We asked the council if Uxbridge Road’s shops had been fixed. It didn’t know.
The council has the power. Is it using it?
The law gives the council a simple tool for this. If a building is in such a poor state that it harms the look of the area, the council can serve a legal notice, known as a Section 215 notice, ordering the owner to put it right by a set date. It has served 12 of them on Uxbridge Road shops, covering everything from exposed wiring and rotten timber to filthy awnings and broken signs.
So your local Lib Dems used the Freedom of Information Act to ask a straightforward question: did the owners actually do the work?
The council’s answer was that it doesn’t know. In its own words, the information “is not held” and the compliance status of all cases “has not yet been determined”.
Deadlines passed, nobody checked
Every one of those 12 deadlines has now passed. Nobody from the council has gone back to see whether the work was done, and no owner has been taken to court.
The law goes further. If an owner ignores a notice, the council can send in its own contractors to do the repairs and bill the owner for the cost. We asked how often that has happened. The answer was none. Not one shop has been fixed that way.
Twenty months of nothing
Our request covered the period since January 2024, but the first of these notices wasn’t served until September 2025. For the first 20 months, the council’s records show no enforcement action at all. We also asked about Goldhawk Road, and not a single notice has been served there.
When we asked how many other run-down properties the council’s own survey had flagged for action, it couldn’t tell us that either. Its staff had asked the same question internally and never got a reply.
A notice is only worth the paper it’s printed on
Sending a letter feels like action. But a deadline that nobody checks is just a suggestion, and owners who ignore the law quickly learn that nothing will happen to them. That’s how a high street ends up looking like this.
You should have a high street you can be proud of, and the council has the tools to deliver one.
What we’re asking for
We’re calling on the council to visit every one of these shops, check whether the work has been done, and take action where it hasn’t. That means using the powers it already has.
We aren’t stopping there. We have also written to the Liberal Democrat group at the GLA to ask what they can do about this.
Please sign our petition below, where you can also read more, and help us get Uxbridge Road fixed.