A Wandsworth council tenant has been ordered to pay £64,743.54 after subletting her flat to a family for three years, the council says.
Priscilla Antah advertised her one-bedroom council flat on Gumtree. The couple, who have a young child, paid her £1,200 a month, believing she owned it. The council found out only when she stopped paying her own rent and an officer came to serve a formal warning. The family told the officer their landlord did not live there.
According to the council, Ms Antah denied subletting, said a relative had been staying while she was away, claimed not to know the family, and even called the police to have them illegally evicted.
The council won the case, she was ordered to hand the flat back, and it can now be let to someone on the waiting list. The council’s announcement last week did not name the court, give a date for the judgment, or say what happened to the family.
The council has publicised two similar cases since December 2024. One came to light when a subtenant complained that there was no heating; the other was caught by the council’s own checks.
Under resourced fraud division
Sublets are investigated by the South West London Fraud Partnership, a team of 15 people that Wandsworth shares with Kingston, Merton, Richmond and Sutton. It also deals with blue badge, parking and staff fraud. Last year Wandsworth’s share of it came to just under five full-time investigators, for 17,353 council homes.
The team set out its plan for this year in its latest report to the council’s audit committee, in March. Under it, tenancy fraud takes half of the time spent investigating cases. But the time set aside for going looking for fraud, rather than waiting to be told about it, is cut by about a quarter, to 139 days from 182 in the plan presented a year earlier. In all, the team expects to spend 920 days on Wandsworth this year, down from 990.
In the eleven months to late February, the team got back 40 homes for the council and housing associations. Its target was 36, and stays at 36 this year. The number of tenancy fraud cases it worked on fell: 222 in those eleven months, against 303 in the whole of the year before.
Every property recovered “frees up a place for a family on the Council’s waiting list therefore reducing the impact of the temporary housing costs”, the report says. The council is spending £28.6 million of council tax a year on temporary accommodation, where a family costs up to £2,226 a month. A council home costs £645, and around 13,000 households are on the waiting list.
Relying on referrals
When the report went to the committee in March, Kevin Holland, the council’s assistant director for fraud, risk and insurance, said the vast majority of the team’s cases come to it as referrals, mostly from housing teams. The team also runs some checks of its own, he said.
Residents of the estates are the best source of information about which homes sit empty and which are being let out. Yet of 264 tenancy fraud cases worked on between April 2024 and January 2025, just 29 started with a tip-off from a member of the public. Residents who have spoken to Putney.news say sublets and empty homes are common.
Much of the report councillors were given in March repeats the previous year’s word for word. Of its 77 sentences, 29 are exactly the same as the March 2025 report, figures included, and 45 are the same apart from the figures. It is signed with the previous year’s date. It repeats the previous year’s figure of 149 cases for each investigator, although the number of cases changed. And it still says, in a sentence carried over unchanged, that progress on cases has been held back by Covid.
The March 2025 report also recorded a hold-up inside the housing department. A national data-checking exercise had flagged housing applications that might not be genuine, but following them up was delayed “due to resourcing issues within Housing Allocations”, the team that runs the waiting list.
An internal audit reported to councillors in July found that at Battersea Fields, an estate run by its residents’ own management organisation, staff were carrying out fewer checks on who was living in homes than they should, and some forms did not record what identification had been seen. The auditors said this made it more likely that homes were being lived in by people with no right to them.
Councillor Peter Graham, the council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for finance, said: “Having a council home is a privilege. It means having a rent well below what others have to pay. People who sublet our council homes aren’t just defrauding us; they are defrauding their neighbours and those in genuine housing need.
“We will prosecute anyone abusing that privilege and breaking the law. If you know about illegal subletting in Wandsworth, get in touch and let us take action.”
What you can do
Report a suspected sublet or empty council home: email the South West London Fraud Partnership at swlfp@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk.
Renting a flat from someone you found online? Check who owns it first. A free search on the government’s property register gives a summary of most homes, and for £7 you can download the title register, which names the owner. If the owner is the council or a housing association, the person taking your rent should not be.
