Site icon Inside Croydon

Perry admits he can’t take action against council’s bankrupters

insidecroydon

Croydon’s part-time Mayor has always known that the actions of councillors and senior council staff ‘can decimate an authority… without any fear of recrimination’. But he’s been very reluctant to admit his impotency to the borough’s residents. By STEVEN DOWNES

Compare and contrast Jason Perry in the video above, from a Town Hall meeting in November, and Perry in a letter to his Tory masters: “None of the individuals responsible have been personally held to account for their actions as they all resigned when disciplinary action began. This has left the council with very few options to hold them to account or to pursue personal consequence.”

One year into his term as Croydon Mayor, and in a letter to a Government minister, Perry has finally admitted that he can never deliver on one of his key election promises: to bring to account those responsible for bankrupting the borough.

Perry’s admission comes in a little-publicised letter he sent to Michael Gove, the Secretary of States at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Broken promise: Tory Mayor Jason Perry

The reality is that, having been privy to the majority of the top-level, privileged legal advice that the council has received since its financial collapse in November 2020, the Tory Mayor knew – or certainly, ought to have realised – than any punitive action against the likes of former council leader Tony Newman and his Numpties, or Jo “Negreedy” Negrini, the former council CEO, or any of her senior officials, was only ever a very remote possibility.

Throughout the election campaign last year, Perry kept going large on how he would “Clear up Labour’s mess” and bring those responsible to account. Yet the only thing the part-time, £82,000 per year Mayor has done so far is to inflict a 15per cent Council Tax hike on residents.

Inside Croydon reported earlier this week that Negrini says she has still not received notification of any legal action from Croydon Council to recover some, or all, of her £437,000 golden handshake. This might actually be a good thing for Croydon’s Council Tax-payers, because senior legal counsel has suggested that any case against the former chief exec would be “throwing good money after bad”, with little chance of recovering the bulk of the payment, and no chance of being awarded costs.

No action: Jo Negrini

Perry knows all this, but publicly has still persisted with the pretence that he is somehow the new sheriff in town who is going to round up the bad guys.

Take, for example, his little hard man speech (as shown in the video above), delivered to a council cabinet meeting last November – after six months of inaction in office.

“The people of Croydon expect action,” Perry said, after cranking up the expectation levels throughout the election campaign, promising to deliver something that he probably always knew was outside his powers.

“I’ve been clear with council officers that where former or current members [meaning councillors] or officers [meaning council staff] are found to have done wrong, everything possible must be done to ensure they face the consequences of their actions.”

This was nothing but a piece of vacuous grandstanding by Perry, who must – should – have known that “everything possible” was very little indeed.

Perry’s speech came more than a month after this website had published the suppressed Penn Report, commissioned in 2020 and kept under wraps for more than two years by senior figures at the council, notably Katherine Kerswell, the current CEO.

Suppressed: by keeping the Penn Report under lock and key for two years, Kerswell and Perry helped ensure there would be no ‘consequences’

The Penn recommendations were stifled for long enough that any council directors implicated in the council’s financial collapse had left Fisher’s Folly, avoiding any possible disciplinary action. Perry knew – should have known – that, yet persisted with his little pantomime and pretence for public consumption.

Having frustrated all attempts to take any action for more than two years, Kerswell outlined the fait accompli that she had handed to Perry at a disciplinary committee meeting in March, where the CEO effectively ordered the Mayor to send a letter to Gove to explain the council’s patent powerlessness.

With Kerswell off on her Easter holibobs, probably after dictating what the Mayor was expected to write, Perry got round to sending the letter to Gove on Maundy Thursday – timed to ensure that as few people as possible among those who voted for him and then got screwed by his 15per cent Council Tax hike would notice that here was the latest of his broken election promises. And a biggy at that.

Now Inside Croydon can share with our readers the truth about what part-time Perry is doing to bring the culprits “to account”: nuffink.

Under a heading “Accountability in Local Government” (Non-accountability may have been more accurate), Perry began by outlining Croydon’s “£1.6billion of unsustainable debt” and the “dramatic breakdown in resident trust in the council”.

In his/Kerswell’s letter, Tory Perry – who had voted in favour of the Labour council’s pre-crash budgets in 2019 and 2020 – navigated through some of Croydon’s recent, painful history which prompted the auditors’ damning “corporate collective blindness” Report in the Public Interest in October 2020.

Decisions: Michael Gove

Perry wrote: “The two independent investigations which followed, the Penn Report into the culture and senior leadership of the organisation and the Kroll Report into potential criminal and other wrongdoing during the Fairfield Halls refurbishment, both highlighted significant failures by former elected Members [he means councillors] and Chief Officers [he means council staff].”

“These reports clearly set out how Croydon’s financial and governance collapse arose as a direct consequence of the failures of the political, statutory and chief officer leadership of the council which did not pay sufficient regard to governance, risk management and internal control when spending millions of taxpayers’ money.”

In journalism, what Perry has done here is what is called “burying the into”, because now he finally gets to the point.

“Despite the scale of the damage done by the mismanagement and poor decision-making of the previous political and officer leadership, none of the individuals responsible have been personally held to account for their actions as they all resigned when disciplinary action began. This has left the Council with very few options to hold them to account or to pursue personal consequence.”

So much for Perry’s promise to bring to account those responsible for bankrupting the borough. His letter to Gove admits that the Mayor is entirely impotent.

“We are now reliant on other organisations to follow this through. In reality, there is little the council is able to do to hold these individuals to account for their part in Croydon’s collapse.”

Perry could yet be rendered completely powerless

Perry, who has been an elected official in local government since 1994 and has been a witness to all the “reforms” imposed on councils by the Blairites and laissez-faire Big Eric Pickles, would have us all believe that he has only now discovered that he is powerless to deliver on another key promise that he made to the Croydon voters.

“The current arrangements to hold senior local authority leaders to account for their conduct in public office are deeply inadequate.” No Shit Sherlock…

Perry told Gove, “New arrangements are urgently needed to protect residents in other local authority areas from experiencing similar situations in the future.” Can you hear that horse galloping over the horizon as part-time Perry closes the stable door?

“A stronger accountability framework for those leading local authorities would reduce the moral hazard related to financial failure and encourage councillors, statutory and chief officers to reflect more fully on the potential consequences of their actions before taking decisions to spend millions of taxpayers’ money.”

Of course, funding councils fairly by central Government might also help to avoid the need to local authorities to make many of those decisions. Perry doesn’t mention that to his Tory Party boss.

“We need to ensure we have robust measures to protect the trust residents place in their public servants, both elected members and officers. Croydon’s example has shown that currently, this is not the case.

UberMayor: Government appointee Tony McArdle

“The situation in Croydon has clearly demonstrated that both elected members and officers can decimate an authority, at huge expense to current and future taxpayers, without any fear of recrimination,” impotent Perry wrote, suggesting that Gove might “learn from our experience” and “strengthen the arrangements for formal accountability and responsibility for conduct in public office”.

But that’s not the end of the humiliating climbdown by Croydon’s elected Mayor.

Having been forced by Gove to effectively bring an end to his own political career by inflicting the 15per cent Council Tax hike on the borough, and being left dangling by the Government over whether it will, or won’t, take the extraordinary step of writing off more than half-a-billion pounds of Croydon’s debt, Perry has another pile of shit to swallow.

An announcement by Gove’s DLUHC was delayed due to pre-election purdah in Thurrock and Slough, but by the end of this month they are expected to give extra powers to commissioners in those other bankrupt boroughs while in Croydon, statutory powers are to be handed to Tony McArdle and his Government-appointed improvement panel.

This will allow McArdle and his colleagues to speak at council meetings and implement financial decisions at Croydon Town Hall. Effectively, it will make McArdle Croydon’s UberMayor.

And it will render Jason Perry utterly powerless, facing the prospect of three years of attending garden fetes and children’s tea parties, with little or no say in the running of the borough. But the £82,000 per year should be a little consolation…

Read more: Kerswell condemns councils’ accountability as inadequate
Read more: Councillors agree to chase Negrini for golden handshake cash
Read more: MP calls for misconduct charges against ex-councillor Hall
Read more: Penn Report wanted police probe into possible misconduct
Read more: Cover-ups and denial over Brick by Brick failure


Exit mobile version