A new development in our Jas Athwal investigation

Dear readers — happy Monday from Londoner HQ. As I write this, the sun is streaming into the office, I’ve had to remove my jumper and I’m debating applying sun cream for my lunchtime walk — but there’s something bittersweetly beautiful about these confused end-of-summer/beginning-of-autumn days. The geese I saw on my walk along the Embankment this morning also seemed to be none the wiser vis-à-vis the seasons, but were enjoying the weather as much as I was.

Today’s briefing features film screenings in ancient tunnels below the city, the London football club with a pitch-side luxury swimming pool, an eight-month-in-the-making update on our launch-day investigation into Jas Athwal and potentially the capital’s best sandwich.

Big story: How much did Redbridge council know about the unsafe children's home operating in a property owned by Jas Athwal?

Topline: Readers may remember our early exposé on how Jas Athwal, the Redbridge council leader turned Labour MP, is the landlord of an unsafe children’s home. Well, after eight months of delays we have managed to get access to secret documents that show senior officials at Redbridge council were aware of serious issues at the home five years before our investigation.

The eight month delay: After we published our launch exposé on Athwal, which hit national headlines and was even mentioned by the prime minister, we wanted to know if Redbridge were aware of the problems pervading the children's home its former leader was the landlord of. We submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request a few weeks after the story first ran asking for copies of emails sent by the council’s director of children’s services mentioning the home or its operators. 

By law, public bodies have an obligation to respond to any FOIs within 20 working days. But Redbridge decided to wait an extra 153 working days before meeting the request. But it was worth the wait.

The story: As a quick recap, our exposé came about almost as an accident. We were looking into a list of addresses linked to Athwal — the biggest landlord in parliament — when we found out one of them wasn’t a rental property at all but a children’s home called Woodlands. That snowballed into weeks of investigating that exposed that it was operated by a man called Daljit Johal and his firm Heartwood. Johal is a personal friend of Athwal, and in the decade after Athwal became Redbridge Council’s leader in 2013, Heartwood was paid £3.3mn for placing children in council care in homes that it ran, including Woodlands — despite the home having a history of its vulnerable underage residents getting stabbed and frequently going missing, risking criminal exploitation. 

Investigation: The MP, the ‘Don’ - and the millions spent on children’s care

‘How you’re going to pin this on me I’ve got no idea’

The LondonerAndrew Kersley

What the documents found: When we finally heard from Redbridge, the findings were stark. The heavily redacted documents they shared included a series of letters from one of the council’s senior corporate directors to multiple neighbouring local councils. He warned that a serious concern, the specific nature of which was censored, was raised by a resident to Redbridge councillor, Helen Coombs, who then raised it with staff. As a result, he was writing to at least five other local authorities who potentially had children living in the home, warning them to urgently “review the placement in order that any concerns can be addressed”.

The letters were sent in September 2019, but Redbridge continued working with Heartwood for the next half a decade. Our next question was to find out if that partnership included Redbridge council specifically sending children to the Woodlands home that its own senior management were raising concerns about. But that's proving harder than expected...

Silence from the council: We first got in touch with Redbridge council looking for some comment on the findings — and asking specifically whether they had placed children in the Woodlands home after issuing those warnings — 10 days ago. They responded to say they had received the request but soon after dropped out of contact, and have yet to respond to our requests for answers.

Your news briefing

💻 Several weeks ago, social media was filled with the viral news that Arsenal player Declan Rice had donated £14mn to house homeless families in Tower Hamlets. The only problem? It wasn’t true. Its source, a fake news site, was able to trick Google’s AI summary system and social media users alike, the Big Issue found out.

⚽ Fulham FC’s football ground Craven Cottage has been officially given clearance to host more major events, despite strong opposition from locals, reports BBC local democracy reporter Ben Lynch. What really drew our eye on this story was the revelation that the ground’s newest stand includes the addition of a rooftop swimming pool complex with a pitch-side view — potentially a Premier League first?

🏊 A London Assembly committee is calling on the mayor to make clear targets and timelines for cleaning up the Thames in order to make it safe for swimming, following a similar scheme in Paris. Other recommendations include tougher enforcement on sewage releases and establishing 10 new natural bathing water sites for swimming.

Quick hits: Gatwick airport is given the green light to build a third runway despite environmental concerns, residents of a block in Croydon have been forced to move out for two years after serious defects were found just three years after it opened, and the company that runs The House of Commons’ official nursery is in trouble after endorsing Reform.

In case you missed it… 

Photo by Peter Carlyon for The Londoner

• Every day, a group of dozens of volunteers across the capital stand ready as a rapid response force. Their job? To save trapped pigeons. For our Saturday read, we went out on patrol with the group to find out why they're dedicated to London's most-hated feathery friend.
• In east London, a nondescript warehouse filled with fake supermarkets and imitation bus stops is shaping the future of our city. On Wednesday, we went inside PEARL, the capital’s cutting-edge urban lab, which is rethinking our urban environment.
• A special edition on Monday saw writer Peter Carlyon report from last weekend’s Unite the Kingdom rally to find out what drew the 100,000-strong crowd. A taster: “I meet two guys walking out of the fray, who arrived via a coach from Nottingham in the morning. When I ask why they’re here, they tell me that it isn’t just about immigration. ‘It is,’ says the woman next to them.”

Wining and dining

With endless offerings and non-stop openings, we all know that deciding where to eat and drink in the capital can be fraught. We want to make it easy — so every week we’ll give you our insider guide to the city’s best spots. 

One perfect meal: Today’s pick is a little different than usual — it isn’t a famed dinner spot, or a buzzy, sit-down lunch hang-out. It isn’t even a restaurant recommendation, per-se. Instead, it’s one item: the vegetarian bagel from Tongue & Brisket, a small London deli chain. But reader, we wouldn’t just recommend any old bagel. This is easily one of the best sandwiches in the entire city — a stack of celeriac schnitzel and potato latkes, topped with coleslaw and fat, juicy pickles. It works for several reasons, the tender marinated celeriac complements the crisp latke exterior, while the coleslaw/pickle combination ensures the whole thing is juicy, rich and pleasantly tangy. Just make sure you pick up some napkins — this isn’t an elegant eat.

One perfect drink: I discovered the Princess of Prussia in the classic, time-honoured way that Londoners discover pubs in areas they don’t usually frequent — by walking past with some friends on our way to a party elsewhere and becoming instantly obsessed with everything about it. Nestled on a backstreet inAldgate, it’s ridiculously, exaggeratedly beautiful — all tiled signs and bay windows and overflowing window boxes of flowers — with a dark-wood, dimly lit interior that’d make Dickens proud. Perhaps most surprising of all is its beer garden, gold dust in this part of town, hidden round the back. 

Have a perfect sandwich you think we should check out? Want to recommend your favourite pub? Let us know in the comments.

Our favourite reads

Gilbert and George: ‘No artist of our generation did what we did’ — Miles Ellingham, Observer

Last weekend’s Observer magazine profiled octogenarian London art duo Gilbert and George, replete with unexpected anecdotes about Dalston's Mangal I and unorthodox opinions about Yoko Ono.

I attempted to walk across Greater London without using a single road — Geowizard, YouTube

We’ve spent the last week lightly hypnotised by the YouTuber Geowizard's ultimately pointless odyssey to cross the entirety of Greater London without using a single road. It’s a crazy saga of barbed wire, trespassing across schools and getting lost in cramped, pitch-black sewage tunnels. 

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To Do List

• Last week saw the opening of Theatre Picasso, Tate Modern’s landmark new exhibition of the artist’s work, staged by contemporary artists. Featuring 45 works of painting, sculpture and textile, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see some of the defining art of the 20th century. 

• The Brunel Museum is hosting a screening of the 2006 Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette on Wednesday in the museum’s Thames Tunnel Shaft, 60 feet underground. See you down there?

From the archives

Given the recent Tube strikes, we thought this 1962 newsreel of the chaos that ensued after a similar strike — including businessmen skating to work — was a fitting one to share.