Wandsworth Council was warned in writing that a vital fire safety check could not be carried out in one of its properties because the top of the building was inaccessible.
Three years later, with the warning still not acted upon, the five-story building had to be evacuated when a fire spread through it with extraordinary speed. It was sheer luck no one was killed. An investigation concluded the inaccessible space was the reason. The lock on it could not take a fire brigade key.
After the fire, the council praised itself for its “strong response”, while fighting to keep secret the fact that it had been warned three years earlier that the building was not safe.
More than 100 people fled Fox House in Battersea on 10 September last year. Sixty lost their homes and all their possessions.
The warning sits in the council’s own 2022 fire risk assessment for the block; a record Putney.news obtained this week after months of refusals. It says the roof void, the empty space above the top-floor flats, could not be inspected at all. The lock on the access hatch was the wrong type for a fire brigade key, so the assessor could not get in.
The report told the council to fit a proper lock and inspect the space, by a deadline in the summer of 2022. The council has produced no record that either job was done.
We don’t know what started the fire but it crossed the roof void in about ten minutes, gutting the fourth floor and the roof. Barry Quirk, the former council chief executive brought in to review the fire, found the speed of that spread pointed to weakness in the void itself. His is the only independent examination of the fire so far, and no one has challenged the finding.
Residents did not wait for help. The fire started at about 7.20pm, a window blew out, and they went down the balcony walkways and out, ignoring the official “stay put” advice. Quirk found that quick escape was what kept everyone alive.
Praise in public, refusals in private
The council commissioned Quirk to review its response to the fire. His report confirmed the void was never inspected. It did not say why. It never mentioned the lock, and it never mentioned the ten safety jobs the 2022 assessment had left outstanding.
The council put that review before its Cabinet and then claimed that it “commends” the council for its “strong response” to the fire, praising its “effective use of data”. The report was presented in the names of the then-Leader, Cllr Simon Hogg, and the then-Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Aydin Dikerdem.
At the same time, the same council was refusing to release the assessment that showed what it had been told about the building before it burned. It used Section 30 of the Freedom of Information Act, an exemption meant for police investigations, to withhold routine safety records.
We challenged that refusal and last month, having exhausted every other avenue, went to the regulator, the Information Commissioner, over a wider pattern of council refusals. The council handed the report over this week, saying it had reconsidered after “further consultation with the London Fire Brigade”. Start to finish, the request took about 116 working days.
Ten jobs, none signed off
The lock was not the only thing left undone. The 2022 assessment listed ten fire-safety jobs, and none was recorded as complete when the report was signed off that October.
There was no emergency lighting on the escape routes. Flat fire doors lacked proper self-closers and smoke seals. Combustible material was being stored in service cupboards. The bin store was not locked, flagged as an arson risk. The building’s electrical wiring safety was unconfirmed. And one job, fitting lightning protection, was marked “completed” in March 2022, then marked “not started” again when the report was approved seven months later. A job logged as done, then quietly undone.
The report did not rate the block as dangerous. It judged the overall risk “tolerable”, and set every action as medium term, none as severe. That is the point. These were routine jobs, not emergencies, and on the record the council has released, they simply sat there. The council has not said whether any of them were done.
The gap matters because of the council’s wider record. The social housing regulator gave Wandsworth its second-lowest rating last year, with around 1,800 fire-safety actions overdue by more than a year. The council’s own papers admit it ignored the Grenfell reforms, the fire-safety rules brought in after the 2017 tower disaster. Against that record, a missed deadline on a roof-void lock is just one more sign of a dangerous approach and attitude to fire safety and to residents’ lives.
The one question only the council can answer
Whether the lock was ever replaced, and the roof void ever inspected, before the night of the fire, is the single thing that would settle this. Only the council holds the answer. We have put it directly to everyone involved.
We asked Cllr Matthew Corner, the current Cabinet Member for Housing who took over last month, whether the lock was replaced and the roof void inspected before the fire, whether the other eight jobs in the 2022 assessment were completed and when, and when the roofs of the neighbouring blocks will be inspected.
We asked Barry Quirk whether he saw the 2022 assessment during his review, and why his report did not mention that the roof void could not be opened.
We asked Cllr Simon Hogg and Cllr Aydin Dikerdem about the praise presented in their names while the report was being withheld.
No one had responded by the time of publication. We will update this story when they do.
Fox House does not stand alone. It is one of a run of near-identical post-war blocks, and people still live in the others. Quirk recommended roof and void inspections across similar buildings. On the council’s own Cabinet paper, that inspection programme carries no completion date. The line in the deadline column is blank.
The failures at Fox House span both parties, a housing crisis they both helped create. The current Conservative administration now owns the remediation, and the answer to whether the work was ever done. We will file a further request asking exactly that: whether the two roof-void jobs, and all ten, were completed before 10 September 2025, and on what dates.
Excellent exposure, extreme disappointment in the incompetent, elected, irresponsible members of the Council.