CROYDON IN CRISIS: While council chief exec Katherine Kerswell prepares to impose another £31m-worth of cuts, the council is recruiting SIX ‘heads of strategic finance’ to tally the money that they don’t have.
By our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE

Glass palace: Fisher’s Folly is soon to get half a dozen new ‘heads of strategic finance’ – to manage the money they say they haven’t got

Cash-strapped Croydon Council, which claims not to have enough money to run basic services, or keep its nursery schools running, to be able to open most of its libraries more than a couple of days per week, or even deliver care services to the elderly and vulnerable, is going into 2024 planning on spending an estimated £1million per year on six “heads of strategic finance”.

Yes. You read that right: SIX.

And with the best applicant placed on a potential salary of more than £92,000!

The top-of-grade salary on offer with each of the positions is £77,770. But if an applicant for the jobs, which were published on the council’s recruitment site a week ago, turns out to be “exceptional”, then they could even get “up to £15,000 market supplement”.

Trebles all-round!

The disparities between the public statements of Katherine Kerswell, the £192,000 per year CEO, and Croydon’s £84,000 per year part-time Mayor, Jason Perry, about the council’s finances and the way they are running the organisation are stark.

Croydon residents are expected to pay more to get less.

No idea: Katherine Kerswell

Council Tax will soon have risen by more than one-fifth in less than two years since Tory Perry was elected, while the Mayor prepares to impose another £31million-worth of cuts to the services that the council provides.

That’s likely to include many more job cuts.

Kerswell has spent much of her expensively remunerated time over the past three weeks observing the proceedings of an Employment Tribunal case that has been brought against the council by a former council exec.

Giving evidence under oath, when asked how many staff she had made redundant at the council since she arrived in late 2020, Kerswell said that she didn’t know…

Based on official council figures and union sources, it is reckoned that around 500 posts have been erased at Croydon Council since January 2020, the process having started even before Croydon issued its first Section 114 notice in November that year.

Maybe that’s why Kerswell needs to recruit six “heads of strategic finance”: to do the number crunching on the various redundancies being planned for front-line council services.

The ads for these posts are contained among nearly 60 vacancies listed on the council’s recruitment site (which appears to believe that Croydon is still in Surrey… how very 1964). Even a bankrupt borough needs staff to carry out its last remaining duties.

Splashing the cash: how the recruitment ad appears for Croydon (in Surrey, apparently)

To be recruited through an agency (incurring more costs, while the council has an in-house HR department), the heads of strategic finance positions are to work in adult social care and health; children, young people and education; sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery; housing; corporate, assistant chief executive and resources; and chief accountant (a bean-counter for the bean-counters).

So these appear to be positions recruited to fulfil one of the latest corporate reorganisations, of which Kerswell is so fond.

Of course, better financial controls at a local authority with debts of £1.6billion might be characterised as shrewd and essential good governance. Or just slamming the stable door long after the horse has cantered over the hill…

One former senior council staffer reckons that on those salaries for mid-ranking civic servants, taking into account the generous local authority pensions that are to be paid and other on-costs, those six new positions may well cost Croydon Council Tax-payers around £1million per year.

Remember that the next time Perry and Kerswell decided to flog off part of your local park or sell your public library.

Read more: Perry struggles with numbers to offer us: Pay More, Get Less
Read more: Council’s temps forced to take 6 days’ unpaid Christmas leave
Read more: Mayor Perry’s spending cuts should begin with his own cabinet
Read more: Town Hall staff braced for £31m more cuts and job losses
Read more: We are witnessing the long, slow death of local government

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