CROYDON IN CRISIS: From a couple of hundred attendees soon after he was first elected, Croydon’s part-time Mayor is now drawing crowds of only a couple of dozen for his council-funded promotional tour. KEN TOWL went along to South Norwood last night, to save you the bother
Is it safe to come out now?: out of his depth, Jason Perry was at his bumbling worst last night
“Dog poo is a difficult one,” said the Mayor as he chewed over his answer.
There is a lot of it about in South Norwood, apparently. In the end, it came down to individual responsibility.
There was to be no mass clean-up.
Jason Perry’s answer to the dog poo question was much like his answer to every question. No commitment for action was made. No opportunity to blame everyone else for Croydon’s woes was missed.
Veteran Croydon politician Andrew Pelling was in the audience. “I should get a discount on my Council Tax for all the Mayor’s Question Times I’ve attended,” he said.
His question, “What can be done to improve the state of Portland Road?” was approached by Perry in his usual rambling fashion, but not actually answered.
I took down as much of it verbatim as I could: “A lot has gone into South Norwood generally… there are a number of initiatives around the history… strands of regeneration work, some of it GLA funded… about trying to revitalise that area. Portland Road is a very long road with houses and shops all the way down it… It’s going to take years.” So now we know.
Liar, liar!: audience members appeared to have a clear idea of what they thought of piss-poor Perry’s presentation
The Mayor’s grasp of figures, or lack of a grasp, came to the fore when he was asked a question about keeping nurseries open in the borough. “They are running at a £500million deficit,” Mayor Perry said, straight-faced.
“No they aren’t!” said his better-informed questioner.
“Sorry,” said Jason, “that should be five hundred thousand.”
Mayor Perry has just passed what he calls a “balanced” budget. It balances only because of a government capitalisation direction of £38million. Perry’s proposing “balanced” budgets balanced with further £38million chunks of cash for the two years following, too. He clearly has a “balanced” grasp of figures generally.
Perry began the session with a little opening speech in which he informed us that he had had his first job, at 16, just around the corner from the Harris Academy venue. He was born and bred in Croydon in case you didn’t know.
He had come with quite the Mayoral entourage: a couple of caseworkers, no less than five uniformed police officers (more than double the security I encountered when meeting the Home Secretary in Croydon a couple of weeks ago) and his Deputy Mayor and Sanderstead councillor Lynn Hale, who chaired the meeting.
Pretty vacant: Mayor Perry’s borough-wide tour is losing its pulling power
“We are still very much in charge of what we do in Croydon,” the impotent Mayor claimed, unconvincingly.
He did concede that there is something called a “Panel”, appointed by the Government, that appears to also be involved in what we do in Croydon.
Perry rattled on for a while about the “Broken Windows theory”, apparently unaware that Wilson and Kellings’ findings are, and have been for a while now, to a great extent discredited.
The Mayor then claimed that the key question, as far as Croydon’s finances are concerned, is “Who is going to pay?”
Given that this year Perry is putting up our Council Tax by 5%, after having hiked it by a record-breaking 15% last April, the answer would seem to be that we are going to pay.
When he was asked about when he had decided to fulfil his election promise to “fix the finances” by increasing Council Tax by so much, Mayor Perry claimed that at the time of his election in 2022, he had not known quite how bad the finances were.
Perry began to sweat, just a little.
Another questioner asked him about the chances of getting a write-off of the debt from central government and he said that he was having “ongoing conversations with central government” about this, and that meanwhile, he was selling assets “to pay down the debt”, but that there were not enough assets to sell.
When the meeting came to an end we all left feeling, I think, none the wiser.
The next Mayor’s Question Time is due to be held in late May (after the London Elections purdah period), the venue TBC. I can’t bring myself to recommend it.
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever
Read more: Croydon put in special measures: ‘Worst of all possible worlds’
Read more: Council forced to issue 3rd bankruptcy notice in just two years
Read more: Here’s the Mayor and 33 Croydon Tory councillors who THREE times voted in favour of hitting you with a 15% Council Tax hike
Read more: The solution to Perry’s finance problem: Fund Croydon Fairly
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