CROYDON IN CRISIS: There’s cuts planned to all kinds of services in the borough in the coming months. The only thing local politicians aren’t planning to cut-back on are their own jobs, as WALTER CRONXITE reports
The holidays are over. Time to go back to work.
£11,691 per year and not one meeting in January: Labour’s Stuart Collins
But for seven of Croydon’s 70 councillors, there is not a single council meeting they are expected to attend for the whole of January.
Croydon’s less-than-magnificent seven are each paid at least £11.691 per year in quaintly titled “council allowances”.
They are Stuart Collins (Labour; Broad Green ward; Tony Newman’s former deputy leader), Matt Griffiths (Labour; Norbury and Pollards Hill), Karen Jewitt (Labour; Thornton Heath), Mario Creatura (Conservative; Coulsdon Town; allowance £23,813.76 per year as at Dec 2023), Endri Llabuti (Conservative; Purley Oaks and Riddlesdown), Alasdair Stewart (Conservative; Purley Oaks and Riddlesdown; allowances £17,183.40 per year as at Dec 2023) and Esther Sutton (Green; Fairfield).
There were significant reshuffles of some council committees conducted over recent weeks, as one further councillor, Park Hill and Whitgift ward’s Jade Appleton (Conservative), stood down from her positions while dealing with ill health.
£11,691 per year and not one meeting in January: Tory Endri Llabuti
It costs Council Tax-payers more than £1.5million a year to pay the allowances of these light-duties councillors, and that’s before adding in the costs of extra of employer’s national insurance. Nor does it include the £82,000 per year paid to the council’s part-time Mayor, Jason Perry.
Nice work if you can get it.
The majority of councillors who are neither members of Mayor Perry’s cabinet or the Labour shadow cabinet are summoned to attend just one formal council meeting in January.
Of course, some of these councillors on light duties are busying themselves elsewhere, with residents’ concerns or meeting with council officials. Most likely, though, they are spending hours every week canvassing, posing gormlessly for selfies and taking part in the political parties’ leafleting cult – an activity which is effectively subsidised by our cash-strapped council and, for many of the borough’s 70 councillors, appears to be their main purpose in life.
For a lot of our councillors, their quaintly named “allowances” are nothing other than a publicly funded keep-fit regime, paying to get them out and about in their later years.
Leafleting cults: local political parties are effectively able to subsidise their campaign costs out of public money
It’s true, too, that more than £100,000 a year is diverted from councillors’ pay packets to the bank accounts of the local Conservative Association and Croydon Labour Party.
But that’s not how a bankrupt council should be spending its cash. It’s not the job of hard-pressed Croydon residents to be paying the running costs of local political parties.
Banstead resident Creatura, the one-time golden boy of Croydon Tories, seems to have checked out mentally of the council.
He has stood down as Tory Chief Whip (and so will soon be waving goodbye to the £1,000 per month extra allowances that went with that non-job), and has instead taken on the less-than-arduous duties as vice-chair on the Ethics Committee. Which meets only once every three months.
The idea of Creatura having any kind of say over the ethical conduct of others will, to many who have followed the former gobby factotum’s grubby career, since his days of illicit fiddling with the Wikipedia entry of his boss, then-MP Gavin Barwell, and worse, will be regarded as some kind of sick joke.
While his Croydon Tory colleagues have devoted much time in the lost cause of leafleting on behalf of their council colleagues Jason Cummings and Simon Fox – who themselves are now preoccupied as their party’s prospective parliamentary candidates for Croydon East and West, respectively – Creature has been spending much time away from Coulsdon, using social media to promote the concerns of residents in Dorking, then Reigate and, most recently, Epsom, as he continues to seek nomination as the candidate for a safe Tory seat in the Surrey stockbroker belt (albeit that, based on current polling, what is regarded as a “safe” Tory seat might require some redefinition).
Semi-detached: Coulsdon councillor Creatura has spent much of the past year trying to get selected elsewhere
At best, Creatura might have to attend fewer than a dozen Croydon Council meetings in a calendar year – working out as costing tax-payers £1,000 a pop.
In reality, there just aren’t enough real jobs to go round at the Town Hall for the 70-member council.
That situation has actually got worse since May 2022, with an additional directly-elected free-loader for Mayor, and now with a non-councillor, independent chair of the audit committee added to the pay-roll (on nearly £8,000 per year).
Croydon has the most councillors of any London borough.
Yet in a recent (entirely non-scientific) poll of Inside Croydon readers – who we’d like to think are better-informed on these matters than most people, 2-in-5 respondents said that they have absolutely no idea of the name(s) of their ward councillors… Which sort of underlines the notion that some councillors have not made much of an impact since those local elections almost two years ago.
With the council’s finances in desperate straits, his scandalous misspending of public money is long overdue for reform. If Mayor Perry wants to be seen to be doing something to earn his salary, he could start by reducing Croydon’s number of councillors in time for the 2026 local elections. Although that might mean less public subsidy for his local Conservative Association, and therefore less cash available to print Tory Party leaflets…
They really are a bunch of cults.
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Some councillors do more than just attend council meetings for the money, take selfies and promote themselves in some hopeless attempt to become an MP.
A few have been known to get things done for the people they are paid to represent. They know who they are.
That there are so few council meetings to attend is a worry, as it means there are very few opportunities to hold our ghastly Mayor and his little cosy gang of lackeys to account.
I see Karen Jewitt a lot on social media replying to constituents and offering help.
It is Cllr Jewitt’s absence of political judgement which has seen her shorn of all responsibilities at the Town Hall. Her reputation as a diligent ward councillor is well-deserved, but the council allowances were never intended as a subsidy for volunteer social work.
I have been in discussions with our councillors regarding our local park. While one is trying to help the other is a waste of a cheap suit. And now to find out they are stealing our money by giving it to certain parties is beyond me after being told by Mr waste of space there’s no money. Enough is enough
Sad that current north borough Labour councilors spent 5 figures + on vanity anniversary ‘punk’ projects in mid 2016 under the guise of ‘Ambition Festival’ because it echoed their own personal youth !
A lesson in expected pending financial acumen abilities !
” We are all doomed captain ” !
The real problem is that they are all at “it”. The Ambition Festival budget was subsumed to pay for promotion for Boozepark, a private company but a Negreedy vanity project.
Now, we have £1.3m of London arts funding being squandered on plastic giraffes, and worse, to promote businesses in the town centre, and worse.
They all do this with impunity.
Or out of incompetence.