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Kerswell finally prepares to publish long withheld #PennReport

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CROYDON IN CRISIS: The council’s £193,000 per year CEO has descended into the realms of Alice In Blunderland with her latest excuses for ignoring elected councillors and the public. By STEVEN DOWNES

Katherine Kerswell, Croydon’s chief executive, claims that it is “factually incorrect” to say that the Penn Report into possible wrong-doing that led to the financial collapse of the council, which she has withheld for more than two years, has been “buried or withheld”.

Kerswell spends nine pages of an 18-page council report indulging in lengthy justifications for her inaction over the Penn Report. But according to the latest council papers, released today ahead of a council appointments and disciplinary committee due to be held on February 23, the Penn Report – or a version of it – will finally be made public on February 24.

As Inside Croydon reported last year, the Penn Report recommended that the borough’s 70 elected councillors should consider the possibility of disciplinary or legal action against Tony Newman and Simon Hall, leading members of the previous Labour administration, as well as Jo Negrini, the former CEO, while lodging of reports with professional bodies regarding the conduct of three senior council executives.

Newman and Hall subsequently resigned as councillors and Negrini and the council officials have all since left their jobs in Croydon.

Lock and key: Katherine Kerswell has resisted all calls to publish the Penn Report

But in the two years since Penn delivered his report, outside the carefully controlled confines of the appointments committee (where much of the proceedings are held in secret) the majority of Croydon’s councillors have never been given the opportunity to discuss the report. After 24 months, not a single submission to any professional bodies arising from the Penn Report has ever been made by Kerswell or on behalf of the council.

Jason Perry’s election as executive Mayor last May, on a manifesto pledge to publish the Penn Report and act on its recommendations, has made no difference.

Kerswell’s stubborn intransigence has continued to keep the 160-page document firmly under wraps, on the flimsy grounds that were the Penn Report to be published, the council itself might be subject to litigation from the likes of Newman and Negrini. Seriously.

“It had always been a choice for the committee to weigh publication of the report against the risk of litigation,” Kerswell has written in one part of the latest council papers.

“It was always the intention to have the report published in as full a version as possible and now that the disciplinary process had concluded there could be a greater push toward publication.”

Alice in Blunderland: a sketch from last November’s council appointments committee, where Katherine Kerswell gave more excuses for not publishing Penn

Kerswell justifies her inaction by citing 13 meetings where she has trotted out various excuses why she would not allow the report to be made public, stalling any action against those who helped to crash the council’s finances.

“This really is Alice in Blunderland stuff,” a Town Hall insider said today.

“The idea that 13 meetings over the course of two years somehow shows Kerswell to be taking dynamic action over these serious complaints, when the opposite is the case, is the stuff of Lewis Carroll.”

Recent meetings of the appointments committee demonstrate how Kerswell has used her position as the local authority’s senior employee to deliberately frustrate the democratically elected councillors, to whom she is supposed to be answerable.

The last time that the appointments committee met to discuss Penn was in early November last year. Councillors from both of the largest political groups, Jason Cummings and Stuart King, were clearly concerned that council officials, in particular Kerswell, were once again stalling over the release of the Penn Report.

Kerswell promised that meeting to organise another meeting (Meeting No14!) to provide the latest update before Christmas. But that meeting was cancelled by the chief executive without any explanation.

When the committee re-assembles, in the very Orwellian Room 1.01 of Fisher’s Folly a week tomorrow, they will at last do so with a firm commitment to publish the Penn Report. Or at least part of it.

All is revealed: Page 1 of the 160-page Penn Report. But how much will be left after Kerswell has applied her redactions?

There’s no way of knowing quite how much of the report Kerswell will have redacted – withheld – from the public and the majority of the borough’s councillors, because the details of her intentions are contained within the Part B – or secret – part of her report to the meeting.

A significant part of the delays in getting to this point has been the insistence on conducting a “Maxwellisation process”, whereby anyone mentioned adversely in the Penn Report gets shown the section in question and is given an opportunity to respond.

A first round of Maxwellisation was conducted two years ago. It is that which prompted the hysterical threats of libel action from Newman and Hall. At least one further round of Maxwellisation consultation has since been conducted by Kerswell’s cautious council.

Today’s council papers confirm that five out of nine parties identified in the Penn Report had responded to the latest Maxwellisation round, which finished nearly six months ago, in October. Their responses, Kerswell reports, “were being worked through by Legal”.

The report continues: “Once this process had concluded there would need to be a view reached on the risk to the council of legal action based on either defamation or data protection, which would need to be balanced against the public interest of publication.”

The Town Hall source asked the obvious questions: “Just who are they trying to protect here? Who’s interests are they acting in?”

Kerswell’s recommendations to next week’s meeting are choc-a-bloc with references to Part B reports that have been withheld from the public and meetings to be held in secret. And they make it clear that Kerswell has already gone through the report with a very thick marker pen…

“The Committee is recommended to:

(i) Consider the Maxwellisation responses received from the interested parties appended at Exempt/Part B Appendices 3 to 7 to the Exempt/Part B report;
(ii) Consider the need for and agree any appropriate targeted redactions having regard to the Maxwellisation responses and, in particular, the proposed redactions set out in paragraph 10.2 of the Exempt/Part B report;
(iii) Consider whether to publish the Penn report at Exempt/Part B
Appendix 1 to the Exempt/Part B report; and
(iv) Note the following next steps:

a) If the committee decides to publish the Penn Report, with or without redactions, the interested parties will be notified as soon as possible and the Penn Report will be published on 24 February 2023;
b) The implementation of the Penn Report’s recommendations, and any other action the committee decides on its own initiative, will be the subject of a follow-up report to be considered by the committee at a meeting on 23 March 2023; and
c) At that meeting the committee will also receive the Kroll Fairfield
Halls investigation report”.

Read the council papers ahead of next Thursday’s meeting by clicking here

Just don’t get your hopes up too much just yet…


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