Wandsworth Council is set to close Access for All, its flagship concession scheme for residents on benefits, without ever formally reviewing whether it worked. A council paper going to Cabinet on Monday evening confirms the scheme will take no new members or bookings after the end of October and close entirely at the end of the year.
Launched in July 2023 by the then Labour administration with a £4.85m fund, Access for All offered free off-peak gym and swimming sessions to residents on benefits, and was billed as the best concession scheme in Britain. Three years later, the paper behind its closure (26-239) admits the scheme’s impact “has not been formally reviewed” — and there is no plan to find out what it achieved.
An investigation by Putney.news, drawing on freedom of information disclosures that took 15 months to obtain, shows why that review would make uncomfortable reading.
The numbers behind the claims
The council promoted the scheme with ever-bigger counts: 80,000 bookings by April 2025, almost 60,000 visits and more than 10,000 members by January 2026, and 100,000 bookings in March 2026. Then leader Simon Hogg said “the take up of these opportunities show that it’s working.”
The figures eventually released told a different story. Across the whole of 2024-25, just 2,433 people used the scheme in a borough of 327,500. Until August 2024, the leisure booking system logged each activity separately, so one visit often produced several counts — roughly three times as many uses as visits across the first year. In May 2026, the scheme’s busiest month, only 2,446 of more than 10,000 members actually used it.
The closure paper itself quotes a usage figure 100,000 higher than the figures released to Putney.news for almost the same period. The council has not explained the discrepancy.
The evaluation that never happened
The report that set the scheme up committed the council to evaluating its impact and take-up. The evaluation never happened. When Putney.news asked for the usage figures and any evaluation in March 2025, the council refused, saying data would go to Cabinet that September and that it was fairer for “elected public representatives” to see it first. An internal review upheld the refusal, saying any update now “would be premature and only provide a partial picture.”
Putney.news took the case to the Information Commissioner. The council admitted its membership card “does not log individual usage” — comparing it to a student ID — and that it held no internal evaluation of the scheme 20 months after the leisure offer began. In May 2026, the Commissioner concluded: “it appears that the Council did not intend to publish” the figures.
The figures were released in June 2026; three weeks later the council admitted a filtering error had left more than 2,000 bookings out. The only step on record towards the promised evaluation was a member survey at the end of 2025. It drew 22 responses, and nothing was ever written up from it. Asked whether any evaluation had been done since, the council did not answer.
What the money bought
The scheme cost more than £2m over three years: £2.007m had been spent by March 2026, including £1.623m in 2025/26 alone — even though from 1 October 2025 the leisure offers were “subsidised by providers at no cost to the Council”. A further £742,000 is budgeted for this year, while £2.287m of the original £4.85m fund will go to a general reserve.
Nine in ten uses were at the seven leisure centres: 211,584 uses against 19,885 across the other 44 offers. Most of the add-ons were barely touched. Between May 2025 and July 2026, pest control was used 69 times, allotments 42, hall hire 10 and fishing permits twice. Sports pitch bookings, library online courses and street traffic orders were never used at all. Twenty-four of the 44 non-leisure offers were used fewer than 100 times in 15 months.
The closure comes as borough finances face wider strain: Band D council tax is set to rise to £1,978 under record increase plans, alongside phased rent rises for council tenants.
What replaces it
Under the plans going to Cabinet, the free off-peak gym and swim sessions — the heart of the scheme — will go. A replacement arrives in the new year, but it is significantly smaller: 20 to 40 per cent off leisure rather than free sessions, and only for people on Carer’s Allowance, students, children in care and care leavers. Universal Credit, the qualifying benefit for more than 80 per cent of adult members (4,839 of 5,942), will no longer count. The scheme has 10,895 members in all, and 4,953 of them are children.
The new scheme will be reviewed in autumn 2027. The old one will simply be switched off, with no review, no findings and nothing written down.
Nobody is looking back
For Labour, which built the scheme and called it Britain’s best at every turn, a review risks showing the claim did not hold. The Conservatives have given their own replacement a review and are treating the old scheme as Labour’s. Malcolm Grimston, the borough’s only independent councillor, has long argued the council resists outside scrutiny. “It was all very internal,” he said. “Scientists spend their whole career trying to prove themselves wrong and politicians spend their whole career trying to prove themselves right.”
The paper behind the closure calls itself a review of the scheme, but its only case is cost: the scheme’s “current broad, reserve-funded model is not financially sustainable”. Its own equality assessment says plainly: “The full Scheme has therefore been in place less than 18 months and its impact has not been formally reviewed.”
Neither the council nor Cllr Hogg responded to questions put earlier this week. Cabinet meets tomorrow, Monday 12 October, at 6pm in Room 123 at the Town Hall, Wandsworth High Street. The meeting is open to the public and webcast. The paper says memberships and bookings made before the end of October will be honoured.
