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Didn’t I do well?! Kerswell gives herself a pat on the back

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CROYDON IN CRISIS: It is three years to the week since the emergency committee meeting, attended by Jason Perry, that decided in secret to give £437,000 to Jo Negrini to leave her job as council CEO.
Today, Negreedy’s replacement, Katherine Kerswell, appears to have put a 1,000-word job application out into the local authority marketplace. By our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE

Pompous, patronising, arrogant: Croydon CEO Katherine Kerswell has annoyed many long-time, loyal council staff

Katherine Kerswell, Croydon Council’s £192,474 per year chief executive, is on annual leave. She’s away until Monday, September 4. At least, that’s the out-of-office message that anyone who has emailed her in the last few days has received.

So Kerswell’s not been answering residents’ emails or attending to their concerns. But she has, in her official capacity, been writing 1,136-word articles for the trade press, telling all and sundry what a great job she’s been doing in her near-three years at cash-strapped Croydon.

This week marks three years since the hurried departure from Fisher’s Folly of Jo “Negreedy” Negrini, with her Gucci briefcase stuffed full of taxpayers’ cash, after she was persuaded to leave her job with a “golden handshake” of £437,000 just before the full horrors of the council’s financial collapse were fully exposed.

Kerswell was parachuted in as a replacement a few weeks later, at the behest of the Government and with the backing of her chums at the Local Government Association – whose members comprise most of the readership of the Local Government Chronicle, the website and magazine which has today published the self-congratulatory article about her time in Croydon by Kerswell.

Those staff still left in the employ of Croydon Council suggest that Kerswell strikes a remote figure, frequently unavailable due to absence (all entirely legitimately, of course), who has never deviated from a condescending and patronising, some have even said “arrogant”, approach to staff at meetings.

There’s been no noticeable improvement in the council’s dire financial position, with the third of Croydon’s Section 114 mea culpa notices being issued as recently as November 2022, despite repeated bail-outs from government and a multi-million-pound fire sale of properties and assets, some of which achieved much less than their true market value.

And although Kerswell has presided over around 500 front-line council jobs being “deleted” in the past three years, she’s now surrounded herself with more executive-level appointees than even Negrini had in her most imperial phase of her bit of empire-building.

Since March 2023, two and a half years into Kerswell’s time in office, the government-appointed improvement panel has been in effective control of Croydon Council, to “direct” all major decisions, rather than “guide”, according to the Secretary of State, Michael Gove. Although Kerswell would prefer if that went unmentioned…

Gissa job: how the self-acclaimed ‘transformational’ Katherine Kerswell’s article appears on the Local Government Chronicle website today

Croydon Council under Kerswell is now subject to formal improvement actions not only from the Department for Levelling Up, but also the Housing Ombudsman, while its conduct is also being carefully watched by the Office of the Information Commissioner, because of Croydon’s appalling record in answering Freedom of Information requests.

But according to the standfirst, the introductory paragraph on the LGC’s website, Croydon “has been building a culture of openness, honesty and transparency at every level”.

Openness, honesty and transparency at every level: the council CEO suppressed the Penn Report for two years

This, remember, is the same Katherine Kerswell who for two years suppressed the Penn Report into wrong-doing at the council, doing nothing to implement its many detailed recommendations for disciplinary action until it was, mostly, far too late to achieve anything.

This is the same Katherine Kerswell who refused to release the salary details of the council’s senior executives – including her own – to researchers working for the right-wing lobby group The Tax Payers Alliance, for their annual Town Hall Rich List. It is the first time in more than a decade that Croydon’s senior salary figures have been withheld.

And this is the same Katherine Kerswell who more recently kept a highly critical report of her own bungling at the 2022 local elections on her desk for four months, suppressing any possible Town Hall debate by councillors until October at the earliest.

Yeah… “openness, honesty and transparency at every level”.

The article is in part a promotional piece for a LGC conference to be held in Manchester next month, at which Kerswell will be a speaker, where she will undoubtedly be telling anyone who will listen what a bang-up job she’s been doing.

Omnishambles: Kerswell’s bungled handling of the 2022  local election count should be investigated by the Electoral Commission, according to a range of witnesses

It is also a blatant job application, a “puff piece”, as Kerswell continues to grumble to friends and colleagues at the Local Government Association about why she thinks she deserves a pay rise while putting hundreds of erstwhile colleagues out of work altogether.

According to Kerswell, Croydon “has needed to change at a scale and speed that has been unprecedented in its history”.

Kerswell writes, “Our collective focus on improvement, and our core commitment to transforming the culture of the organisation – with everyone involved – has enabled us to weather the worst so far.” Yeah, that’s the council which under Kerswell has issued three Section 114 notices, each one a separate admission of financial failure.

Kerswell claims that, “Real change has been delivered and at pace in Croydon”, less than six months after her bosses at the DLUHC announced that they had decided to give greater statutory powers to their improvement panel because, obviously, everything was not progressing so smoothly.

Kerswell seeks to dissemble: “Croydon’s position remains unique. Despite our challenges, the government has not appointed commissioners at Croydon, nor has it removed any decision-making powers from the council.” Which is not untrue. But it is also a long way from “openness, honesty and transparency at every level”.

Different version: the Local Government Chronicle’s reporting of the DLUHC’s actions gives a more objective perspective than Kerswell’s rose-tinted version

Only last month, the same magazine reported unambiguously: “The levelling up secretary confirmed an intervention package for Croydon LBC in parliament this morning.

“In a written ministerial statement Michael Gove said Croydon’s improvement and assurance panel would be placed on a statutory footing… Today Mr Gove said that despite progress that has been made ‘laying the foundations for the recovery’ the government needed to act because ‘historic issues continue to be unearthed’ which are a problem because of the council’s ‘precarious financial position’.”

According to Kerswell, “The aim is that our panel will remain with us for two years, after which they will depart, with confidence that Croydon is a sustainable, well-run local authority, able to meet its duty of best value and able to meet any issues that arise as we continue our organisational journey at rapid pace.” Fingers crossed, everyone!

“Our ambition is to become an efficient council – to deliver essential services well, offer value for money, to listen to the people of Croydon, and simply do what we say we will do,” Kerswell writes.

15% Council Tax hike: Kerswell seems to almost boast of imposing the biggest local tax rise in history

Her method to achieve that? “We must do less, better”.

Kerswell’s article continues to hint that some kind of debt write-off deal is being negotiated – although she and her finance director, Jane West, have been saying that such unprecedented action is “essential” for almost a year now, with no resolution.

It might be significant, but according to Kerswell, that “unaffordable and unsustainable” debt appears to have shrunk by £300million in the past few months. Kerswell refers to a “£1.3billion debt”.

Kerswell seems to boast of “our contribution to that new solution”, the 15per cent Council Tax hike in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis (Kerswell pays her Council Tax in Lewisham… So much for “our contribution”).

And then there’s the savage cuts to council services in Croydon. “We have also delivered £90million of savings over the past two years, with a further £30million coming in this financial year.”

And wait for it… “There is more in years to come as well.”

Powerless: following their S114 notice last November, Kerswell and Tory Mayor Jason Perry have seen the government give additional statutory powers to its improvement panel

“The true challenge is one of moving from fear – fear of those red RAG ratings and fear of calling poor practice out – to confidence and curiosity, where we are unafraid to own up to mistakes, and see them as opportunities for growth,” writes the council CEO who is soon to face an Employment Tribunal case, brought by one of her former senior executives, which accuses her and the council of racism.

“At every level, we need to seek out external challenge and criticism and be willing to have uncomfortable conversations,” writes the council chief executive who fails to respond to questions from Inside Croydon and who has never made herself available for interview by this website’s journalists.

The council CEO who was not answering residents’ emails last week while, presumably, penning this article, tells the LGC that she is somehow “putting residents first in all we do”.

In at least one respect, Kerswell remains a master of the form: writing corporate bullshit: “For Croydon, change continues but it’s through our commitment to improving that we will create a space where people feel part of changing for the better and in owning that change – and founding it in our shared commitment to why we’re here (caring for all of Croydon’s diverse people and places).” Note the use of parentheses, almost as if the people of Croydon were added as an afterthought.

Which, as Katherine Kerswell continues her relentless drive to do what’s best for Katherine Kerswell, may well have been the case.

Read more: Newman and Negrini’s pay-off: no papers, no notes, no reasons
Read more: #PennReport wanted police probe into possible misconduct
Read more: Information Commissioner says council is ‘failing residents’
Read more: Kerswell’s council keeps payments to top earners secret


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