Our columnist ANDREW FISHER watched the Croydon Council budget webcast this week, so that you wouldn’t have to…

Croydon’s very own answer to Laurel and Hardy took to the airwaves this week, as Conservative Mayor Jason Perry and his finance chief Jason Cummings explained why “We will be a council that does less in the future”, all the while charging you more for it.

Yes, it’s that time of year when tenuous justifications meet with fake consultations – otherwise known as the “Croydon Council budget setting process”, which ultimately (plot spoiler alert) will result in your Council Tax rising by more than inflation and you will pay more and get less.

The situation is well-known in Croydon and the timeline is well-established: the council has been amassing debt for years under both Conservative and Labour administrations. Rising service demand combined with cuts to government funding to councils and local mismanagement resulted in Croydon issuing its first Section 114 Notice in November 2020.

Since then, Croydon Council has sacked staff, cut services and failed to get a better deal from Government to offset the years of underfunding relative to other councils and a decade of austerity.

In the past year a number of other councils around the country have also issued Section 114 Notices, including Woking, Birmingham and Nottingham – with many other councils in England teetering on the brink. Croydon’s situation is far from unique.

The first episode of Universally Challenged: Mayor Perry’s budget chat on Monday, joined by Jason Cummings and the council’s senior finance official, Jane West

So on Monday night, I tuned in to Mayor Perry’s opening pitch in his budget-setting process, keen to hear what he has to offer the people of the borough.

In his meandering opening statement, Mayor Perry said, just as he did last year when it came to nought, “I’m talking to the government about a solution that may include a write-off of some of our debt.”

There will be a growing number of councils across the country doing the same, and so far the Government is passing the buck to town halls.

What we know so far for Croydon is this: there’s going to be another £26.9million cuts from services, or “savings” as Perry and Cummings euphemistically call them.

Perry claimed that debt-servicing costs would equate to “nearly 20% of our budget next year”, although a later slide from the cabinet finance member showed it was 11%. That’s still a substantial figure, but nevertheless, it’s worrying that the Mayor gets his figures so badly wrong on an issue like this.

Of course, part of the reason that debt servicing costs have gone up is that Liz Truss tanked the economy in 2022, during her mercifully short Premiership when she was backed enthusiastically by Croydon South MP Chris Philp. Borrowing costs have risen as a consequence.

Cummings, who was key in raising Council Tax by 15% last April, took us through the figures and let us know that Council Tax would likely rise by 5% in 2024. “And that is below the current level of inflation,” he claimed – seemingly missing the Conservative HQ script which is busy declaring Rishi Sunak the Messiah for halving inflation to… 4.6%.

Even though Sunak has done nothing to achieve it, inflation is indeed currently 4.6% and is forecast to be around 3.6% in April next year. Both figures are well below Cummings’ 5%.

I add this context because, if you listen to the Mayor, Croydon’s woes are all the fault of the previous Labour council, who according to Perry’s muddled metaphors “had the mortgage, used the credit cards and then went on to payday loans in order to balance the books”.

An honest summary of the last Labour-run council would be: it inherited £800million debt from the predecessor Conservative administration (of which Perry was a leading member), they had their budget cut by government, they encountered increasing demand on services and they made some bad and far from transparent decisions.

But whoever you blame (the correct answer is: all of them), for the second year running, Croydon residents will be charged an inflation-busting hike in their Council Tax – in exchange for receiving worse services.

Cummings’ presentation showed that despite residents being charged a supposedly hypothecated 2% adult social care precept (as part of the likely increase increase in April), adult social care will actually have £5million taken out of its budget this coming year.

This is on top of the £12 million that was cut in 2023-2024. It goes completely against the advice from central government: “the government set an expectation that the additional funding made available to adult social care should lead to a substantial increase in planned adult social care spending”.

Croydon Council is putting people needing care at risk, breaking guidance, and the Government is looking the other way.

When asked later on how vulnerable people will be protected from more service cuts, all Mayor Perry could offer was “we will be a council that does less in the future”, while Jane West, the council’s senior finance official, offered that “all savings were subject to an Equality Impact Assessment”.

Last year, an Equality Impact Assessment showed that there would be a disproportionate impact of the 15% tax rise and cuts on Croydon’s black and ethnic minority communities. Mayor Perry still went ahead with it.

Questions from residents followed the two presentations, chaired by Lynne Hale, Perry’s deputy mayor. No follow-up questions were permitted and Councillor Hale didn’t scrutinise the often weak and partial answers, either.

Hale selected some really tricky questions to test her party colleagues. The pick of the bunch was this gem from “Frances”: “This webinar has been useful. Will you do more in the future?”

The ever-adroit Perry agreed it had been useful, and said, “Yes”. And he then used the opportunity to publicise his Mayor’s Question Time events at which hard-pressed residents spend their evenings listening to the same sort of farce when hand-picked pre-submitted questions will be answered without any ability to scrutinise the response.

Residents can respond to the consultation on the proposals here. But don’t expect any changes.

“There are few choices,” Mayor Perry concluded. Things can only get worse.

• As well as the BBC’s Politics Live, Radio 4’s Today and various other broadcast outlets, Andrew Fisher is a regular guest on The Croydon Insider, the podcast that analyses the latest news from inside Croydon. Click here to listen to his contribution in this month’s episode (requires subscription)
• From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. He is a former chair of the Croydon Central Constituency Labour Party. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes regular columns for InsideCroydon

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