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£603,000: the soaring costs of Croydon’s ‘improvement’ panel

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CROYDON IN CRISIS: Three years since Tony McArdle and his government-appointed team of troubleshooters were parachuted into the council, there are mounting questions about what they have achieved. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

Part-timer: Tony McArdle is the £1,000-a-day government-appointed troubleshooter

The Government-appointed chair of Croydon Council’s “improvement and assurance” panel, Tony McArdle, has said this week that, “The reason I do this is because I want to continue working and it’s a way for me to put something back.”

A Freedom of Information request lodged by Inside Croydon has discovered that in just three years, McArdle’s “putting something back” as chair of cash-strapped Croydon Council’s “improvement” panel has seen him paid a cool

£209,056.88

McArdle is one of six current members of the “improvement” panel. All have been appointed by Tory government minister Michael Gove and his Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

The panel members are each paid between £900 and £1,000 per day, for their part-time work, by order of the Secretary of State.

And all of this is being paid by the borough’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers.

Figures obtained under FoI show that collectively, McArdle and his part-time “improvement” panel have, since 2021, cost Croydon tax-payers a total of

£602,991.75

“The total cost does not reflect additional officer time associated with supporting or responding to panel requests which is not possible to quantify,” a council official, presumably who is paid much less than £1,000 per day, helpfully noted in the FoI response.

The panel currently consists of McArdle, who was council CEO in Lincolnshire for 13 years; Phil Brookes (in charge of commercial and asset disposal); Jon Wilson (the panel’s adult social care expert, fitting in between his day job at Leicestershire County Council);
Brian Roberts (a former president of CIPFA, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy); Pamela Leonce (a housing association chair) and Eleanor Brazil (an education, children’s services and safeguarding specialist).

McArdle, Wilson and Brookes have been milking Croydon for their day rates since they were appointed by the then minister, Robert Jenrick, in January 2021. Brookes had worked alongside McArdle in a similar capacity for two years previously, when they were appointed to oversee Northamptonshire County Council, the first English local authority this century to go bust.

Back for more: Eleanor Brazil

Croydon Council’s website describes this as “the Government’s successful intervention in Northamptonshire County Council” (our italics, for emphasis). The two new councils established under McArdle and Brookes’ recommendations have both recently gone bust. Makes you wonder what Croydon would regard as a failure…

Other panel members have come and gone.

Brazil is the most recent appointee, and should be familiar to many in Croydon. In 2017, she was brought in after the shocking findings of an Ofsted inspection of the council’s children’s services, which reported “widespread and serious failures”, which “leave some children at risk of significant harm”.

Brazil’s work helped Croydon’s children’s services gain a “Good” Ofsted rating by 2020, but only after £30million had been chucked at the problem in the space of 18 months on a round of social worker recruitment and other measures either recommended or approved by Brazil.

Council insiders now regard this sudden hike in expenditure as a significant step towards Croydon’s financial collapse in November 2020. Oddly, some might consider, there is no mention of Brazil’s previous role at Croydon Council in her biography profile on the Croydon Council website…

In from the start: Phil Brookes

The figures obtained under FoI do not identify the individual panel members by name, although the payments to McArdle appear obvious enough, and includes £98,135.07 (what was the 7p for?) in 2023-2024.

It appears that since 2021, one of either Wilson or Brookes has received £150,009.90.

The next highest-paid panel member has received £89,524.29 (although this panel member was paid nothing in 2023-2024, which suggests it might be Margaret Lee, who left the panel last year).

The FoI response states, “In July 2023, the role of the Improvement and Assurance Panel was formally strengthened, and membership revised.”

After Mayor Jason Perry had presided over Croydon’s third Section 114 Notice in November 2022, Gove gave McArdle’s panel more, statutory powers, taking many decision-making responsibilities away from the Mayor and the borough’s elected councillors, and handing it all over to McArdle’s panel.

Hence the significant increase in McArdle’s payments in the past year.

Spending on the panel overall has also increased dramatically in the past year:

For Croydon Council Tax-payers, this is the cost of failure, writ large.

But what, exactly, if anything, has the panel achieved?

Empire-building: council CEO Katherine Kerswell

Inside Croydon reported earlier this week how Katherine Kerswell, the government-approved chief executive of the council, now has more executives working at the council on salaries of £140,000 per year or more than under her predecessor, Jo “Negreedy” Negrini.

These appointments have been made while the council has axed more than 400 frontline jobs.

Almost all of those senior exec jobs will have been appointed with approval from McArdle and his “improvement” panel.

From having to deliver four update reports to Whitehall each year when they arrived in 2021, McArdle and his team now only have to draft two such reports a year.Same money, natch.

But even then, they can get significant things wrong: the last report saw McArdle get mixed up over the difference between a loan and a payment (yep!), making an error in his reporting over Brick by Brick to the tune of £94million.

There was no apology for the cock-up, no explanation, just a bureaucrat in Whitehall applying the Tippex after Inside Croydon flagged up this monumental miscalculation.

No delusions: how the Local Government Chronicle reported Gove’s additional powers for the ‘improvement’ panel last year

But hey, what do you expect for a mere £1,000 per day?

The Local Government Chronicle, the in-house trade magazine for civic servants up and down the land, has this week run a series of articles about commissioners and government interventions in councils, as they reckon there’s plenty more local authorities in financial distress after 14 years of Tory misgovernment.

The editorial tone is that they are not overly convinced that the works of McArdle, Brookes, Brazil and their mates actually works… “Commissioner model lacks ‘political buy-in’ and ‘long term thinking’,” the LGC says.

The LGC has found some interesting stats, such as how a quarter of commissioners appointed as troubleshooters have not worked in local government for four years or more.

McArdle, as one example, is just too busy to have an actual job. As well as Croydon, he was recently given a similar gig by DLUHC overseeing troubled Nottingham City Council. In addition, he is paid as an independent scrutineer at Barnsley council.

He is also tasked by the Department for Education as their “chief safety valve negotiator” (who dreams up these titles?) for 38 councils and an expert on SEND – “expert” in the sense of McArdle’s role being to throttle down council spending on special educational needs and disabilities. The DfE has been dishing out a share of £800million in bailouts to councils at risk of going bankrupt because of the steepling demand for SEND provision.

According to the LGC, Gove’s department is on a bit of a recruitment drive at the moment, looking for more commissioners, presumably to sit on more “improvement” panels, as more councils go bust. They are seeking experienced, senior council executives, with a commitment of 150 days per year. In McArdle’s case, what with Croydon and Nottingham, plus the SEND gig, he’s hardly got time to take any holiday and spend all that public cash he’s being paid…

And that, according to LGC, has become a bit of a sore point for McArdle.

“Many commissioners also face criticism, often in local media…”, Wot? Us guv? “… about how much they are paid,” says the Chronicle.

Busy man: Tony ‘Four Jobs’ McArdle

McArdle “says bringing in this kind of support from a consultancy would cost even more”.

He possibly knows this because, together with Santa McArdle, he runs a management consultancy called Priora Consulting Ltd.

“If money was the only motivation,” £1,000-per-day Tony McArdle told the LGC, “these people could almost certainly work for more in the private sector in the consultancy firms.

“The reason I do this is because I want to continue working and it’s a way for me to put something back in the sector from what I have learned during my time there.”

Which is nice.

Oh, and the achievements of the “improvement” panel in the three years since they were appointed in Croydon? Well, the debt is still around £1.5billion – McArdle has said that it really needs a government debt write-off, but doesn’t appear to have achieved that.

Council Tax has been hiked by 21% in the past 12 months, while services are being cut, libraries and parks sold off, and 400 frontline council jobs axed.

“It’s quite difficult to keep going to the government and asking for more money if you’ve got assets you can sell that are releasing that money yourself,” McArdle said last month, after his appointment in Nottingham.

But that has not stopped Croydon Council, under McArdle and his team’s oversight, requesting another £38million bail-out this year, and next year, and the year after, just to be able to say that they have “balanced” the books. Which of course, they haven’t, as they just layer on ever more debt, which will have to be paid by generations of Croydon residents to come.

In fact, so “successful” has McArdle and his panel been in delivering “improvement” in Croydon, that Michael Gove has given them another year, through to 2025, to keep those “improvements” coming.

All at £1,000 per day.

Read more: Cummings’ budget rejected before his big Newsnight moment
Read more: It’s time for our elected councillors to stand up for Croydon
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever

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