Council tenants and leaseholders in Wandsworth could soon have to fill in an application form to secure a formal say in how their homes are run, under plans to scrap the borough’s four area housing panels and replace them with borough-wide groups recruited by selection criteria.
The draft proposals would do away with the area panels, where representatives of residents’ associations currently meet councillors and housing officers four times a year to raise problems from their estates and hold the housing service to account.
In their place would come five borough-wide groups organised by topic rather than place: one each for tenants, leaseholders, vulnerable residents and accessibility, repairs, and the borough’s housing co-operatives. Seats would be open to any tenant or resident leaseholder who applies and is selected, with selection criteria used to make the groups representative of the borough as a whole. Those chosen would be offered training.
A new scrutiny body would sit at the top of the structure, fed by the five groups. Residents’ associations, meanwhile, would move to what the council calls “informal activities”, listed alongside roadshows, pulse surveys and newsletters.
What the area panels do today
The area panels are the front line of formal resident involvement in the borough’s council housing. Most panel members are appointed from accredited residents’ associations, and the panels in turn elect the residents who sit on the Borough Residents’ Forum, the body above them.
In Roehampton, the Western Area Housing Panel brings ten residents’ associations together at the Manresa Clubroom on Fontley Way, with each association able to put up to three items on the agenda.
At a single meeting last year, the panel dealt with issues ranging from litter from split bin bags that the council’s waste contractor would not sweep up, to Thames Water bills of £800 to £900 a year for flats with the same layout that cannot have individual meters, to buses being cut short.
It is this kind of place-based, granular problem-solving that residents value: problems tied to a particular block, street or estate, raised by the people who live there, with councillors and housing officers in the room. Under the proposed structure, engagement on individual estates would “take place at the informal level”, through estate inspections, roadshows and residents’ associations — but the paper does not say where issues tied to a place would be raised once the area panels have gone.
The councillors who chair the area panels would keep a role, the paper says, with thought given to how they could chair and attend the new groups.
Why the council says change is needed
The council’s case for change is that the current route is too narrow. Its paper says residents’ associations cover only a third of its estates, and that access to influence should no longer depend on belonging to one.
The shake-up follows an inspection of the council’s housing service by the Regulator of Social Housing, which gave it a C3 rating last year. In the council’s latest survey, 61 per cent of tenants and 55 per cent of leaseholders said the housing service listens to their views and acts on them.
The council’s housing service has been under the microscope in other ways too. Earlier this month, a Wandsworth tenant was ordered to hand back more than £64,000 after secretly renting out a council flat for three years.
The engagement overhaul also lands as the council faces a string of major decisions, including a proposed record 94 per cent council tax rise from April 2027, and comes after the borough agreed to fund 25 extra police officers in a £4.9 million-a-year deal.
What a C3 rating means for tenants
The Regulator of Social Housing inspects every social landlord in England with more than 1,000 homes and grades them on how well they are run. The grades run from C1, the best, to C4, the worst. A C3 rating means the regulator has found serious failings: the landlord is not meeting the required consumer standards, and tenants’ interests are at risk.
For tenants, a C3 is a signal that something is structurally wrong — not just with repairs or waiting times, but with how the landlord listens and responds. Landlords given a C3 must agree an improvement plan with the regulator and demonstrate progress, and the judgement is published so tenants can see it.
Wandsworth’s C3 judgement is the backdrop to the whole engagement overhaul: the council has committed to improving its services for residents, and the new strategy is one of the vehicles for doing it.
The Alton precedent
The council already runs a panel recruited in the way the new groups would be. The Alton Community Panel, on the Alton estate in Roehampton, was recruited by application in 2025 to help shape the estate’s renewal: 15 residents, meeting with an independent chair. When it was set up, the council said members would be paid the London Living Wage for around four hours a month.
But its members have questioned how much power it has. After an external evaluation this year, the panel’s published notes record members saying the work was not yet “resident-led”, that power over regeneration outcomes arguably still sits mostly with officers and professionals, and that there are still “many people above us who have the final say”.
What the paper does not say
The proposal does not say whether members of the new groups would be paid, as Alton’s panel members were told they would be. It does not say whether any money would be saved; the only financial comment is that the cost of drawing up the strategy will come from existing housing budgets.
Decisions on the funding residents’ associations receive, on how they are recognised, and on the small improvement budget each panel shares out for estate projects are all left for later Cabinet papers. Nor does the proposal say whether the Alton panel is the model, or whether the Housing Quality Network review that led to the plans will be published.
What happens next
The plans go to the Borough Residents’ Forum on Wednesday evening at the Town Hall — a public meeting members of the public can attend to observe — and to the council’s housing scrutiny committee on Thursday. The council says the proposals are a draft for discussion.
Separately, the council is asking residents on its estates to complete its survey on the new strategy by 25 October. Focus groups will follow, with residents designing the engagement structures alongside the council. A draft strategy will then go to the council’s Cabinet and to residents for formal consultation in early 2027, and the council hopes to have a new formal engagement structure in place within six months of the strategy being adopted.
