Wandsworth Council has ignored fire safety warnings put in place following the Grenfell Tower disaster, put thousands of tenants at serious risk, and nearly suffered two tragedies in the past year, according to internal documents being presented to Cabinet on Monday.
The council will vote on creating an independent board to oversee housing improvements after a Root Cause Analysis found “decades of stagnation” and a culture that had “lost sight of the customer from a health and safety and involvement perspective.”
Cabinet papers [pdf] published ahead of Monday’s meeting admit the council made no significant changes following the 2020 government White Paper introduced after 72 people died in the June 2017 fire, even as other social landlords across the country invested in building safety teams and updated their systems.
“Wandsworth did not significantly change its practices following the White Paper,” the papers state.
The failures were so severe the council has restructured its entire Housing Department, merging it with Environment and Community Services to create a new “Resident Services” directorate. The independent board, to be chaired by an external housing expert, will provide quarterly oversight of improvement efforts.
The department operated in silos with “entrenched ways of working, lack of strategic focus, and centralised decision-making.” It used data systems that “conflicted, were difficult to access,” with the housing management system “not fully utilised.” It failed to address underperformance, with “insufficient use of data and insight to drive improvement.” The service was “out of touch” when reviewed against current regulatory requirements.
Eight years after Grenfell, 326 fire safety actions remain overdue in Wandsworth Council housing, 13% of council homes lack electrical safety certificates, and 1,500 repairs are outstanding.
The council received a damning C3 regulatory rating in February 2025 for “serious failings” affecting 17,000 tenants.
Putney.news has been tracking the council’s fire safety failures since April 2025, when gas explosions destroyed homes at Burke Close in Roehampton. Residents had been reporting problems for months. In September 2025, Fox House in Battersea caught fire. The blaze spread across a 50-metre roof void in 10 minutes, displacing over 100 residents. The 2022 Fire Risk Assessment had never inspected the roof void where the fire spread.
The Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Aydin Dikerdem, who has spent years downplaying these failures and has consistently refused to respond to our queries, responded to this month’s report by blaming the previous Conservative administration. He makes no acknowledgment that Labour has controlled the council since May 2022 or that the explosions and fire happened on his watch.
No one has been held accountable. The Cabinet papers do not identify who was responsible during the years of inaction, or whether anyone faced disciplinary action.
What the council knew and when
The 2020 Social Housing White Paper was published on 17 November 2020 as the government’s direct response to Grenfell. It delivered on what ministers called “the commitment we made to the Grenfell community that, never again, would the voices of residents go unheard.”
The Wandsworth Council Cabinet papers state: “Most social landlords began responding to this changing environment after the Social Housing White Paper (2020) by investing in and enhancing their housing and building safety teams, investing in competence and systems and embedding resident engagement at the core of service delivery.”
Wandsworth didn’t. Labour took control of the council in May 2022, 18 months after the White Paper was published. The party had nearly three years to implement the reforms before inspectors arrived in November 2024.
The February 2025 inspection found nearly 1,800 overdue fire safety actions, all outstanding for more than 12 months. Inspectors found 80% of communal areas lacked electrical safety tests and 40% of homes lacked electrical safety certificates. The last comprehensive property survey had been completed in 2012.
The pattern of dismissal
The Cabinet Member for Housing repeatedly dismissed the seriousness of the failures as the problems escalated.
When the C3 rating was published in February 2025, identifying nearly 2,000 overdue fire safety actions, the Cabinet Member told councillors the verdict was “not what we hoped for” but claimed it was “all fixable.”
A C3 rating means “serious failings requiring substantial improvements” – the third-worst grade on a four-point scale where C4 triggers regulatory intervention. The council defended the rating by noting that 48.6% of local authorities received C3, making it “the most common grade.”
This defence is technically true but deeply misleading. While C3 is indeed the most common rating among councils nationally, more than half of London boroughs (56.2%) achieved C2 or better – including Westminster, Barnet, Enfield and Sutton which all achieved C1. Wandsworth’s C3 puts it in the bottom 44% of London boroughs. The council was comparing itself to underperforming authorities nationally rather than its London peers facing similar challenges.
By June, officers and the Cabinet Member were still downplaying the seriousness, describing the C3 rating as “based on whether you can evidence things, not necessarily whether the things are being done.” This suggested the problems were with documentation rather than actual safety failures – despite overdue actions including life-critical fire doors, smoke detectors and fire exits.
The same month, the Housing Ombudsman found “severe maladministration” in how the council handled a four-year roof leak, exposing a pattern of ignoring problems until forced to act.
At an April 2025 committee meeting, councillors were told the fire safety actions had been reduced and that “many of them relate to things like signage, meter boxes, or fire hatch upgrades”, our reporting revealed.
This was false. Audit documents show the overdue actions included non-compliant fire doors that should contain flames for 30-60 minutes, blocked fire exits that could trap residents during evacuations, faulty smoke detectors, and missing smoke seals that allow toxic smoke to spread. These are not “signage” issues. They are life-or-death safety measures.
When gas explosions destroyed homes at Burke Close in Roehampton in April 2025, weeks after the C3 rating, the Cabinet Member for Housing dismissed criticism of the council’s response as “misinformation.” Residents reported they had been smelling gas for months before the explosions.
In September 2025, Fox House burned. The independent review documented emergency response failures but did not examine why the roof void where fire spread catastrophically had never been inspected.
This is the culture the Root Cause Analysis identified: dismissive of risks, resistant to change, focused on defending the council rather than protecting tenants.
What the Root Cause Analysis found
The Regulator of Social Housing requires all authorities that fail to meet consumer standards to conduct a Root Cause Analysis. Wandsworth’s analysis [pdf], produced for the Housing Improvement Plan presented to Cabinet on 26 January, identified four fundamental problems:
- The position of housing and its relationship with the wider council, with poor escalation of issues.
- A siloed departmental culture “characterised by entrenched ways of working, lack of strategic focus, and centralised decision-making.”
- Data and systems that “conflicted, were difficult to access,” with the housing management system “not fully utilised.”
- Performance issues, with “underperformance not being effectively addressed and insufficient use of data and insight to drive improvement.”
The analysis concluded the council had created a service that was fundamentally “out of touch” when reviewed against current regulatory requirements.
The council has merged housing with environment services to create a “Resident Services” directorate and appointed an interim Director of Housing Management in November 2025.
Independent oversight under regulatory pressure
Cabinet will vote Monday on creating an independent Housing Improvement and Transformation Board to oversee improvements, following eleven months of sustained regulatory pressure.
The Regulator of Social Housing’s February 2025 judgment did not legally require an independent board. But the council’s response [pdf] over the past year suggests mounting pressure through monthly monitoring meetings.
In June 2025, four months after the C3 rating, the council created an internal “Regulatory Compliance Board.” By September it added a cross-party Task and Finish Group including residents. Both remained internal to council structures.
A November meeting attended by the council’s Chief Executive appears to have prompted the independent board proposal. The board will have an independent chair recruited from the housing sector and will meet quarterly to hold the council to account.
The Regulator stated a year ago that it would maintain “intensive engagement” with the council and would “seek evidence that gives us the assurance that sufficient change and progress is being made.” It added: “We are not proposing to use our enforcement powers at this stage but will keep this under review.”
The board’s membership will include the Cabinet Member for Housing, two councillors from the cross-party Task Force, two tenant representatives, and senior officers. Questions remain about whether the council can override the board’s recommendations and how genuine independence will be maintained when the council appoints the chair.
The cost of failure
The same Cabinet meeting will consider a Housing Revenue Account budget forecasting £884 million in borrowing over the next decade. Of this, £212 million is required just for repairs and improvements to existing stock.
The HRA Budget paper blames “years of national underfunding” and government rent cap decisions for financial pressure. It makes no connection between the council’s admitted “decades of stagnation” and the substantial borrowing now required.
The paper acknowledges that “significant inflationary increases within the sector over the past few years” have added to costs. Put simply: the council didn’t invest when it should have. Now taxpayers will pay more because prices have gone up.
Tenants still at risk
Despite the regulatory intervention and promises of improvement, tenant satisfaction barely moved. Overall satisfaction increased from 64% to 65% between 2024 and 2025. Satisfaction with repairs stands at 58%, meaning 42% of tenants remain dissatisfied.
More concerning: 70% of tenants said they were satisfied their homes are safe, even though 326 fire safety actions remain overdue and 13% of homes lack electrical safety certificates. This suggests tenants don’t know about the risks, or the survey question is poorly designed, or “safe” means different things to different people.
The Cabinet papers show the council had stopped using Housemark, a benchmarking service that compares performance with other landlords. It has now “re-engaged” with the service. Translation: the council stopped measuring itself against others and is only now starting again.
The council has completed stock condition surveys on 3,392 of more than 17,000 properties. It has committed to finishing by December 2026. That’s nearly a decade after Grenfell.
Blaming the past while ignoring the present
In his comments on the Housing Improvement Plan, the Cabinet Member for Housing blames the previous Conservative administration rather than accepting responsibility.
“For decades the previous administration championed the ‘Wandsworth way’, but what we have found is that many of the corporate systems and models that we have inherited were not fit for the new regulatory environment,” he writes.
Labour has controlled the council since May 2022 – nearly four years. The Social Housing White Paper that Wandsworth ignored was published in November 2020. Most other social landlords began responding then, according to the council’s own papers.
Labour had nearly three years to change course before the C3 rating was issued in February 2025. They had two months after the C3 rating before Burke Close exploded in April 2025. They had five more months before Fox House burned in September 2025. They had four more months before publishing this admission in January 2026.
The papers do not identify who was responsible for housing during the period of stagnation. They do not explain whether any disciplinary action has been taken. They do not explain why Labour took no action for nearly four years after taking control.
The council is holding monthly meetings with the Regulator to demonstrate progress. An independent Housing Improvement and Transformation Board will provide oversight. But these are responses to regulatory intervention, not voluntary improvements.
Cabinet members will vote on all three housing papers at their meeting this evening, Monday 26 January.
Have you been affected by housing safety issues in Wandsworth? Contact news@putney.news
The level of complacency within Housing is very worrying. When I highlighted the nine-fold increase in annual findings against the Council by the Housing Ombudsman between 2020/21 and 2023/4 I was prevented from raising the matter at full Council and told, incorrectly, that this massive decline in service quality was ‘reflected across the sector’ – the data the Council used to generate this dismissive comment actually showed Wandsworth’s ombudsman findings growing at 3 times the sectoral average and was now above the national average. The inescapable impression is that the Council is (rightly) keen to increase the number of social housing places available but has little to no interest in the experience of the people who will actually live there. Last week I visited one of the many Council estate in West Hill Ward, which consists of 167 properties. I would expect to pick up a handful of complaints – I actually came away with 22 bits of casework to follow up (and of course many people were out when I called so I may well have missed many others). This is way above what I would have expected two or three years ago and clearly unacceptable.
I am concerned that there is a shift and greater emphasis on regeneration here on the Alton Estate. Regeneration at the expense of the existing stock which has been neglected. Fly tipping is out of control so we need the basics ie cleaning, repairs and waste management prioritised.