Vote today: here’s everything you need, and what might happen

How to vote

Polls are open from 7am to 10pm. You must bring photo ID: a passport, driving licence, Oyster 60+ card, Freedom Pass, or blue badge. Your polling station address is on your poll card. If you’ve lost your card, it’s also on your ward page or at wandsworth.gov.uk/elections.

You vote for individual candidates, not parties. Depending on your ward, you have two or three votes. You don’t have to use all of them.

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What might happen

What’s interesting about this election, this year, in Putney, is that nobody knows what will happen. Three forecasters agreed last Sunday that no party is on course for a majority. That’s shorthand for saying so many wards are uncertain that they can’t predict which way it will go.

Unlike the rest of South West London, Wandsworth has remained entrenched in the two-party system and so it will take a surge of support for the Greens, or Lib Dems or Reform in a specific ward to displace either Labour or the Conservatives.

What seems likely is that third-party support will favour one of the two main parties by effectively removing more of the other’s votes. But even that is unclear. Polling experts are waiting to see if the UK has truly entered a period of multi-party democracy. The genuine uncertainty around that point is what makes this election so interesting; and potentially historic.

From the voter perspective, the upshot of all this is quite simple: vote for who you want. In local elections, you have multiple votes, so you can vote across parties. If you do so, you will bend the minds of the political experts even further.

But in terms of pragmatics: Labour holds 34 seats and needs 30 to keep control. The Conservatives hold 21 and need to gain nine more. The Conservatives really want to regain control of councils they lost in 2022 in order to tell a bigger story going into the general election in two years’ time. There are two councils in the whole country that sit foremost in the Conservative Party’s mind: Westminster and Wandsworth.

Kemi Badenoch told The Standard she is “very optimistic” about winning back Wandsworth, but a More in Common poll published this week put the Conservatives behind Labour in our home borough.

The honest picture: this is a tight, genuinely uncertain, five-party competition that makes every ward unpredictable. Your vote may actually count.

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Why Putney matters

Wandsworth may be decided here. The fiercest contests of this election are in Balham, South Balham and Wandsworth Town, but the seats that could tip who controls the council are in Putney: East Putney, West Putney, Southfields, Thamesfield and Roehampton.

Putney shifted decisively towards Labour in 2022: accumulated anger at the Conservative government, the fallout from Brexit, and the deselection of popular MP Justine Greening, left many traditional Conservative voters without a home. It is fair to say that Keir Starmer’s government has not exactly enamoured people, and the inexperienced Labour group at Wandsworth Town Hall have very little to show for their four years in power.

But are people willing to forgive the Tories, do they want to give Labour another chance, or do the alternatives look more attractive? The Green Party has seen a massive boost in energy and optimism following the remarkable win of a woman plumber in Manchester; Reform has tapped into deep frustration with how the country is governed; and the quiet vote has put more Lib Dems into Westminster that any time since the Liberals actually ran the country.

What happens in Putney will decide what happens in Wandsworth.

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What a change of control means

Putney Junction. Labour built the new junction at Putney Bridge Road, and has resisted the scale of corrective action residents have repeatedly demanded. Multiple parties (Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green) have committed to act more substantively, with different specifics.

Housing. The Conservatives have said they would scrap the Alton Estate regeneration plans and the Lennox Estate tower. The Greens have said the same. And then there are the hugely unpopular plans in West Putney’s Innes Gardens, Hayward Gardens, Cortis Road and Whitnell Way. Plans were pushed through but there are no spades in the soil. A change in administration could see them scrapped. For Roehampton, a further delay to plans residents have been waiting on for 20 years would be yet one more political failure.

Labour’s housing record was checked here and the Conservatives’ record here. Yesterday, Wandsworth’s housing chief made his case for re-election. We tested it against the documents.

Access for All. Labour has committed to expanding the inclusive programme for those on low incomes. The Conservatives will scale it back.

Council tax. It will rise regardless of who wins. The only question is who says so first. The Greens have been the only honest party about this during the campaign. Labour has pledged no rise, which, given that central government is cutting local authority funding, will require either a carefully managed U-turn or significant damage to services.

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If may seem too far removed, it may seem pointless, it may feel like a hassle, but our system does give you a direct say in who makes the decisions that impact you and your neighbours’ lives – and you only get it for one day every two years. So vote.