The £4m renovation of Putney Leisure Centre is months behind schedule, and the council is still tendering for the work more than four months after its own deadline.
The community amenity, at the centre of a pool fight earlier this year, is consuming roughly half of an £8m green programme covering five council buildings. The £3.85m works promise roof and wall insulation, double glazing, new pipework, solar panels and a heat pump. But none of it can start until orders are placed.
The council’s timetable, disclosed in July 2025, said every order would be placed by 1 April 2026. But in evidence submitted to the Information Commissioner this month, in response to a challenge brought by Putney.news, it admitted the tendering had still not finished.
The council’s contracts register, with over 600 entries, lists no works contract for the programme, and no tender or award notice for it has been published on Find a Tender, the government’s contracts service. As far back as January, the government’s delivery body Salix noted that a tendering processes “have yet to be completed”. What has been settled is a £100,000 contract for a consultant whose job will be to oversee expenditure – once, that is, contracts are actually signed.
The council has not announced any delay over a year of correspondence with Putney.news, an internal review and an 11-month watchdog investigation. But in order to keep the programme’s costs secret, the council needed to show the Commissioner that its procurement was still live. The decision notice, issued this week, records that “the Council has confirmed that the procurement exercise for the project is ongoing”.
The defence worked. The Commissioner ruled the costs can stay secret. For now. When the Commissioner invited the council in July to reconsider its secrecy “given the passage of time” – it has been over a year since the program was approved – the council declined.
Southwark, funded in the same round of the same government scheme, signed its decarbonisation contracts in April and May. Wandsworth was still tendering in August.
Putney.news is preparing an appeal against the ruling, and will file a fresh request asking for the latest developments and deadline at Putney Leisure Centre.
