The Conservatives’ election manifesto claims 44 years of “high-quality, value-for-money services” in Wandsworth. The council’s own documents describe “decades of stagnation.”
That contradiction sits at the heart of our fact-check of the 30-page manifesto, “Rising to the Challenge,” published ahead of the 7 May local elections. We extracted 28 verifiable claims and tested each against council committee papers, the housing monitoring report, FOI responses, the finance settlement and our own investigations.
The Conservatives’ diagnosis of Wandsworth’s financial crisis is largely right. Nine claims were rated fully accurate, five mostly accurate. Their strongest ground is Labour’s record on council tax, spending and debt.
Their weakest ground is their own record and a pattern of cherry-picked data. Six claims needed significant context. One could not be verified. Of seven forward pledges, only one passed without qualification.
Their own documents tell a different story
The manifesto celebrates delivering “the lowest council tax in Britain alongside high-quality services” for 44 years.
The low tax part is true. The high-quality services part is not, according to the council itself.
A Root Cause Analysis presented to Cabinet in January found “a significant history of stagnation in the management of council housing” and “limited appetite for change and innovation.” That covers the department the Conservatives ran for 44 of the last 48 years.
The Cabinet member for housing put it plainly: “For years we were told how impressive the Council’s 100% decent homes standard was, but what good is a 100% decent homes rating if it is based on a stock condition survey of only 1% of our homes?”
Those surveys covered just 1% of homes in 2003, 5% in 2012 and 6.5% by the time the Conservatives left office in 2022. The Regulator of Social Housing gave Wandsworth a C3 rating last year for 1,800 overdue fire safety actions. Repairs overspent by £16.3 million in 2024/25, the cost of decades of deferred work.
The Fox House fire, reported today, spread through an attic space the council had never inspected.
Low tax and high-quality services cannot both be true when the council’s own papers describe decades of underinvestment. The Conservatives delivered low tax by underfunding maintenance. The bill is now arriving.
Cherry-picked data
The manifesto claims developer contributions “halved” under Labour. In the last year of Conservative control, Wandsworth collected £619,000 from developers. Under Labour, that figure rose to £78.4 million by 2023/24.
Much of Labour’s early income came from planning permissions the Conservatives had approved, working through the development pipeline. The manifesto compares Labour’s peak to a dip caused by national regulation, not a Conservative-to-Labour comparison.
Housing starts did fall sharply to 571 last year, the lowest since 2006. The direction is not in dispute. But the council’s own monitoring report attributes the decline primarily to the Building Safety Regulator regime and a softer housing market, not to Labour council policy. The manifesto leaves that out.
The same pattern appears in waste. The manifesto cites a “500%” surge in missed bin collections from a November 2024 committee paper. The actual increase was roughly 400%, and the data was 17 months old by the time the manifesto was published. The service had been hitting its targets since September 2025.
The deeper accountability question is why the outsourced contractor, Serco, was fined just £43,682 over 12 months on a multi-million-pound contract, with zero formal enforcement actions.
The fake freeze
The manifesto is on its strongest ground when attacking Labour’s council tax “freeze.” Council tax rose 2% every year, totalling 8.2% over four years. The UK Statistics Authority wrote to the council leader, warning the freeze claims had “potential to mislead.” BBC More or Less presenter Tim Harford put it bluntly: “It seems mad to have to repeat this, but a 2% increase is not a freeze.”
This is one of nine claims we rated fully accurate.
The financial diagnosis
The manifesto’s headline figure, a £137 million cumulative gap by 2028/29, comes from the council’s own budget papers. The arithmetic behind “council tax will more than double” is correct: £137 million divided by £770,000 per 1% of council tax equals 178%.
But 42% of that gap, £58 million, is caused by the government’s Fair Funding Review, which reclassifies Wandsworth as overfunded. The manifesto attributes the entire crisis to local Labour decisions. It isn’t.
Looking ahead
The Conservatives make seven forward pledges. Only one, cancelling Labour’s plans for the Ashburton and Lennox estates, is fully within council powers and requires no new money. The rest are qualified by missing detail: no numbers on police officers, no cost for the high streets fund, no timeline on waste collection changes, no price tag for Springfield Park.
The policing pledge deserves particular attention. Labour promised “law enforcement officers paid for by developer levies” in 2022. None were recruited, and three-quarters of readers told us they understood the pledge to mean police. The Conservatives now make a near-identical promise without explaining why they would succeed where Labour failed.
This is the first manifesto through our election fact-check pipeline. We will review all parties’ manifestos with the same methodology.
Wandsworth Conservatives are invited to respond to any of these findings. Any response received will be published in full as an update to this article.
Wandsworth goes to the polls on 7 May.
Worth noting the Conservatives also called it a council tax freeze in 2021 even though they raised the social care precept by 3% that year