Campaigners against the naming of a Highgate roundabout after an assassinated Russian dissident have accused officials of “marking their own homework” after their complaints were dismissed.

The junction of Highgate Road, Highgate West Hill and Swains Lane was officially named Boris Nemtsov Place in November 2022.

Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, was shot and killed near the Kremlin in 2015.

Last October, two opponents of the renaming - Helen Rapley and Lucy Tauber - submitted a formal complaint to Camden Council calling for the removal of planters, road signs and a plaque bearing his name.

There were 13 sub-complaints within the written submission, including accusations that the council breached street naming guidelines and ran a flawed consultation about the plans.

The Ham and High can now reveal that all 13 complaints were dismissed last December, with the council maintaining that it “correctly renamed” the roundabout.

A review of this decision requested by Rapley and Tauber, who said they had been unfairly discredited and labelled “vexatious” by the council, was also dismissed in January.

Rapley now claims these responses were “a bit like marking your own homework”.

She said: “It’s just frustrating that the council can act with such impunity, such a lack of democracy and such dishonesty and manipulation and get away with it.

“It’s just all this sort of wrongdoing that it appears they can just get away with.”

The complaint was then escalated to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, but in March it decided not to investigate further.

The watchdog found that the alleged faults by the council “have not caused a significant enough injustice to the complainant”.

A Camden Council spokesperson said: “We reviewed this complaint in accordance with our set procedures and concluded that we renamed the roundabout correctly under our street naming processes.” 

In response to a freedom of information (FoI) request submitted by Rapley and Tauber in March last year, Camden Council said that the volume of questions asked by the pair had resulted in a “detrimental impact on the provision of services to the public”.

The FoI request, which was the sixth submitted in a five-month period, had asked questions about how email submissions were handled during the consultation process.

Camden Council said that earlier requests regarding Boris Nemtsov were “proportionate and reasonable”, but that continued requests were “disproportionate and therefore vexatious”.

The authority added that answering further questions would delay providing council services.