Wandsworth Council is preparing to spend more than half a million pounds on a self-built surveillance-style system to track whether residents are actually living in the borough’s temporary accommodation—despite having never tested the approach beyond a small group of council staff.
The proposed scheme, to be approved by Cabinet on Monday 17 June, is being rushed through in response to the council’s humiliating C3 governance rating from the Regulator of Social Housing. That formal finding judged Wandsworth to have serious failings in oversight, including an inability to demonstrate who is actually living in the homes it manages.
The consequence? Wandsworth is believed to be paying over £1 million a year for temporary accommodation placements that are in many cases empty, abandoned or illegally used.
When officers finally began making site visits earlier this year, they found around 7% of properties were not being occupied as intended. Some had been sublet on Airbnb. In at least one case, a council-provided flat was being used as a stash house for illegal drugs.
The council’s homemade solution
To fix the problem, the council has decided not to adopt an established system or outsource to a vetted provider—but to build its own solution. The new tool is a web app hosted on Microsoft Azure that sends text messages to temporary accommodation tenants 3–6 times per month, prompting them to:
- Enable their phone’s location services, and
- Take a selfie, which is checked against a council-held photo ID.
This data is then used to verify whether the named applicant is still in the property. Any mismatch flags the case for review by a six-person team. But critically, the Cabinet paper [pdf] confirms that failed check-ins will not lead to eviction or loss of housing on their own.
The council admits many residents won’t be able to use the system—due to lack of a smartphone, digital exclusion, disability, or erratic work hours. In fact, the paper says repeatedly that participation cannot be mandatory and that check-ins should not be used punitively. It also concedes that in practice, officers will still have to manually investigate every failure.
Costly gamble with no track record
That has not stopped the Labour administration from budgeting £560,000 over three years to develop and run the scheme—including salaries for a new housing verification team. Nor has it dampened the council’s ambition to sell the app to other local authorities, despite having no record of software innovation and no evidence of demand elsewhere.
“Potentially, the product could be marketed to other LAs [local authorities] to generate a revenue steam going forward.”
While the council pitches the system as a practical fix, it bears the hallmarks of a surveillance tool. Residents in council-provided homes will be digitally tracked, photographed, and monitored—often without having opted in. And while the council insists the data is used only for housing verification, the move raises significant questions about privacy, consent, and the direction of public services.
No scrutiny, no questions
Adding to the concern is the lack of scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Labour administration moved to abolish the Housing Overview and Scrutiny Committee, meaning there will be no formal oversight or opportunity for opposition councillors to question the system before it is signed off. The Cabinet is expected to approve the scheme without amendment.
This marks the second tech-heavy housing spend in two weeks. Putney.news recently reported that Wandsworth plans to spend £50,000 on iPads for officers to photograph mould, also justified as a long-term cost-saving measure.
In both cases, the logic is the same: spend money now to save money later. But as any seasoned public finance officer knows, this is where some of the costliest IT failures begin—with vague promises of future savings, limited user testing, and no clear accountability.
Improvisation with a tracking link
And with no meaningful scrutiny in place, a worrying pattern is emerging: a council under pressure, claiming innovation, spending large sums of public money—and increasingly relying on unproven surveillance tools to cover its own failures.
When a housing system is already in crisis, the question becomes harder to ignore: Is this really innovation—or just improvisation with a price tag and a tracking link?
