- 20% budget cuts expected to be announced
- Jo Negrini’s pay-off figure confirmed as £440,000
- Redundancy process for 400 council workers enters final two weeks
- Katherine Kerswell begins work as interim chief exec
The final phase of redundancy discussions begins at Fisher’s Folly today
Tony Newman and Simon Hall will be presenting an “emergency budget” at the council cabinet meeting next Monday, but they don’t want anyone to know about it.
In the time-honoured fashion of this “open and transparent” council, no details of the emergency measures for the cash-strapped council have been revealed, even to the majority of Newman’s Labour councillor colleagues. And because the emergency budget is being set before the council cabinet, there will be very limited opportunity for public discussion.
Croydon is £1.5billion in debt, and in the first few weeks of the covid-19 lockdown the council spent £62million that it has not got. The council chief executive, Jo Negrini, has left her job – not before she was handed a record-breaking pay-off, now confirmed as being £440,000 – and the council has made a plea to Whitehall for help as they fear they will run out of money altogether by the end of this month.
Sources inside Fisher’s Folly are predicting that the situation is so dire that the emergency budget will see 20 per cent cuts to the council budget which was agreed as recently as March this year.
As recently as July, councillors were being advised that 15 per cent cuts were required, involving the loss of more than 400 jobs in order to make savings of more than £17million. This may no longer be enough.
A report to scrutiny committee in July included this table with more detail on where the job cuts will fall – with many predicting that even more cuts will be required
The formal redundancy consultancy process enters a new phase today, with representative panels taking place for those council workers set to lose their jobs. Notices of redundancy are due to go out on September 28.
The incoming interim CEO, Katherine Kerswell, takes up her job this morning, and inherits a rapidly worsening financial situation.
Bunker mentality: Tony Newman
Certainly, the majority of the borough’s elected representatives, Labour as well as Conservative councillors, are being frozen out of the process altogether as Newman sinks ever deeper into a bunker mentality and tries desperately to cling on to power.
In the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic and the Town Hall’s cashflow crisis, Croydon has staged just one meeting of the full council since March, as Newman and his clique has sought to avoid broader scrutiny of their handling of the council’s business.
As Inside Croydon reported last week, the increasingly secretive Newman failed to inform Labour colleagues that Negrini was leaving, and has refused to discuss the “sickening” £440,000 pay-out she received, and which he had authorised.
Next Monday’s cabinet meeting will provide only a very limited opportunity for scrutiny of the proposals. The meeting will be held “virtually”, and while any elected councillors can, in theory, log-on to attend, discussion is likely to be carefully and strictly restricted to cheerleaders in Newman’s cabinet and their Tory opposition shadows. It is, in effect, a vainglorious rubber-stamping exercise.
The council has had to invoke special legal procedures to put forward its emergency budget
The agenda notice for the cabinet meeting on September 21 was slipped out on Friday evening, just within the 10 days’ notice period required by law.
The agenda included the emergency budget item. None of the reports and documents that would usually accompany a cabinet meeting agenda item were available for the emergency budget, though.
A brief look at the cabinet meeting agenda would suggest that the emergency budget is not actually all that urgent: it is only item 7 on the agenda.
Not like it’s an emergency at all, then, really.
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and BBC London News
- Inside Croydon named Journalist of the Year at 2018 Anna Kennedy Online Autism Heroes Awards
- ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: For three consecutive years, 2017, 2018 and 2019, Inside Croydon has been the source for award-winning nominations in Private Eye magazine’s annual celebration of civic cock-ups
- Inside Croydon had 1.6million pages viewed by 721,000 unique visitors in 2019
The people who brought about the financial crisis within the council are being trusted to turn the situation around. Is that a good idea?
In the private sector that’d be a bad idea. Shareholders wouldn’t allow it.
As a Croydon resident and council tax payer, I’m a shareholder in this borough and I want Newman and his paid mates out.
Bad Biblical analogy: Samson, betrayed by his personal Delilah, is going to bring the whole house down over his head with a bang and a crash.
It’s a mess and, if I were Tony, I’d bail out now, before it gets too painful. It is all going to end in tears.
So Newman is blaming a £72.5m overspend on Covid-19 and the government. If you take the trouble to look at the detailed report going to Cabinet next week, it can be seen that £9.2m of the overspend is due to unachievable savings that had been included in the budget. This shows that they set a clearly unsustainable budget even before the advent of Covid.
The variances attributed to Covid total a not insignificant £18.858m, but the remaining £53.6m must sit firmly in Newman’s lap rather than throwing up a smoke screen to cover his own incompetence and mismanagement.