The councillors who promised to fix Putney’s junction produced nothing. We can now prove it.

The junction at the foot of Putney Bridge has been gridlocked since Wandsworth Council redesigned it in December 2024. Buses have been running late. Side streets have become rat-runs. A resident survey collected 1,373 responses, almost all of them complaints. Putney.news has spent the past year filing Freedom of Information requests trying to establish what the council’s elected representatives did about it. We kept expecting to find something. We have not.

Three FOI requests. Fourteen months. Well over two months of unlawful delay across the three responses. And not a single document authored by a councillor. No report. No briefing. No recommendation. No action plan. Nothing the council could point to as evidence that the people democratically accountable for transport in this borough were doing anything beyond attending meetings someone else organised.

We kept asking. They kept not answering.

The first request, filed in August 2025, asked for three things: minutes of any internal meetings about the junction, internal reports on the congestion, and correspondence with Cabinet Members following a public meeting at which residents had confronted the council about the crisis. It came back within the legal deadline.

The council confirmed that five meetings had taken place, chaired by Fleur Anderson MP, but that council officers had taken no notes. It said internal reports existed but were being withheld because they were still being worked on. That is a standard reason councils give for not releasing documents while work is ongoing. Only later did we find out there was no ongoing work. On the question of Cabinet Member correspondence following the May meeting, the answer was a single word: “None.”

We assumed there must be more. So we came back. The second request asked for what the first had not reached: attendance records, any briefings or agendas shared with council officers, an index of the withheld reports, and explicit confirmation of whether WhatsApp and text messages had been searched. This response was three weeks late. The council withheld all the meeting materials on the same grounds. On WhatsApp and text messages, it said the information was not held.

By November 2025, the council’s Transport Committee had published its report on the junction. The work the council had said was ongoing was now complete and public. We filed a third request pointing this out: the reports should now be released, and we still needed the council to tell us whether it had searched WhatsApp and text messages when it concluded that no Cabinet Member correspondence existed.

The council took nearly three months to reply, well past the legal deadline. When it finally did, it produced seven emails. Every one had been written by Anderson. It also applied an exemption, for the first time, to Cabinet Member correspondence, but this was the same category it had previously told us did not exist. It gave no explanation for the contradiction. It still said nothing about whether WhatsApp or text messages had been searched.

So earlier this month we went back again, pointing out that two contradictory answers had been given on the same question, that we still hadn’t been told whether WhatsApp and texts had been searched, and that three late responses in a row wasn’t bad luck. The council has until early May to reply. If the answers aren’t good enough, the matter goes to the Information Commissioner.

At each stage we assumed we were missing something. We were not. The record is clear: if councillors had been doing their jobs, analysing the crisis, directing solutions, making decisions, there would be a paper trail. There isn’t one. When we asked specifically about WhatsApp and text messages, the platforms where politicians often say things they would rather not see in writing, the council stopped saying “None” and started applying exemptions. It has never told us whether those platforms were searched.

The one message we did find

The only communication we have managed to find from an elected representative about the junction didn’t come from the council at all. It came from a Freedom of Information request to Transport for London, which is where we found a letter from Cllr Jenny Yates, the Cabinet Member for Transport, complaining to TfL about “an unmanageable amount of public pressure and anger.” She wasn’t telling TfL what to do. She was telling them how bad it had got for her politically. That is what the council’s records show its elected representatives were doing. Which makes the refusal to confirm whether WhatsApp and text messages were searched all the more telling, because if those messages exist, this is almost certainly what they look like too.

It is not an isolated case. Three days before a January 2025 ministerial meeting on Hammersmith Bridge, Council Leader Simon Hogg stood at a public rally calling for “urgent and decisive action to fund and deliver the repairs.” Three days later, when Wandsworth’s representative was offered the chance to open talks on sharing the repair costs, the response was two words: “no money.” The council has never told residents what happened in that room. The pattern is the same: public promises, private inaction, and no paper trail of anyone actually trying to fix anything.

They thought someone was in charge

If you live in Putney, or take a bus through it, or have sat in the traffic on Lower Richmond Road, or walked your children to school past queuing cars, this is the part of the story that concerns you most directly. Because while all of that was happening, several hundred of your neighbours packed St Margaret’s Church in October 2025 to confront the council. They didn’t know what we now know. They thought someone was in charge.

Hogg apologised. “I’m sorry that we haven’t kept you up to date,” he said. “We haven’t brought you on the journey of all of these meetings we’re having.” Meetings for which we have been unable to find any evidence.

When asked specifically about buses, he handed immediately to Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney. “This is where I’m going to bring in our MP Fleur Anderson,” he said, “who has been working really, really hard on the buses and the task force for that.”

The Putney and Roehampton Bus Taskforce was Anderson’s initiative entirely. She convened it from her parliamentary office to look at bus services in her constituency. It could not direct the council to do anything. Anderson wrote every agenda, compiled every action table, sent every meeting summary. The council’s own FOI response confirmed that council officers attended meetings at which “verbal updates were given by various organisations” and that “no written minutes or notes were made by Council officers.”

When we asked for materials prepared by council officers for those taskforce meetings (briefings, notes, summaries, attendance records, correspondence with the MP’s office), the council didn’t say it was withholding them. It didn’t say it didn’t have them. It simply said nothing. Our formal challenge asks the council to explain why.

Where’s Hogg?

The junction crisis was documented throughout the taskforce’s own records. Anderson’s May 2025 agenda noted “significant tail backs on Lower Richmond Road and Putney Bridge Road — residents submitting regular complaints re congestion dangers (rat-running, pollution) in correspondence to both Fleur Anderson MP and WBC.” The junction review remained a standing item through July 2025, still listed as pending with no confirmed completion timeline. Cllr Yates was named in the emails throughout. So was Cllr Matthew Tiller, a fellow Labour councillor for Roehampton, from June 2025 onwards.

Hogg, meanwhile, is absent from the record entirely. He was told at St Margaret’s Church, loudly and directly, that the junction was the most urgent issue facing residents. He promised communication. He promised action. The FOI record contains nothing he wrote, commissioned, or directed. At the same meeting, he suggested WhatsApp groups might keep residents informed. When we asked for those messages, the council told us there were none.

Residents were not subtle about the stakes. “If someone had a critical problem in my business and it was then ten months later and you’re still listening to the problem, I would have been fired by now,” said Sean Pooley, a resident of Lower Richmond Road. “We have elderly people in tears because they can’t get a bus,” said Gail Renard, of the Erpingham Road neighbourhood watch. “We will use our votes if this is not rectified soon because you have made our lives intolerable in what was a great area.” Harry Grubb, a resident of Erpingham Road, told Hogg directly: “At some point somebody is going to be killed. You have a duty of care towards all of us and you’ve been warned now about this.”

Bus performance data published last week showed Putney’s routes running 41% above the borough average for excess waiting time, with the junction identified as the primary cause.

Wandsworth Council did not respond to questions submitted about this story over a week ago, on Friday 20 March 2026.

What you can do

The complete FOI correspondence, covering all three requests and the council’s responses, is publicly available at WhatDoTheyKnow.

You can submit your own FOI request to Wandsworth Council via WhatDoTheyKnow asking for any council-authored documents relating to the Putney junction produced since January 2025.

Our formal challenge to the council’s handling of these FOI requests is due a response by early May 2026. Putney.news will report the outcome. If the answers are not satisfactory, the matter goes to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Wandsworth Council elections take place on 7 May 2026.