After 611 days of complaints and nearly 50 police callouts, Wandsworth Council has finally evicted the tenant who made life hell for his neighbours on Fownes Street.
Kevin Stratford left the Battersea flat at around 10am on 4 August with two suitcases. By 11am, the council had fitted a metal security door where his front door used to be. He told a neighbour he was being moved to a homeless shelter.
For more than eighteen months, residents of the six-flat block lived with screaming, violence, smashed windows and men climbing the outside of the building. One family packed up and left rather than carry on living there. The case had been on the council’s desk since at least December 2024.
Council officers told residents on the doorstep that day that they had also secured an injunction with power of arrest against Lee Preston, Stratford’s partner. They had not yet served it. After everyone left, residents went up to check the flat had been properly sealed. Outside the front door: a used needle.
The council won the legal power to evict Stratford on 23 March. It sat on that power for 134 days even as terrified residents continued to call the police each time violence broke out and afterwards provided yet one more police reference number to the council which promised them it was going to act soon. Sixteen weeks in, as we reported in July, it still hadn’t used its eviction power.
A man kicked in a door and smashed a window at 3am on 12 July, the exact kind of incident the unused order existed to stop, before the council finally moved. And even then it was only after the police, council officers, local councillors, the cabinet member in charge of housing and the local MP had been alerted that residents feared for their lives.
Every power the council used in August, it already held in March. What changed was not the law. Nor was it the copious amounts of evidence that the residents were asked, over and over again, to supply the council. It was our investigations, four court hearings, political pressure and a final act of violence the council’s own order was supposed to have prevented.
Another failure to look after Wandsworth residents
In July 2025, after a separate case in which a council tenant terrorised the young couple living above her for two years before finally being jailed, Wandsworth’s then cabinet member for housing, Aydin Dikerdem, said in a public statement: “We accept that we could have acted more swiftly. Following this case, changes are being made to our anti-social behaviour case management system.” Fownes Street ran alongside that promise, from the same council, and tested it against the record in February. The changes were never applied.
When Putney.news first investigated the block in December, the council had already closed its formal case review on Fownes Street, marking its actions as complete.
One of those actions was a CCTV camera. It hadn’t been installed when the case was closed. It didn’t go up until late October, and was then found to be obstructed by foliage.
Following repeat and frequent requests for action for over a year from both residents and Putney.news, including actively tracking the case and turning up to court to make sure events were publicly reported, a court granted an injunction against Stratford. The council served it, alongside a notice seeking eviction, on 18 December. The disturbances started again within hours.
A hearing due in early January didn’t happen until 20 February, six weeks late. The council turned up without alleging Stratford had breached the injunction – despite prodding from the judge – and its own witness statement, dated 3 February, hadn’t been served or filed. At that hearing, a judge told the council to get in an Uber, fixing a six-week standoff over house keys in the time it took to say it: “Get in an Uber… Go there now, before the office closes.”
At least six named council officers touched this case at different points. Not one owned it from start to finish. Leicester City Council does it differently: since January, one named officer runs each housing ASB case, start to finish.
Wandsworth still hasn’t answered the questions Putney.news put to it, including why the 134-day gap happened at all. One resident has taken his complaint about the council’s handling to the Housing Ombudsman.
The possession order sat unenforced from 23 March, through spring and into summer. Weeks earlier, on 6 March, a council officer watched Stratford fall while climbing the building’s exterior on live CCTV, and confirmed it in writing. The drainpipe Stratford and Preston used to climb in and out eventually failed, and only then did the council remove it. The tenant was left in place.
On 18 March, the council’s own draft breach statement for the coming hearing left out around ten recorded incidents.
“I’m so happy,” said the resident named here as Imran, who moved his family out of the block in January rather than wait any longer, on hearing the eviction had finally happened. It had been a long – unnecessarily long – process but finally this weekend, peace descended for the first time in years on Fownes Street.
Almost a year to the day that Wandsworth Council’s failings were plastered all over the national press, there remains no evidence that it has improved its processes or learned any lessons. Fownes Street will go down as yet one more black mark.
What you can do if this sounds familiar
If you have reported antisocial behaviour to your landlord, council or the police three or more times in six months, you have a statutory right to demand a multi-agency “community trigger” case review: details from GOV.UK. If a council or housing association’s own complaints process has not resolved an ASB complaint, the Housing Ombudsman can investigate afterwards, as one Fownes Street resident is doing now.
Wandsworth’s Falconbrook ward councillors are Simon Hogg and Kate Stock.
