Four days ago we published a fact-check of the four financial claims in a bright magenta leaflet Wandsworth Council distributed with residents’ council tax bills. We found all four claims false and sent detailed questions to the council’s press office. The council did not respond.
What happened next is revealing in itself.
Cllr Malcolm Grimston (Independent, West Hill) wrote to the council’s Resources Directorate on 16 March asking, in substance, exactly the same questions we had put to the press office. Three days later, Katherine Burston, Director of Financial Management, sent him a formal response. Cllr Grimston has given permission for it to be published here.
We have now read that response carefully. In each case, Burston’s explanation confirms the gap we identified rather than closing it.
Claim 1: “£230m collected from property developers since 2022”
Burston’s table gives a four-year total of £235.8m across three income streams: Strategic CIL (£53.1m), Neighbourhood CIL (£9m), and Section 106 planning obligations (£173.7m).
The first thing to note is that the figure doesn’t match the leaflet. The council’s own Director of Financial Management gives £235.8m; the leaflet said £230m.
On the composition: including S106 alongside CIL is a defensible description of “money from developers” in plain English. Both streams do come from developers. But the two instruments are very different. CIL is a standard charge applied automatically to new developments. S106 is a negotiated planning obligation attached to a specific permission, often paid out over years after that permission is granted. S106 receipts therefore lag planning decisions significantly, and the timing of when they arrive tells you more about decisions made under a previous administration than about the performance of the current one.
That lag is visible in the numbers. S106 receipts in Labour’s first year were £86.6m. By 2024/25 they had fallen to £22.5m. The large opening figure almost certainly reflects planning permissions approved under the Conservatives, with payment schedules running into Labour’s term. Meanwhile, CIL income under Labour has averaged £19.6m a year, against £25.9m under the Conservatives.
The council’s own data, read in full, tells the opposite story to the leaflet.
Verdict: the figure has a basis but the claim does not survive scrutiny. The composition was not disclosed, the number is wrong, and the trend runs the wrong way.
Claim 2: “£30m saved on new leisure contract over 10 years”
Burston’s response confirms two things we reported. First, the £30m figure is in Paper 25-177A, the exempt companion to the public Cabinet report. Second, it represents a saving “over the next 10 years.”
That second point is the problem. The leaflet says the council has “saved” £30m. Burston’s own words say it is a saving projected over the next decade. The contract began on 1 October 2025. The saving has not been achieved. It is an estimate of what the contract is expected to deliver.
The underlying calculation may well be sound. We cannot verify it because the document containing it has never been published. That is itself part of the story: a claim about public money, made in a publicly funded leaflet, rests entirely on a figure that no scrutiny committee has ever seen.
Verdict: a saving may be on track, but the leaflet’s past tense is wrong. “Saved” and “will save over 10 years” are not the same thing.
Claim 3: “£3.7m avoided annually through homelessness prevention”
Burston discloses the methodology for the first time: 226 cases prevented as at the end of November, multiplied by an average monthly temporary accommodation cost of £1,356, then annualised by multiplying by 12. She also states explicitly that the figure “is not published.”
The methodology has a logic to it. Preventing homelessness does save money, and comparing prevention costs against temporary accommodation costs is a legitimate exercise. But the calculation has significant problems.
The annualisation assumes every prevented case would otherwise have remained in temporary accommodation for a full 12 months. Temporary accommodation stays vary considerably; many are resolved in weeks. Multiplying by 12 almost certainly overstates the saving.
More fundamentally, Burston herself confirms the figure has never been published and has never been through any committee scrutiny. Our original story documented sixteen months of committee papers in which council officers described this very analysis as incomplete and the financial benefits as prospective. Those papers ran right up to June 2025. The figure then appeared on a council PR page in February 2026, without source or methodology, eight weeks before the election.
Burston’s disclosure of the methodology does not rehabilitate the claim. It shows the figure existed internally. It does not explain why it was presented as a verified achieved saving when the council’s own officers were simultaneously saying the analysis was not complete.
And in the year this saving was supposedly being achieved, the homelessness budget overspent by £6.9m.
Verdict: the methodology exists but has never been scrutinised, the annualisation assumption is aggressive, and the financial context makes the claim very hard to sustain.
Claim 4: “£14m saved through efficiencies, service redesign and smarter staffing”
Burston’s answer is the shortest and the most telling: “£14m has been saved from budgets in the period of this administration. Budget holders and Exec Directors are tasked to manage within their allocated budget.”
That second sentence describes an instruction, not an outcome. Tasking budget holders to manage within reduced allocations is not the same as those savings having been delivered. Our original story documented two cases in 2024/25 where exactly this approach was taken and exactly failed: £2m of adult social care savings and £1.5m of children’s services savings, both written into budgets, neither delivered.
Burston’s response does not address that track record. It does not explain why this time is different. It confirms, in its own language, that the £14m is a budget reduction rather than a verified saving.
Verdict: Burston’s response confirms our finding. This is a budget assumption, not a delivered result.
Where we are
Cllr Grimston, who obtained the response, said the council’s press office appeared to have “a mission to mislead the public as far as possible without actually lying,” adding that the council tax freeze claim “probably crosses that line.”
That is a strong statement. On the evidence, it is hard to argue with.
None of the four figures in the leaflet are invented. Each has some basis in internal council data. But in every case the leaflet presents that data in the most favourable possible light, strips out the context that would qualify it, and uses language that implies achievement where the underlying documents show projection, assumption or ambition.
The council had four days to respond to our questions directly. Instead the first official explanation of these figures came via a formal complaint from an opposition councillor, and that explanation, read carefully, makes each claim harder to defend, not easier.
The council’s press office has still not responded to Putney.news.
The original fact-check, including our questions to the council and the source documents behind each verdict, is published here.
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