With the council’s annual meeting and Trumptonesque ‘mayor-making’ at the Town Hall just a week away, Inside Croydon can today unveil official figures to show who are the councillors doing the most to hold Mayor Jason Perry, chief exec Katherine Kerswell and their officials to account.
Tomorrow, we will be publishing possibly our most-anticipated report of the year, with our second annual Toss-cars – the awards for the feckless and the lazy, the councillors who really couldn’t give a toss…
Inside Croydon can today reveal that, according to official figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request, for the civic year 2023 to 2024, the councillor who submitted the most number of members’ requests – formal questions about how the council is being run – was:
Consistent: Karen Jewitt, leading the way in asking questions of council officials
Drum roll…
Thornton Heath Labour councillor Karen Jewitt.
One of the borough’s longest-serving councillors, Jewitt receives the basic £11,681.96 councillor allowance. Yet she managed to submit 281 formal enquiries on behalf of the people she represents – which works out to cost the people of Croydon £41.60 per time.
Runner-up this year is Stuart King, the Labour councillor for West Thornton and the leader of the Labour group. Clearly, those political responsibilities were no brake on his efforts on behalf of the residents of the ward he serves, as he submitted 251 member enquiries.
With King receiving £29,648.04 in basic and special responsibility allowances (as leader of the largest opposition group), that means each of his member enquiries cost the borough £118.12.
Questioning: Stuart King
Jewitt and King were in the top three of council caseworkers last year, too.
Mike Bonello, who topped the table in 2022-2023, resigned as a councillor in January this year, yet still managed to ask more questions in just 10 months than 63 of his councillor colleagues.
Placed third this year was Perry’s deputy mayor, Lynne Hale, demonstrating that being in the Mayor’s cabinet is no excuse for not dealing with the nuts and bolts of a councillor’s duties to their residents. But Hale’s numbers come up alarmingly short of Jewitt and King – 120 items fewer than the top performer.
With Hale pocketing a hefty £42,044.76 – more than £3,500 per month – effectively for following Perry around and nodding at everything he says, her 163 member enquiries average out as costing £257.94. Maybe Mayor Perry has been looking in the wrong places to find ways of reducing Croydon’s “toxic” debt?
2023-2024 TOP OF THE TABLE
1, Karen Jewitt (Lab) 281
2, Stuart King (Lab) 251
3, Lynne Hale (Con) 163
4, Sami Dwesar (Con) 152
5, Claire Bonham (LibDem) 150
6, Margaret Bird (Con) 140
7, Mike Bonello (Lab) 137
8, Simon Fox (Con) 132
9, Rowenna Davis (Lab) 117
10, Gayle Gander (Con) 114
Two years on from the historic 2022 local elections in Croydon, Mayor Jason Perry is at the halfway mark of his administration, making this an ideal time to review the performance of councillors, many of whom receive not only a backbench allowance but also tens of thousands of pounds in SRAs, or special responsibility allowances.
Just what do they do for that money, residents often ask.
Casework volumes are but one measurement of a councillor’s workload, and effectiveness, as former councillor Robert Canning explained last year. There are other things that take up the time of our 70 councillors, like ward tours, police liaison meetings, ward surgeries (though some councillors duck even those), oh, and delivering leaflets, thousands of them, for their political parties…
Many of these activities are unmeasured or unmeasurable. But there is a council system in place that keeps a check of casework volumes. Many other local authorities choose to publish these figures. Croydon opts not to do so. We’ll leave you to consider why that might be.
But the figures are available, through an Freedom of Information request, and this year, just like last year, Inside Croydon posed the awkward question, and got some less-surprising answers.
For the civic year 2023- 2024, collectively, Croydon’s 70 councillors handled 3,928 pieces of casework – enquiries, requests, planning application queries and pleas for help from the residents in their wards.
That’s an average of 56 pieces of casework for each councillor over the course of the year – little more than one a week. Some, clearly, take this task a good deal more seriously than others.
Tomorrow, Inside Croydon will be handing out its Toss-cars, the annual awards for the feckless, the lazy and the vastly overpaid.
Will anyone challenge last year’s laziest Croydon councillor, Labour’s Clive Fraser, for his title?- Could anyone have submitted fewer than the two members’ enquiries submitted in 2022-2023 by Tory councillor Richard Chatterjee (Who he? Ed)?
- And will anyone manage to render themselves more expensive to the public purse than Tory cabinet member Scott Roche, who last year, pro-rata, got paid £13,000 for each piece of casework he handled?
We know: you can’t wait. You’re just going to have to, while we absorb the detail surrounding those councillors who do try to be as diligent as possible.
Every councillor has the opportunity to submit casework through the council’s case management system.
Our FoI request shows all the casework logged via the council system. It is not a perfect measure of how much casework is handled – some councillors may not always log individual enquiries with council officials – but it does provide a kind of benchmark. And it can also identify which councillors might just be taking the piss.
The figures show, too, that this is not necessarily a partisan thing: there are lazier councillors among Labour as well as Tories.
Croydon’s Top 10 for 2023-2024 comprises four Labour councillors, five Conservative and the borough’s only Liberal Democrat councillor, Claire Bonham, who represents Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood ward (fifth, with 150).
More productive: LibDem councillor Claire Bonham did 15 times the number of official enquiries than a ward colleague
The figures show that Bonham carried out more than double the casework of one of her ward colleagues (Labour councillor Nina Degrads, who did just 60) and handled 15 times more cases than the other Labour councillor for the ward, Patsy Cummings, who did less than one piece of case work per month.
While on the subject of Upper Norwood: bizarrely, the official figures include a single piece of casework for Pat Ryan, who has not been a councillor since 2022 (some might argue he stopped being a functioning councillor some time before that…).
This year, unlike the previous 12 months, the councillors did not have the excuse of not having received their casework management system training, as the council newcomers did after the May 2022 elections.
Over the past couple of years Croydon’s councillors, many of whom played a part in bankrupting the borough, have often parroted the line about regaining the public’s trust.
Some might have to consider seriously whether they can continue to take the public’s votes for granted if we review this kind of information each year between now and when Croydon next stages its local elections, in 2026.
Last year’s league tables: Revealed: Croydon’s laziest and costliest local councillors
Read more: Measure the effectiveness of councillors, not just the casework
Read more: Making the case for councillors’ casework to be made public
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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
Fairly likely that Croydon’s better performing MPs are doing 5,000 items of casework a year, a good deal of those being council related.
Have you checked how many state-funded caseworkers each of them employs to do that work?
Typically 2 caseworkers, plus the MP.