CROYDON IN CRISIS: It was déjà vu all over again at last night’s budget meeting, where ‘steadfast’ opposition melted as soon as the borough’s opposition councillors were given a stern talking to.
TOWN HALL SKETCH by STEVEN DOWNES

Poor hand: but who chose the deck?

Anyone out there, maybe in the South Croydon area, run a regular poker night? Only I have a mug punter that I reckon I could bring along, and everyone will know when they are bluffing.

Because Stuart King’s always bluffing, and everyone at the Town Hall, inside and out, knows it.

Poor Stuart King (well, not so poor, but that’s another article…), he really was dealt a crap hand when he took over as leader of Croydon’s Town Hall Labour group in May 2022, knowing he’d have to face up to Jason Perry’s gurning mug across the chamber floor and never have an ace up his sleeve with which to trump him.

But then, King had chosen the deck when he accepted a role in the council cabinet under Tony Newman and never spoke out publicly about the crap that was going on.

King really ought to know better by now.

Twelve months ago, thanks to a people’s campaign and petition, a couple of impassioned speeches and hundreds of demonstrators on the Town Hall steps, piss-poor Perry, the Tory Mayor, was placed under real pressure over his 15% Council Tax hike and swingeing cuts to services. “Fund Croydon Fairly” was the slogan. “Pay More, Get Less” is the catchphrase that is being widely used today.

In 2023, King and his group of Labour councillors successfully blocked Perry’s unbalanced budget. For a whole week. And then they all crumbled into abstentions to allow the budget to pass.

Bluffer and duffer: Mayor Perry at last night’s meeting. He calculated that Labour were bluffing

Much the same thing happened last night, at the second budget-setting meeting for the 2024 to 2025 financial year.

King, with his best poker face on, had stoutly refused to endorse Perry’s unbalanced budget last Wednesday. And for a while last night, he played the same game of bluff.

King said that Perry “… has made no attempt to contact the other parties. There’s been no effort to find a consensus… That’s because there’s no Conservative political advantage to consensus.”

Truth is, Perry didn’t have to seek consensus because he knew King and Labour were bluffing all along. Within an hour of the West Thornton councillor giving his speech, King and his Labour colleagues were abstaining to allow an unbalanced Tory budget to pass for the second time in barely 12 months. More cuts. Another Council Tax hike. Pay more, get even less.

“The thing is, if you put someone between a rock and a hard place, you don’t do yourselves any favours when you remove the rock,” one veteran campaigner in the public gallery said at the end of the night, having witnessed the latest abject performance by Croydon Labour.

Bluff cove: Stuart King

The Town Hall Chamber’s public gallery, packed out on budget nights a year ago, told the story of the public’s loss of faith with the Labour opposition. Only a handful bothered to turn up this time. They knew Labour was bluffing, too.

The national opinion polls suggest Labour will romp to victory at the General Election, with swingometer readings that suggest they could even win all four Croydon parliamentary seats. But that won’t be the case if you listen to the Croydon public, who time and again have been let down by Labour in this borough, when they were in power and now in opposition. “How can you trust a thing these tossers say?” asked one of the campaigners.

Thanks to King’s transparent bluff, last night was a complete waste of time, for all concerned. Nearly four precious hours which none who witnessed it will ever get back.

Labour might have simply abstained last week, let the budget pass there and then and spared us all the bother.

Instead, last night we had to endure nearly two hours of witless grandstanding from both sides as councillors confronted with a budget proposing another £30million-worth of cuts to public services decided to debate how much they themselves are paid in Council Tax-funded allowances.

Seriously. It was a most unedifying spectacle.

Labour and the council’s two Green councillors had both tabled amendments. Labour’s revolved around the under-employed Tory council cabinet members and the £40,000 a year that they each pocket for doing not very much. This was outrageous to Perry. “Arrogance” was how he described it. “The cabinet is working very hard to put right what you have broken,” he claimed. Pull the other one, Jase…

Back bench view: Tory councillor Robert Ward returns to the conundrum facing Labour in Croydon

Labour’s amendment was as hypocritical as it was stupid. It failed to include any suggested cut in their own SRAs – special responsibility allowances – which might at least have given them a toe-hold on the moral high ground.

The Greens’ amendment was along similar lines, but also raised the issue of how, while there have been swingeing job cuts to the council’s frontline workers, Katherine Kerswell, the council CEO, has managed to increase the number of execs on six-figure salaries at the cash-strapped council.

This, according to Perry’s Tories, was grossly unfair.

Lynne Hale, Perry’s deputy, gave a detailed speech opposing cuts to senior staff. The council has “high-calibre senior management”, according to Hale. Reducing those kind of high-paid jobs, “Flies in the face of commonsense,” in Hale’s world.

Other under-employed Tory cabinet members got up on their hind legs, too, to defend the council staff on the highest salaries and pension contributions – several of whom were in the Chamber, watching the councillors’ every move.

Councillors in Croydon suffer from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, where the captives are won over to take the side of their hostage-takers.

The elected councillors, whose first duty is to the voters who elected them into office, now defend the senior management at the council, who they say are doing a top-rate job. Apparently, our parks and open spaces are “cared for and maintained”, and the planning department is performing wonders. There’s even some suggestion that planning enforcement takes place…

When the vote on the Labour amendment took place, the two Greens voted with the Tories, and against the amendment, a curious play. With LibDem Claire Bonham voting with Labour, the amendment got 33 for and 36 against.

When the vote on the Green amendment took place, it seemed that Labour had been whipped to abstain – one councillor murmured “under protest”. Councillors interfering with top-level council staff’s salaries was something that Labour’s deputy leader, Callton Young, could not tolerate.

That vote wound up 3 in favour (the Greens and Bonham), 34 against and 32 abstentions.

All of which was a waste of time, anyway, because under Croydon Council’s still uncompleted constitution, any amendment requires a two-thirds majority – 47 votes – and that ain’t gonna happen with the no-overall-control state of the council as it is today.

Higher and higher: Council Tax has been increased by 21% in 12 months under Jason Perry. He thinks he’s doing a marvellous job

So then it was on to the budget itself, a budget that proposes another hike in Council Tax, “only” 4.99%, according to Perry, and yet more cuts to services.

Perry and his trusty finance cabinet member, Jason Cummings, can only make their budget balance by getting special permission from the Government for £38million of capitalisation directions.

Cummings got a bit tetchy over this point. A capitalisation direction sees the Government provide money against which the local authority is allowed to flog off assets. It is also Perry and Cumming’s plan to balance their unbalanced budget next year, the year after that, and the year after that – all-in-all, another £152million of capitalisation directions, or borrowing, over four years.

Without which, there would not be a balanced budget.

Croydon may soon reach the stage where it has nothing left to sell. Esther Sutton, for the Greens, made this point, as did Bonham. “We’re selling your libraries so that we can empty your bins,” was how one Town Hall figure put it.

Cummings was at his patronising best to put the minority parties at their ease. A capitalisation direction is “not necessarily” the same as borrowing, he said. “Debt didn’t go up last year. It won’t go up next year.”

King got his line in about this unbalanced budget. “Unamended, the Mayor’s budget does not carry our support.”

Capital stuff: Jason Cummings wants £38m government bailouts in each of the next four years to ‘balance’ his budgets

What Perry and Cummings both refused to answer was how their pleas to the Treasury, and Levelling Up minister Michael Gove, to erase some of Croydon’s £1.3billion debt (11% of the budget is spent on servicing debt), were going.

“We’re in conversations,” was the best they could offer, while Perry did let slip that, “Croydon cannot fix this on our own.”

It was 9pm. Time for a vote on the unbalanced budget.

Labour, the LibDem and the Greens all voted against. The Tories all voted in favour of the highest level of Council Tax this borough has ever endured – £2,366.91 from April for a home in Band D, up £127.35 on last year, after Perry’s notorious 15% hike.

Perry’s budget had failed, 35 votes to 34.

Jane West, one of those council execs paid more than £150,000 and who, according to Perry, Kerswell and, no doubt, West herself, is doing such a good job, was wheeled out to wag her finger and warn the naughty councillors of the terrible potential consequences if they refused to pass her unbalanced budget. All the councillors had also received a “written warning” from the council’s monitoring officer, too.

Labour scuttled off to “break out room” F4 and F5 to discuss their strategy. But it was a foregone conclusion.

When they all came back, the budget was passed: 34 for, 3 against, 32 abstaining. And no one had really managed to get to see what Mayor Perry held in his hand.

You know what they say about playing high stakes in the casino: the banker always wins…

Read more: Cummings’ budget rejected before his big Newsnight moment
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever

From 2023: And here are the Labour councillors who broke their word over the 15% tax hike and abandoned the people of Croydon
From 2023: Here’s the Mayor and 33 Croydon Tory councillors who THREE times voted in favour of hitting you with a 15% Council Tax hike
From 2023: Only three councillors were as good as their word and stood up for the people against Tory Mayor Perry’s 15% Council Tax hike

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