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Time’s running out for Axis as new Mayor comes under scrutiny

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The honeymoon period is over for Jason Perry, as the first reports of his administration are due to be published this week, reports KEN LEE, our Town Hall correspondent

Bland of hope and glory: Croydon’s building supplies salesman Mayor has been enjoying his higher profile during his first month in office

Jason Perry this week faces his first real tests as Croydon’s elected Mayor, after a month-long honeymoon period which has been heavy on rhetoric but light on any real actions.

Mayor Perry pulled out of public engagements at the weekend, including the first post-pandemic New Addington festival, citing covid precautions – sources suggest that the Mayor has actually escaped with just a heavy cold – but not before promising to take forward a number of (as yet unspecified) measures in cabinet reports this week.

The £81,000 per year Tory Mayor has already bowed to public pressure by giving an undertaking to pay the costs of staging the South Croydon ward by-election out of his own pocket.

The by-election, to be held on June 30, has been called because Perry opted to stand for election as a councillor as well as for Mayor. He is only allowed to fill one position, and the by-election is to fill the vacancy left by Perry. The by-election is estimated to cost Croydon’s tax-payers at least £20,000.

And the Mayor has fuelled speculation that he might, after all, relinquish his position as managing director of his family business, Carlton Building Plastics.

Critics have repeatedly asked how Perry intends to be a full-time executive Mayor, for which he is very well paid, while maintaining his commercial business interests at the company based on the Beddington industrial estate, where he has held a directorship since 1994.

So far, the Mayor has failed to offer any public statement on how he can possibly reconcile these competing interests.

Not that the Mayor’s declarations of interests are available for public scrutiny.

More than a month since his election, and while the councillors who were elected on May 5 have had their declarations of interests published by the council, those for Mayor Perry are not available on the council website.

This is despite the stated role of the elected Mayor being to “promote, uphold and act in accordance with the Seven Principles of Public Life (the ‘Nolan Principles’)” and the council’s Code of Conduct.

Official records at Companies House show Perry still as one of Carlton Building Plastics’ two directors.

Blank page: while councillors have their declarations of interest published on the council website, five weeks into his term of office, the Mayor still has nothing

But in a recent column for the Tory website Conservative Home, Perry seemed to suggest that his days selling plastic gutters may have come to an end with a throwaway line referring to the family business “which I ran myself prior to becoming Mayor”.

Perry’s first month in office has largely appeared to be a continuation of his election campaign, but now with the Council Tax-payers funding his publicity, through the propaganda department at Fisher’s Folly, with seemingly every mayoral engagement fawningly reported or photographed via council press release.

Perry’s week of big business begins tomorrow night at the first scrutiny committee meeting of his new administration, where he is to provide an “Executive Mayor update”.

The report accompanying this agenda item states, “In inviting Mayor Perry to outline his priorities for the year ahead, this will give the committee an opportunity to provide an early, high-level challenge on these priorities.”

One early move by Perry was to over-rule the previous Labour administration’s approach to scrutiny and insist that the committee should be chaired by a backbench councillor from the largest opposition group – in this case, Labour. If he was going to be scrutinsed, Perry argued, it shouldn’t be done by one of his mates, as was the case under Labour’s disgraced ex-leader, Tony Newman.

Croydon’s Conservatives also made it absolutely clear that there was no way in which the previous chair of scrutiny, Sean Fitzsimons, would be acceptable as the chair of the new committee.

The six-person committee is a Tory and Labour carve-up, and excludes any of the three councillors from the Greens or LibDems elected last month – when even one might have provided a welcome, alternative perspective.

Focus: Rowenna Davis

But under new chair Rowenna Davis, scrutiny has made a bold start in staging a session tonight at which council tenants can offer up their experiences of dealing with Croydon’s struggling housing department and repairs contractors Axis. Members of the scrutiny committee have even been on visits to some council flats.

Twelve councillors – 11 of them Labour – have been recruited to work tonight as “facilitators” for residents in break-out groups in an exercise taken straight from the Blairite play-book and their fondness for running focus groups.

The findings from tonight’s session, we are told, will be fed in to tomorrow’s more formal scrutiny committee meeting, where a fast-approaching new crisis may emerge.

Axis, the £21million-a-year repairs contractors who were at the centre of many of the criticisms over the appalling conditions in council homes in Regina Road, announced in February that they are quitting Croydon. Axis’s work in the borough is due to end in August, yet the council has not even started its process of competitive tendering to find suitable, and hopefully better, replacements.

There is a real risk that the cash-strapped council will be forced into hiring in, at extra cost, some temporary contractors for an interim period, something hinted at in the detail-lite report submitted to the scrutiny committee, which is asked to “evaluate the work undertaken to prepare for the procurement of new providers to deliver Responsive Repairs Service for the council’s housing stock from 2023”.

On the way out: contractors Axis’s work in Croydon ends in August

By running out of time to replace Axis, Mayor Perry could find himself boxed into a corner in any negotiations over replacement contractors, and could lose options such as looking to bring in two or three different contractors to operate in different parts of the borough, as some in and around the council are known to prefer.

The details of this, and other important business, should be revealed this week as reports are published ahead of the first cabinet meeting of the new council on June 22.

In his weekly homily to the borough on Friday, Mayor Perry said, “There is much, much more to do in the months ahead and it will take time, but I am determined to keep up the pace of change that I know residents, businesses, our partners and everyone in Croydon wants.

“My priority remains to keep on listening,” Perry said, after apparently having cocked a deaf ‘un to the business of his own family business.

Read more: Mayor Perry unveils his old team as the new team
Read more: Mayor Perry’s first act is to end planners’ ‘9-9-9 emergency’

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