Hammersmith and Fulham Council under Labour holds a distinction that no council should ever want. Under their stewardship the Housing Ombudsman branded us the worst landlord for damp and mould in the whole of England. Not among the worst. Not in the bottom quartile. The worst. Number one. Top of a league table of misery.
Lest we forget. The Ombudsman found a maladministration rate of 10.8 findings per 10,000 homes, more than three times worse than the next landlord on the list. We were not just failing. We were failing on an industrial scale.
And it did not stop there. This council was also found to be the worst in England at handling complaints about damp and mould, 3.3 maladministration findings per 10,000 homes. So not only were residents living in appalling conditions, but when they had the courage to complain, their complaints were mishandled too. The Ombudsman found that residents were, and I quote ‘systematically blamed’ for the damp and mould in their own homes.
Families with children. Elderly residents. People with asthma, with respiratory conditions. They reported black mould creeping across their walls, and this council’s response was to tell them it was their fault.
That is not the hallmark of a compassionate administration. That is the hallmark of an institution in denial.
Then came the Housing Ombudsman’s Special Investigation in February 2024, a step reserved for only the most serious cases of systemic failure. The findings were devastating: 85 findings across 33 cases, with a maladministration rate of 88%. The Ombudsman found residents left ‘feeling anything but secure in their homes’ after ‘multiple and repeated failures.’
The cases were not abstract statistics. Windows that could not be closed, leaving homes insecure. A window frame that fell out of a property into the garden below. Ceiling debris falling onto the head of a young child. These are the conditions this administration presided over while assuring us everything was under control.
The administration will point to investment figures and talk about smart sensors and dedicated teams. But as recently as November 2024, the Ombudsman was still issuing findings of severe maladministration for this council’s handling of repairs, noting that it had ‘failed to carry out repairs as promised in its complaint responses.’
It’s fair to say when last year Cllr Campbell-Simon, elected as a Labour Cllr said of his former colleagues that, 'the Labour administration in Hammersmith and Fulham is failing the people it was elected to serve', it brings things into a clearer context. But then again when your ethos is one 'where councillors are punished for speaking up, and
where residents’ voices are too often ignored' as so aptly stated by Cllr Collins, another three year Labour Cllr elected in 2022, you can see how this could occur.
The fundamental question is this then, how did it come to this? This is one of the wealthiest boroughs in the country. Yet under continuous Labour control, our social housing tenants, some of the most vulnerable people in the borough have been left to live in conditions that are a disgrace.
The answer lies in priorities.
This is an administration that has found hundreds of millions for vanity capital projects while basic repairs went undone. Families sleeping in rooms covered in black mould while the council built monuments to itself.
