Wandsworth Council broke the law twice while refusing to hand over repair records for a Roehampton block hit by a sewage leak, the Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled. It is the second Freedom of Information case Putney.news has won against the council this year.
The ICO found Wandsworth failed in its duty to give “advice and assistance” as well as breached the 20-working-day deadline for responding, taking nearly a month longer than the law allows.
Denmead House is the tower block where residents spent weeks in May 2025 emptying buckets of sewage from their own flats, after years of plumbing neglect. Putney.news has spent 14 months trying to get the council’s full repair record for that block, and reported the watchdog stepping in in June. Residents there are still waiting to know whether the underlying problem has actually been fixed.
What you can do
The same route is open to anyone whose own information request has been refused. Ask for an internal review, and if that fails, complain to the ICO. It is a lengthy process but it works: we have won both of our ICO cases against Wandsworth Council and a further two are in process. Anyone with a stalled request can start at WhatDoTheyKnow.com or by writing directly to the council’s FOI team.
Wandsworth Council must comply with the ICO’s order within 30 calendar days of the decision, meaning by 19 August. The order requires it to be more transparent about the reasons it refused our request and to help ensure it fits their approach.
Residents with ongoing concerns about repairs at Denmead House or elsewhere on the Alton Estate can also raise them directly with their ward councillors, Cllr Graeme Henderson, Cllr Jenny Yates and Cllr Matthew Tiller – although we feel obliged to note that we originally picked up this story after residents complained that their local councillors had repeatedly ignored their complaints. Repeat requests to those same councillors from Putney.news for over a year have also gone unanswered. Nevertheless, it is their job to look after residents’ interests and there remains the possibility they will start to do so.
The Housing Ombudsman is another route; it has separately criticised Wandsworth’s handling of long-running repair cases elsewhere in the borough.
How the council did its own maths
Putney.news first asked Wandsworth for the history of leaks, inspections and repairs at Denmead House in May 2025. The original request asked for five things: records of leaks and water ingress since 2018, inspection reports, details of repair works carried out, internal correspondence about recurring problems in that part of the building, and the council’s own policy for prioritising repeat repairs.
The council refused, citing the legal cost limit on requests: £450, worked out at £25 an hour, which comes to 18 hours of staff time. A narrower request followed in June, cut down to two things: leak reports since 2023, and the repair works themselves. Wandsworth took until 13 August, nearly a month past its 20-working-day deadline, to refuse that one too, and it is that refusal the ICO has now found unlawful in two separate ways.
- How many work orders were actually sampled to produce the 5.5-minute figure
- How that sample was chosen
- Whether 5.5 minutes is typical, generous, or convenient
- Why the records cannot simply be pulled as a report, given the council says they sit in an electronic system
To justify the refusal, the council told the regulator it would need to check 233 individual repair work orders. Based on a sample, it estimated each one would take 5.5 minutes to review. That put the job at 21.36 hours, almost a fifth over the 18-hour limit. The Commissioner accepted the estimate as reasonable and agreed Wandsworth was entitled to refuse on cost grounds.
But Wandsworth never told Putney.news any of this. Not the 233 cases behind the number, not the sampling method used to work out the 5.5 minutes, nothing. A council needs some estimate before it can refuse a request on cost grounds at all; Wandsworth had to have one from its first refusal, in June 2025. It simply never told the person who asked what that estimate actually was, or how it had been reached, until the regulator forced it to explain itself, more than a year later.
The council had offered narrowing advice once before, on the first refusal in June: it suggested limiting the request to the leak-and-inspection records alone. That advice is why part of the request was disclosed in September. But the law requires that same help every time a request runs into the cost limit, not just the first time. Once the September review had dealt with the easier half, nothing more came for the half that remained.
This is a recognised failure, not a novel one. The Commissioner has made near-identical findings against other councils before. Sandwell Council was found to have breached the same duty by inviting a narrower request without explaining how to write one. In a separate case, a tribunal ordered Kingston upon Thames to provide proper advice and assistance within 30 working days, after making practically the same mistake. Wandsworth's failure here follows a pattern the regulator has already set out publicly as good practice councils are expected to meet.
This is not the first time the same failure has surfaced with Wandsworth Council either. Wandsworth has issued a substantive refusal without any real help finding a way through it in five other Freedom of Information disputes since September 2025, according to this title's own tracking of the council's FOI handling.
What happens next
This ruling does not, on its own, say what the underlying repair record actually shows. That is why we filed two further requests the day the decision was published. One asks for the full pattern of repair work orders at Denmead House going back to 2016; the other for copies of the raw work orders themselves.
