Wandsworth Council is still paying out for asbestos exposure. Four claims are currently open, two of them already in court, and at least one new claim has arrived every year since 2020. This is not a bill the council has finished settling and based on recent information released by the council to Putney.news, that is likely to continue.
The total paid since 2020 is just over £1m (£1,017,415 to be exact), across eleven claims and so averaging £92,500. Three of the eleven people who claimed never worked for the council but were people who had used a council building.
Whether others are being exposed right now is something nobody currently knows but there remain a large number of buildings with the cancer-causing material in them and crucial maintenance checks are not being carried out as required. The law assumes any council building put up or refurbished before 2000 contains asbestos until a survey says otherwise, and says it has to be checked at least every six to twelve months.
Of the thirteen children’s buildings officially recognised as containing asbestos, nine have not been checked in the past year and four have not been checked since before 2016.
Material that is degrading without anyone knowing is exactly what turns into a claim decades later. We don’t know if today’s gaps caused any of the eleven cases already settled, exposure from that era predates any of this by thirty years or more. But the same pattern that produced them, asbestos going unchecked, is demonstrably still running.
Left unmanaged, that cost does not go away on its own. Every year a piece of asbestos goes unchecked, whether that means confirming it is still safely sealed or removing material that has degraded, is a year closer to another exposure, another payout, and another decades-long illness. The bill compounds. So does the harm: mesothelioma is not a fine the council budgets for. It is an incurable disease that kills the people who get it.
How the money is found is a question the council has yet to answer publicly. Its latest accounts show it self-insures up to £531,108 per claim before any external cover applies, and disclose no specific provision, no money set aside, for the four cases still open.
One more gap needs explaining. Across the same years it paid out £1m, the council reported zero asbestos exposure incidents. The two figures measure different things, an incident is a fibre release today, a claim is litigation about exposure decades ago, so they were never going to match.
But the council has never said so publicly, and a resident reading “zero incidents” could reasonably conclude there is no asbestos problem in Wandsworth.
We contacted Wandsworth Council two days ago with five questions, including how the open claims are funded, the circumstances of the three claims from people who were not council employees, and whether Municipal Mutual is involved. We have yet to receive a response.
Behind the figures are eleven people, at least some of whom will have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer of the lung lining almost always caused by asbestos.
