CROYDON IN CRISIS: Mayor Perry spent £53.4m on temporary staff at the council in 2024-2025.
Yet the council sacked a whistleblower who raised serious concerns about staffing agency Adecco’s possible overcharging for workers in the children’s services department.
With an Employment Tribunal judge mentioning the possibility of fraud, opposition councillors are demanding an urgent investigation. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Croydon’s Green councillors have called on Mayor Jason Perry to commission an urgent and independent auditors’ investigation into the possibility of large-scale fraud, going back at least eight years, over the use of temporary staff booked through agency Adecco.
Loadsamoney: Jason Perry always has the readies to pay for temporary staff, or for lawyers in the long-running persecution of a council whistleblower
Inside Croydon revealed this week how Croydon Council has spent almost £150,000 in hiring lawyers to oppose an Employment Tribunal case first brought by temp worker Daniel Cox in 2018, when he was dismissed after blowing the whistle on contractors Adecco’s billing for his work.
Rather than investigate Cox’s claims, Croydon Council has instead been the co-respondents alongside Adecco in this eight-year Employment Tribunal saga. The latest hearing was held this week, with a further full tribunal to come in January.
The judges in the hearings only consider the rights and wrongs of Cox’s dismissal, though His Honour Judge James Tayler did include mention of possible fraud in one of his rulings. It will be HH Judge Tayler who will hear Daniel Cox’s case at the Employment Tribunal in January. Continue reading
Looking for a new ‘challenge’? Or simply need a job? CHERYL FERGUS-FERRELL, right, Inside Croydon’s roving reporter, checked out a jobs fair at the Fairfield Halls to see what can be on offer at these events
The company stages more than 100 career fairs a year across more than 50 locations. So just what might this event, free for visitors and jobseekers, have to offer?
WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, on the grim budget report from the borough’s failed Mayor
The Purley Literary Society was set up in 1901 by the Congregational Church as a mechanism to “improve” agricultural workers #, and give them an alternative to visiting the pubs and fleshpots of Purley during the winter months. The Purley Lit has continued ever autumn and winter ever since, just losing a few years due to world wars, and more recently, covid. 
CROYDON IN CRISIS: In 2018, Daniel Cox blew the whistle when he discovered that a contractor was charging the council almost double what he was being paid for his work. Cox was dismissed, and the council has spent the past eight years working with the same contractor to gag him.
CROYDON CHRONICLES: Much has changed around the town centre over the last 50 years, not least in the area of accessibility to public buildings and spaces. Some of the pioneering work was catalogued by a woman with cerebral palsy, whose scrapbook is now part of the Minster archives, as DAVID MORGAN explains
