Mention of the council’s woebegone attempts to get the Croydon Gateway site developed with at least a little style and some substance prompted recollection of another local campaigner, Ken Frost, who this month has been named in Accountancy Age‘s Financial Power List for 2013.

Cheers: Ken Frost, a thorn in the side of authority

Frost is rated 25th in the 50-strong list, thanks to his acerbic website, HMRC is shite, which it says is, “Dedicated to the taxpayers of Britain, and the employees of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), who have to endure the monumental shambles that is HMRC”.

Frost’s site ought to be beloved of taxpayers (how’s that self-assessment coming along?) and small businesses who regularly have to stop earning their living and instead do the state’s work for it by collecting VAT.

Accountacy Age praises Frost’s site as “an amusing and revealing read”.

It is not the first time that Frost has made himself a thorn in the side of authority. Chartered accountant Frost, when a central Croydon resident,  made life awkward for the council as he mapped the town’s decline in the last decade and predicted the inevitable failure to develop the land next to East Croydon as a result of the vanity of trying to build the white elephant Arena on the site.

Frost even approached Prince Charles about Croydon’s decline, leading to a response from the Prince of Wales’s office that Frost said, acknowledged the resident’s “concerns as being issues raised have long been at the heart of what Prince Charles has been trying to achieve through his Foundation for the Built Environment”.

Frost now lives in Brighton from where he posts pictures of the locality that he claims are sometimes almost as bad as Croydon’s eyesores. That does not stop him keeping a keen interest in the developments in Croydon, however. He remains firmly underwhelmed.

• The council is organising a session for businesses with Google, presumably entitled “How to avoid £200m a year in UK corporation tax”
• TaxPayers’ Alliance say Fisher is “part of entitlement culture”

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