Wandsworth Council left a disabled woman living in a house it had decided was not fit to live in three years earlier.
The property was so bad she wasn’t able to use the kitchen. When she asked to be rehoused, the council ignored her.
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has found in her favour and ordered the council to pay “Miss X” £6,300, make ongoing monthly payments, apologise, and confirm in writing that it will offer her the next suitable home that becomes available.
The council was given four weeks to do all four things. The deadline was 6 July 2026. That date has come and gone, and Wandsworth still hasn’t said publicly whether it has met it.
In September 2023, Wandsworth had already decided the house was unfit. That was more than a year before Miss X reported a leak that made things impossible. The Ombudsman puts it plainly: from that point on, the council “owed an immediate duty to provide suitable accommodation.” It didn’t. The leak that finally reached the Ombudsman wasn’t the failure. It just made a failure Wandsworth was already sitting on impossible to ignore.
Miss X reported the leak in December 2024. In February 2025, she formally asked to be moved, on the grounds of her disability. The council did not properly consider that request, the Ombudsman found, and never told her how to challenge the property’s suitability either. Nor did it act on the finding it had already made about the same house, more than a year before.
The Ombudsman worked out what Wandsworth owes her by counting the months: £350 for each, from December 2024, when she reported the leak, to May 2026, when the ruling was made. A total of £6,300. On top of that, the council must keep paying her £350 a month from June 2026, for up to six months or until it finds her somewhere suitable, whichever comes first. It must also write to her confirming she’ll get the next suitable home that comes up, and apologise for the harm its failure caused her.
A problem the watchdog has seen before
The Ombudsman doesn’t treat this as a one-off. Its decision says it has “recently made service improvements of the Council on other cases” over exactly this failure, how Wandsworth handles reviews of whether accommodation is suitable, and chose not to order anything further this time, saying the council “must be allowed an opportunity to improve its service.” The watchdog that just investigated Miss X’s case is telling Wandsworth, in its own words, that it has seen this before.
This is at least the seventh time a Wandsworth tenant has been left in a home the council knew wasn’t fit, for far longer than it should have taken to sort out: a family left traumatised after a two-year housing nightmare, a domestic abuse survivor left in a room too small for her newborn, damp and mould cases stretching back to 2025, and a four-year housing scandal that first put the pattern on the record.
Wandsworth inspected the house twice more in this case, in June and October 2025, and did some repair work, but Miss X says the problem was never properly fixed. She made a formal complaint in March 2025 and escalated it in June; the council replied the following month. In January 2026, it offered her another property. She turned it down, over cost and personal reasons.
A council spokesperson said: “We take the wellbeing of our residents incredibly seriously. We are sorry for the delays in this case and have apologised to the individual. We have since offered alternative accommodation and fully paid the compensation ordered.”
If your accommodation isn’t suitable
You can formally challenge a council’s decision that your temporary accommodation is suitable, under section 202 of the Housing Act 1996, once it has accepted a duty to house you. Ask in writing within 21 days of being told it’s suitable. The council then has up to eight weeks to complete the review.
Wandsworth’s own two-stage complaints process, escalating to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman if it goes nowhere, is the route Miss X used. Complaints to the Ombudsman normally have to be made within 12 months of you becoming aware of the problem.
Shelter’s helpline (0808 800 4444) deals specifically with suitability-review queries, and Citizens Advice can help too. If you don’t know who your ward councillor is, you can look them up on Wandsworth Council’s website.
