Having imposed his 15per cent Council Tax hike on the borough – without securing the refinancing deal he said was essential to deal with Croydon’s “unsustainable” debt – Tory Mayor Jason Perry is now cutting services.
Consistent: Claire Bonham has highlighted concerns about cuts to disability services
But some say that millions of pounds worth of the cuts have been approved by the Conservatives without undergoing proper scrutiny and without a full, and legally required, EIA – equalities impact assessment.
Claire Bonham is Croydon’s only Liberal Democrat councillor.
At the council budget meetings in March, while all the borough’s Labour councillors abstained on the Tory proposals to increase Council Tax, Bonham was one of only three councillors to consistently vote against.
Bonham believes that the budget as passed includes serious flaws.
“We were given very little time to scrutinise the detail of the budget, and what we were given was lacking in detail,” Bonham told Inside Croydon.
Included in the £30million-plus of cuts under Perry’s Pay More-Get Less budget is £5million of cuts to the disabilities operational budget.
“I didn’t get a response on whether a detailed Equalities Impact Assessment had been completed on this aspect of the cuts,” Bonham said.
“I asked Councillor Jason Cummings specifically about the £5million cuts to the disabilities operational budget and whether a detailed EIA had been completed.
“The response I got was that ‘it is not always the case that cuts to budgets results in a loss of service – rather it about service transformation’.
“Of course, these are savings but there may be additional funds available under the transformation programme – we didn’t get a lot of detail.”
Read more: Here’s the Mayor and 33 Croydon Tory councillors who THREE times voted in favour of hitting you with a 15% Council Tax hike
Read more: Perry says there’s no alternative to his budget. But there’s lots
Read more: The solution to Perry’s finance problem: Fund Croydon Fairly
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SIXTH successive year in 2022 in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
So part time has set a budget on false assumptions of a massive debt write off and cut services without proper assessment.
Sounds like a massive failure of governance to me.
So being he stated there should be no reward for failure, can we assume he is unpaid and preparing to stand down as our part time Mayor?
Since unless he keeps hiking up council tax by 15% a year (which he doesn’t plan to according to the budget planning) how can Croydon Council be solvent and so we can expect another Section 114 to be the result of his reign.
Quite right Delboy. We’re paying 15% more Council Tax for no good reason, our services are being cut and Croydon Tories have shown they just can’t be arsed to find out what impact that will have on vulnerable and marginalised people.
Perry’s pretence about listening is just window dressing. He’s the local leader of a party that just doesn’t care, whose governments needlessly imposed austerity and Brexit on us to satisfy their political dogma.
What’s so pitiful about the whole fiasco is that if Croydon Labour had sided with the two Greens and the lone LibDem and voted down the Tory budget, we might have found out then that the biggest hike in the country was an empty unnecessary pointless gesture.
This has been evident since 2020. Not one EQIA has been provided by the Council when asked.
Just ask what measures this council has in place to assist disabled to access information digitally.?
Ask Ms Townsend about the failure to provide analogue details to disabled on those pesky legal developments.?
Ask about reasonable adjustments?
Ask how disabled can independently obtain just about anything from this sorry excuse of an administration.
And where is the Equalities Commmission? Where are the regulators the Ombudsman?
If they are not going to have their knuckles rapped why would one expect them to behave?
I am physically disabled from a ruptured brain tumour and stroke . A case well known to to the council and Mayor personally ,not least ,as I raised it at two of the hustling’s together with the Nolan principles . What exactly are the very well paid officers and councilors actually employed to do? What about those disabled residents who are unable to speak up ?Yet to see any evidence of any support in my case . In 9 years ,no support not even a grab rail despite the representations of the council under disability and Co vid. Not even a slice of bread.