Neglect and consequences: Council under fire after Roehampton explosion and safety report

Just days after gas explosions tore through homes on Burke Close in Roehampton displacing residents, Wandsworth Council will meet to discuss a damning regulatory report highlighting serious safety failings—failings that appear disturbingly similar to the issues residents say they had long warned about.

The explosions, which occurred on 27 March, devastated several terraced council homes. Frances Bird, a local resident who has lived in Burke Close for 36 years, described the horror: “It looked like a bomb had gone off… the house just exploded.” According to residents, there had been warning signs for months—electrical issues, constant power tripping, and the smell of gas. But repeated reports, they say, were ignored.

Now, attention turns to the Housing Overview and Scrutiny Committee, which on Tuesday, 8 April 2025, will review an interim report [pdf] from the Regulator of Social Housing that graded Wandsworth’s landlord service a C3—a classification meaning there were “serious failings” in key areas of tenant safety and housing condition.

A catalogue of overdue safety work

The report, dated 31 March 2025, highlights a series of red flags, including:

• Inadequate stock condition surveys, with only 6.5% of homes assessed in 2022.
• Significant delays in electrical safety checks: just 70% of homes had been checked by early 2025.
• 1,800 overdue fire safety remedial actions at the time of inspection in November 2024—only recently reduced to 1,200.
• Weak resident engagement, with tenants’ voices not being heard through informal channels.

The report’s findings now appear alarmingly prescient in the wake of the explosion.

Residents say warnings were ignored

Residents of Burke Close have come forward in the days since the explosion, insisting they reported problems with gas and electrics months ago. Some had called the gas company. Others contacted the council. According to Mrs Bird, the response was consistently dismissive: “They just said it was a work in progress. We were smelling gas for months.”

Even more concerning, she added, is the lack of follow-up after the explosion: “No one came to see if we were okay. Not the council. Not a single person.”

These accounts directly mirror the regulator’s concerns about tenant engagement and transparency—where the Council was found to be falling short in listening to residents and acting on their concerns.

A System Under Scrutiny

The Housing Committee meeting this Tuesday won’t only be an administrative formality—it now sits in the shadow of real-life consequences. The regulator’s warning about serious lapses in electrical safety, fire risk management, and property condition assessments are no longer hypothetical dangers. The Burke Close explosion has made them tragically tangible.

Though the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the parallels between resident complaints and the regulator’s findings are too striking to ignore. They raise the question: if Wandsworth Council had acted sooner on either the regulator’s advice or its residents’ pleas, could this have been prevented?

What Happens Next?

At Tuesday’s meeting, the council is expected to outline early steps in its action plan, including:

• Surveying 20% of its housing stock annually.
• Completing all communal electrical safety checks by April and home checks by the end of 2025.
• Increasing informal resident engagement.

But for residents of Burke Close, that may be too little, too late.

As the borough waits for answers—and as displaced families attempt to rebuild—the Council must reckon not only with the regulator’s findings, but with the lived reality of tenants who say their safety concerns were ignored until it was nearly too late.