Wandsworth Council is refusing to reveal how it plans to spend nearly £8 million of public money on retrofitting five of its buildings, including Putney Leisure Centre and Wandsworth Town Hall, under a flagship green grant scheme, despite repeated Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and mounting evidence that other councils have disclosed similar information without issue.
In May, the council publicly announced it had secured a £4.7 million grant from the central government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, with an additional £3.3 million of match funding from its own budget. The scheme is being delivered by Salix Finance and aims to cut carbon emissions from public buildings by 75% by 2037.
At the time, the council claimed the work could cut energy use by 92% across the five buildings: a figure that, while ambitious, was left entirely unsubstantiated by any publicly shared breakdown of how the funds would be used.
Since then, Putney.news has made multiple FOI requests asking for basic transparency: how the money will be divided between buildings, and what technologies – like solar panels, insulation, and heat pumps – will be installed where.
The response? A blanket refusal. The council claims that releasing this information could hurt its future bargaining power with contractors, and has invoked Section 43(2) of the FOI Act on “commercial sensitivity” grounds.
Other councils can disclose. Why not Wandsworth?
What makes Wandsworth’s refusal particularly striking is that Putney.news directly cited examples from other councils in its internal review request – councils that have already published this type of information without issue.
These include:
- Lambeth Council, which published a full breakdown of PSDS-funded upgrades by site and technology.
- Bristol and Leicester, which disclosed costs per building and expected carbon savings.
- Cambridgeshire, which included detailed financials in public audit reports.
All this was pointed out to Wandsworth Council in a formal request for an internal review. Yet despite this, the council doubled down, not only standing by its refusal to release any numbers, but acknowledging that internal spreadsheets do exist, and it simply won’t share them.
This isn’t just bureaucratic stubbornness. It’s a worrying pattern of public opacity on green spending.
A pattern of secrecy and contradiction
This is not the first time Wandsworth has preached climate leadership while dodging transparency.
Just last month, we revealed that the council had quietly signed a £775,000 contract to lease 24 new diesel vans, abandoning its own pledge to switch to electric vehicles. The deal was made behind closed doors and only came to light after a delayed and heavily redacted FOI release.
No climate criteria were applied. No public consultation was held. And no competition was opened. The contract was simply extended with the same supplier the council has used since 2019.
Now, with its green retrofit programme, the council is again withholding basic information; even after admitting it broke the legal FOI deadline by nearly a month.
So now we ask: What is Wandsworth Council hiding?
Is the money being disproportionately spent on the Town Hall instead of community services? Is there a political sensitivity over the scale or quality of what’s being delivered? Or is this simply a council culture that sees transparency as optional?
What happens next
Putney.news is today submitting a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), challenging Wandsworth Council’s use of the Section 43(2) exemption and its refusal to provide even high-level or redacted estimates.
We will also be submitting new FOI requests and reviewing future spending disclosures to ensure this money – provided by taxpayers and overseen by the national government – is not wasted or hidden from public view.
Wandsworth residents deserve to know how their money is being spent. Especially when that spending is meant to deliver on one of the most urgent issues of our time: the climate crisis.
