There are 48 Wandsworth council buildings that still contain asbestos. The council has paid out over £1 million in the past five years to those exposed to it, and more cases are in process. We have asked which buildings are affected. The council refuses to say.
Last year, a gas explosion tore through homes on Burke Close in Roehampton. A firefighter was nearly killed when he was blown ten metres out of the back of a house by an electrical surge. The council denies responsibility despite having received an official government warning about thousands of outstanding electrical safety failures in its properties. The council paid to replace all the boilers. We asked for the records. It refuses to release them.
Sixty residents lost their homes in a fire at Fox House in Battersea. The fire spread through an attic space that had never been inspected. We have asked for the safety and inspection records that show what the council knew, and when. The council refuses to hand them over.
There are four more cases like these, and doubtless many others we haven’t come across. In every one, the council has used the same mechanism to block the request. Putney.news believes that mechanism is unlawful. This week, we went to the regulator.
What the council did
When a public body fails to answer a Freedom of Information request within the legal 20-working-day limit, residents have one formal option before going to the regulator: an internal review. It is a request for the council to examine its own handling of the case. It does not require a completed answer first. The review can happen precisely because the answer has not arrived.
Wandsworth Council disagrees. In September 2025, responding to three overdue requests simultaneously, the council stated its position in writing: it “cannot carry out an Internal Review of your request before we have responded to your FOI request.”
The ICO’s own guidance says the opposite. Requesters may ask for an internal review when they are “still waiting for a response and are unhappy with the delay.”
The council’s position is not a misunderstanding. It is a policy, applied in writing, to every request we have made.
When we told the council it was wrong
In September 2025, Putney.news wrote to the council about its internal review position. The letter cited guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and set out three enforcement notices the ICO had issued to other councils for identical failures (Lewisham, Croydon, and Bristol). We asked the council to reconsider.
The council did not reply. It did not defend its position, withdraw it, or acknowledge the enforcement notices. Over the following nine months, four more requests arrived. The council applied the same position to each one.
The council was told it was breaking the law. It chose to continue.
What the law requires, and what can happen next
The Freedom of Information Act requires public bodies to respond within 20 working days. A separate duty requires them to maintain a complaints procedure for when they do not. A completed answer is not a precondition for that procedure. That is the point of it.
The backstop is the Information Commissioner’s Office. The ICO can require a council to conduct an internal review, provide a substantive answer, or change its procedures. It has ordered other London boroughs to do exactly this. We have run through the internal review process with Wandsworth Council on numerous occasions. But on the most controversial topics, the council has simply refused to provide one. The complaint filed this week provides a rundown of seven separate occasions in which it has done so.
The ICO has opened case IC-531715-P7V0. We have requested expedited consideration. The cases are procedurally simple: no exemption analysis is needed, only a determination of whether internal reviews were conducted. They were not.
What we are asking for, and what you can do
The complaint asks for five things: formal decision notices on each of the seven cases; orders requiring substantive answers; completion of the Fox House internal review the council accepted and twice failed to deliver; a practice recommendation on Wandsworth’s internal review procedure; and expedited handling.
We have filed these together because the failure is institutional. The same words, the same outcome, seven times. It warrants a single consolidated argument.
This is the third active ICO complaint we have filed against Wandsworth. The first, on the council’s Access for All concessions scheme, was decided in our favour in May, with the council ordered to release data it had withheld for years. The second, on Roehampton sewage repairs, is ongoing. The ICO process works. We will keep using it.
FOI requests are not a journalist’s tool. They are a legal right that belongs to every resident. We file them because residents have a right to know whether their buildings are safe, whether public money is being spent wisely, and whether what the council tells them is true. When the council blocks the mechanism that enforces those rights, it is not blocking us. It is blocking you.
If you think that matters, you can support Putney.news. And if there are questions you think need asking (buildings you use, money you want accounted for, decisions that don’t add up), tell us. We will file the requests.
