Strong police presence: on-duty officers comprised 17% of the entire audience on Tuesday evening for Mayor Perry’s Question Time staged in South Norwood. Which might explain the shortage of police on our streets
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Fewer than 30 people turned up this week for the latest stage in Jason Perry’s council-funded grand tour of the borough. And five of them were police. Season ticket-holder ANDREW PELLING, left, was in South Norwood to see whether the Mayor had anything new to offer
It is unfortunate that the Mayoral Question Time events have become so poorly attended.
The occasions see little angst under deputy mayor Lynne Hale’s chairing, especially after most questions are carefully selected and vetted beforehand.
Quite a lot of the recognisable regulars get addressed by their first name. It’s more like a small non-league crowd of loyal old stalwarts at a grim winter’s evening’s match at an unfashionable ground than a Parks and Recreation-style confrontation.
But the low-key relaxed atmosphere allows some surprising information to leak out about the council’s affairs. Or what might be regarded by unsympathetic observers as “Mayor’s mistakes”.
Members of the public get much more access to asking the Mayor questions than elected councillors do at the occasional full council meetings, where few of our 70 councillors ever get given the chance to pose questions.
Councillors are completely banned from asking questions at these on-the-road Question Time events, where it is the public’s opportunity to quiz the Mayor. But you might think they would still bother to turn up.
Public opinion: audience members appeared to have a clear idea of what they thought of piss-poor Perry’s presentation
I saw none of the South Norwood or Woodside councillors in attendance at the Harris Academy South Norwood venue this week.
As well as meeting some of the people they are supposed to represent, had they bothered, they would have learned a lot from making the effort to attend as some really serious news emerged which impacts on their residents.
Maybe members of the public are better at asking questions than most of the current crop of councillors? And maybe the Mayor is more willing to share information in a less partisan environment?
For we learnt that the borough’s five nursery schools are far from safe from closure, that the Conservative Mayor is going to adopt Labour’s landlord licensing policy, and that more of the 1960s Wates-built council blocks may need to be demolished, as is happening with Regina Road.
The renewed prospect of closure for some of Croydon’s five maintained nurseries will surprise those who read what Mayor Perry said as recently as December last year. That apparent abandonment of closure plans now seems to have been only a brief stay of execution.
Under threat: Croydon’s nursery schools could face closure after all
The decision on the future of Croydon’s nurseries will come in May.
For Mayor Perry (who in December said, “We are doing everything possible to secure their future”), this week’s version is that the current provision of nursery schools “can’t go on as we are”.
Consideration of sales of the nursery school sites would take place after decisions on which nursery schools will close.
A real surprise is that the Conservative Mayor is going to bring back landlord licensing in limited parts of Croydon – a return to a controversial Labour policy where residents at last night’s meeting expressed scepticism that the money had been well-spent on really policing the private rented sector.
We learned on Tuesday night that Mayor Perry would have preferred to have seen the Regina Road towers dynamited with the press of a button.
But, beginning next year, they will be slowly deconstructed allowing for analysis of why these buildings became structurally unfit for human habitation. The structural data will provide information on whether any other such blocks – there’s around a dozen others around the borough – need to come down, the Mayor advised.
What Mayor Perry failed to say is that his council has hired Arup to undertake a structural survey of the residential blocks at Regina Road, and the other Wates-built council flats elsewhere in the borough. Arup is where Jo Negrini, the former council chief executive, today draws her salary.
The latest review of the Croydon Plan, which sets out the guidance for planning applications, will be anti-new housing in most parts of the borough and will also aim to limit extra homes under multiple occupation.
In an extraordinary expression of anti-developer sentiment, Perry said “planning is in the hands of the developers”.
More controls: having scrapped SPD2, Mayor Perry has a new Local Plan that is ‘anti-developer’
Planning enforcement, or the lack of it, the Mayor confessed, has always been a problem in Croydon. Mayor Perry speaks with the expertise of having been the council’s planning spokesperson in the last decade. A £180,000 government grant for improved planning in the borough would not be used to improve enforcement, the Mayor told his small audience.
There are still mysteries about how council money is spent.
Graham Mitchell, who was an independent councillor candidate in 2022, was concerned about the lack of information on how and with what justifications £8million of government funding was spent during the covid crisis, and also why £5million more remains unspent.
Mitchell wanted to know what might happen to this unused pot of money before the September 30 spending deadline. Mitchell was concerned that money was not being used for its intended purpose, on public health. Mitchell knew that £150,000 was spent by the then-Labour-controlled council on a public health video which was made in 2021, called “The magnificence of Croydon”.
He also cited £65,000 being proposed for spending on a review of Fairfield Halls. Mayor Perry promised enhanced transparency and justification for these spends to appear on the council’s website.
And then we came to the excuses. Mayor Perry claimed that he didn’t realise that the council’s finances were so bad when he promised to “fix the finances” during his election campaign two years ago. You could sense a feeling among the sparse audience: Is that really possible?
The solution to a debt “that Croydon cannot fix on its own” in “a not very easy conversation” with Government might be “an interest holiday or bigger grants”, Mayor Perry suggested, offering little real hope that he might achieve such an arrangement.
Talking in the week when Council Tax bills were dropping on doormats across the borough, with the full horror of a 21% hike in 12 months under Perry as Mayor, according to Mayor Perry nothing much is within his powers or is his fault.
Those £5 charges for new landfill bins that he wants to impose? That’s all the fault of residents, who Mayor Perry reckons have been ordering the wheelie bins to use in their gardens.
It all adds up to much more news than you get at any Town Hall meetings.
One of the few residents who bothered to turn up told me at the end, “Mayor Perry was just so poor... All his mistakes, his trouble with numbers, his failure to be briefed. Yet he will have been given all of the questions in advance, council staff will have been able to prepare his responses.
“It’s almost worth turning up to the next one to find out quite how bad Mayor Perry really is.”
Maybe it is worth going to the next Mayoral Question Time on May 29, although Mayor Perry hasn’t yet decided where his personal promotional tour of the borough will take him next.
Read more: No hiding place for Jason Perry, Croydon’s impotent Mayor
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever
Read more: Mayor Perry’s spending cuts should begin with his own cabinet
- Andrew Pelling was a Labour councillor from 2014 to 2022, when he was expelled from the party. He was an independent candidate for Croydon Mayor in 2022. He has previously been a Croydon councillor, London Assembly Member and Croydon Central’s MP for the Conservatives
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Given the next event by the Mayor is on 29th May , can Inside Croydon indicate where the next event is to held , and how to register. Or can one just turn up ?
No.
Piss-poor Perry squanders at least £500,000 a year on a council propaganda department, which he uses to promote his own activities.
That’s their job. We’re not going to do it for them.
If the council has a ‘propaganda department’, where is the positive coverage? Are there any ‘clippoings’? I only see negative and tragic media reportrs.
We only said there’s a propaganda department. We didn’t say they were any good
A Question Time where the questions are vetted in advance? What’s the point?
Exactly.
Sounds like a monumental waste of time, like Perry