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Perry admits he has failed to secure £540m debt write-off deal

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CROYDON IN CRISIS: After a year in office, the Tory Mayor told a Purley audience last night that he has failed to ‘fix the finances’ and he won’t be opening the local swimming pool without lumbering the area with another massive development scheme. By WALTER CRONXITE, political editor

Under pressure: even the audience in Purley was not entirely sympathetic to Tory Mayor Jason Perry

Jason Perry, the part-time Mayor of Croydon, last night as much as admitted that he’d sold the borough down the river by agreeing to the 15per cent Council Tax hike without first securing a vital agreement from Government to write off the borough’s crippling debt.

Perry was speaking at a Mayor’s Question Time event staged in the Tory heartlands of Purley. Although having what should have been a supportive audience did not guarantee him an entirely easy ride.

The pre-event censorship and careful selection of what questions could be asked, and by whom, did that for Perry, as key points about the borough’s finances were not allowed.

Attempts were also made to remove a “No to 15% Hike… Fund Croydon Fairly” banner, placed outside the meeting hall. On this occasion, senior Tory councillors and the Public Order Act were thwarted because the school where the banner was placed had given its permission.

Inside the school hall, it was soon made clear that the chances of the Government writing off one-third of the borough’s £1.6billion debt, the possibility of which was raised six months ago before the Council Tax hike was announced, is now very remote.

Clear message: Tory councillors tried to get the banner removed from outside the school hall

Perry told his audience, largely made up of white, middle-class and older residents, that he had had meetings with Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary, and with the Prime Minister.

“The current one,” Perry clarified, getting a rare laugh from the audience.

Many attending will have voted for Perry to become Mayor on his promise to “fix the finances”. But last night he told them, “It isn’t right for other parts of the country to have to bail Croydon out” – the kind of language which Gove and Rishi Sunak, and the grey suits in Whitehall, will no doubt have used.

On the Council Tax hike, one polite questioner asked: “Could 10per cent have been possible? Especially as the £20million raised is a pittance compared to the request to government to write off £540million of Croydon debt?”

The hoped-for half-billion debt write-off will have been the first time in the history of local government in Britain that a council will have been allowed to default on its debts. Such a precedent will have surely created a clamour from dozens of other hard-up councils, also looking to get off the hook of debt that has been built up over a decade of austerity and a couple of years of covid.

It was last November that, under Mayor Perry, Croydon had issued a Section 114 notice – effective admission of bankruptcy, Croydon’s third in two years – predicting that it would be unable to balance the books without the half-billion pounds write-off.

Some in the audience quickly realised that while Perry had inflicted the 15per cent Council Tax hike on residents, he had come away from negotiations without getting Government to sign-off on their part of any rescue package. The £540million debt write-off amount had even been included in the 2023-2024 council budget that was eventually passed in March.

Perry’s other answers will have been familiar from those budget debates: that the Council Tax increase was necessary to avoid another £20million of cuts, that the Council Tax decision was “difficult to make”.

One-quarter of all the council’s spending – £50million per year – is being used just to service the loan interest on the debt. Having previously claimed that the council has nothing left to flog off, last night Perry said that there is £300million in assets, and that these were being liquidated.

It seems that other Perry promises are crumbling all the time.

His pledge to fix the town centre? Well, despite all the Tory blandishments, that won’t happen any time soon: after having a meeting Westfield yesterday, the Mayor said that the company’s “divorce” from Hammerson (10 years ago, it was Perry and Gavin Barwell who had had a hand in creating the doomed shotgun marriage) gave him cause for optimism.

Perry’s people: with an audience including UKIP supporters, individuals expelled from the Tory party and apologists for racists, the Mayor might have expected an easy time in Purley

Yet the discussions yesterday were not about an urgent new masterplan for the Whitgift Centre and surrounding area, but about “meanwhile use” for just the ground floor of the Allders building – something Perry had promised would be operating before Christmas last year.

A man of very limited repertoire, “If we fix broken windows, other things will follow,” was the best cliché he could summon up.

He’s still saying that those responsible for the council’s bankruptcy “must be held to account”. But given what he has himself put in writing to the Secretary of State, it is surprising that he still tries to peddle this load of old flannel any longer.

Certainly, his election lies about re-opening the Purley Pool are now widely seen as just that: lies.

Perry tried to put it another way: he was “misinformed” was the best that he managed last night. “Misinformed”, over what he had claimed was a “fully costed” amendment to the council budget that he had presented to the Town Hall little more than a year ago.

Last March, Perry had presented to council a motion that claimed the pool could be re-opened by spending just £3.5million-worth of community infrastructure money that had been collected from developers operating in Croydon. This had then become “a key commitment” in an election he eventually won by fewer than 600 votes.

Now Perry told the people of Purley that the condition of the pool was “worse than we had been told previously”.

Perry had been “shocked”, he said, when he visited the pool in Week One of his Mayoralty to discover that the concrete base of the pool was cracked. Perry said he “could not go into detail” but was working with developers “looking at the site as a whole and that there will be good news in a few weeks”.

Perry remained, he said, “very committed to delivering”.

Structural cracks have been used as an excuse for not re-opening the Olympic-sized pool at Crystal Palace for almost four years. But that is in a listed building that cannot be bulldozed for redevelopment. Purley Pool and leisure centre, alongside a council-owned car park and supermarket that has been vacant for a decade, has no such protections.

And in case you had forgotten, Mayor Perry’s Croydon Council is pot-less. So it probably won’t take much to guess what all this “looking at the site as a whole” business will really mean – more development in Purley town centre.

One obviously disappointed resident warned, to murmurings of support in the hall, that with all the development that’s been going on in the town for the past few years, including the Purley Tower, “everyone is selling up”.

After this latest underwhelming session with the Mayor, Purley estate agents can expect to be busier than ever this weekend, putting up even more “For Sale” boards.

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