Wandsworth Council’s Cabinet Member for the leisure contract told residents Putney would get a new café. The council’s own documents say Cabinet was never briefed on the café arrangements. One of those things cannot be true.
Jeannine Angel, who ran The Kitchen at Putney Leisure Centre for a decade, reached a confidential settlement with Places Leisure and Wandsworth Council last month. She will leave the café she has run since 2015. The terms are sealed. The public cannot find out what it cost.
Putney.news asked the council under the Freedom of Information Act what Cabinet was told when it approved the £24m Places Leisure contract in June 2025. The response, which arrived three months after the statutory deadline, was unambiguous. Cabinet was not told about any ongoing tenant disputes. It was not told about plans to alter or end café arrangements. It was not told about any legal advice on the council’s obligations to existing tenants. No risk assessments were prepared. To each of those questions, the council’s written answer was either “No” or “N/A.”
Yet Cllr Paul White, Cabinet Member for Environment, attended a public meeting that same month and told residents Putney would receive a “new café” as part of the refurbishment. If Cabinet was not briefed on the café arrangements, as the council now says, it is not clear on what basis he made that promise.
We asked whether the council considers it acceptable that decision-makers were told nothing about the existing tenant before approving a £24m contract. Neither the council nor Cllr White responded; he has not answered any question on this story since November 2025.
The contract White helped approve already contained an answer of sorts. Its specification describes among the planned improvements at Putney Leisure Centre “a new reception area, café studio, soft play area and party room.” A café studio (whatever that means in practice) is the replacement for the space The Kitchen has occupied since 2015. Cabinet was not told about the existing tenant in that space, or about her legal right to remain.
Council officers have refused to provide the reports Cabinet relied on to approve the contract. We asked for their due diligence documents, which they sent – and they were blank procurement templates rather than any related the site. The result is that the public still cannot see the decision-making process that led up to £24m of public money being committed. There are already questions over the plan, including its investment in heat pumps and insulation, the latter of which may require asbestos removal.
At the Cabinet meeting itself, the leisure contract was introduced with a short speech read verbatim from a laptop. No questions were raised.
The settlement
The dispute began in May 2025 when Putney Leisure Centre management told The Kitchen’s owner to shut down her shop over a claimed health and safety issue. When she hired a lawyer to dispute that, she was told it had been a mistake. She discovered she had statutory protection as a long-term tenant under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, a right her solicitors said Places Leisure’s paperwork had failed to account for. More than 500 people signed a petition in her support. In November 2025, formal legal notices were served on both Places Leisure and the council.
Places Leisure is a private operator running council-owned leisure facilities under a public contract. Any payment to settle this legal dispute flows from public money. All three of the Angel family’s café operations across council leisure centres are now closing within a month. Places Leisure stated after the settlement that “no further comment will be made.” Questions put to the company on 20 March 2026 received no reply.
Angel’s own words, made publicly before the confidentiality clause took effect: “It was an amicable agreement and, in the end, we did not come out of it worse off.” And: “This is my community. This place feels like home.”
What happens next
Last month, Putney.news challenged the council’s response to our request for documentation (reference WBC-FOI-11625). The grounds include the council’s blanket use of the commercial interests exemption to withhold officer reports, its failure to confirm whether correspondence about tenant disputes exists, and its complete non-response to questions about the refurbishment budget and “café studio” arrangements. The internal review response is due this week.
A separate question has also emerged. The council’s Forward Plan, updated on Friday 10 April 2026, includes a new key decision item, “Culture and Leisure Commissioning: Future Delivery Model Options”, with no decision date yet set. Less than a year after approving a £24m contract, Wandsworth Council is already reviewing whether its leisure delivery model needs to change. The public paper approving that contract presented a figure of £30m in connection with the deal; a Putney.news fact-check found that figure described a cost, not a saving, and that the actual financial terms were held in an exempt paper that has never been published.
The council’s local elections take place on 7 May 2026. No decision date has been set for the leisure delivery model review.
What you can do
Wandsworth Council is in pre-election purdah until 7 May 2026, which limits what council officers and cabinet members can say publicly on policy matters. Cllr White is standing for re-election in Tooting Bec ward. If he loses his seat, accountability for these decisions passes to whoever the new administration appoints. You can still contact him directly at cllr.p.white@wandsworth.gov.uk.
Wandsworth Cabinet meets periodically and questions on leisure contract decisions.
