Putney, the Conservative threat is sharpest. Each ward returns a single Labour councillor won on a narrow margin in 2022. One announcement covers the West Hill and West Putney border: a money advice drop-in, geographically positioned to reach both wards.

In Roehampton and Shaftesbury and Queenstown, the picture is more complicated. Reform UK has been gaining support among residents unhappy with Labour’s approach to housing developments, including the Lennox Estate plans, Toland Square construction and the Alton Estate redevelopment. The Winstanley area receives a green neighbourhood grant; Roehampton gets a youth rugby grant for Rosslyn Park. Both wards are ones where Labour cannot afford a significant vote shift to Reform.

The Queenstown Road works announcement is different in character: residents there have been frustrated for months. The announcement lands in a ward Labour holds 3-0 but where relations have been under strain.

One announcement sits outside the pattern entirely. A homelessness hub on Lavender Hill falls in Lavender ward, which returns two Conservatives and no Labour councillors. There is no marginal seat to explain its inclusion. It is the exception in an otherwise consistent geographic picture.

The wards that tell you the most

East Putney is the most marginal seat in the borough.

In the first twelve days of March, the council published no announcements for East Putney.

That may itself be a calculation. The seat may be so exposed that no press release will secure it. Wandsworth Common, where Labour also holds a single seat, has received nothing either.

The wards most likely to receive announcements before the pre-election period opens on 30 March are Wandsworth Common and West Hill, both single Labour seats, both reachable by the Conservatives. East Putney may follow, or may not. It will likely tells us about the party’s internal election calculus.

Labour won 35 seats in 2022. It currently holds 34, having lost a West Putney by-election in May 2024 to the Conservatives on a swing of 7.7 points. A majority requires 30. That means Labour can lose four more seats and still govern, just. Lose five and the Conservatives are likely back in power.

The arithmetic explains the announcements. Every press release carrying a councillor’s name in a marginal ward between now and 30 March is a calculation about which seats Labour can afford to lose, and which it cannot.

The Tories did it too. Much worse.

Before anyone concludes this is a Labour invention, it is worth looking at March 2022, when the then-Conservative administration was eight weeks from losing power.

The Conservatives published a remarkable 93 press releases that month. In one week alone, the seven days before the pre-election period opened, they published 31. When the restrictions kicked in, the rate collapsed to 27 for the whole of April.

Both parties, when eight weeks from an election they might lose, have used the council’s communications operation the same way: point the announcements at the seats you need, attach a councillor’s name, and hope residents don’t notice what they are looking at. Right now the announcements tell you Labour is worried, and that the pressure is coming from two directions at once.

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Clarification: An earlier version of this article stated Labour holds East Putney by three votes. The correct margin is 100 votes: the gap between Labour’s Fianna Ayres (2,147) and the highest-placed Conservative who did not win a seat, Michael Stephens (2,047). We have updated the article accordingly.