IT’S TOSS-CAR TIME
Now is the time when Inside Croydon can reveal those councillors who really couldn’t give a toss, the ones who have done least to hold Mayor Perry, chief exec Katherine Kerswell and their officials to account, or conduct casework for their residents.
Based on official statistics, we have unearthed some startling figures which suggest that some of our elected representatives are getting tens of thousands of pounds of your cash for doing… well, not a great deal
Mayor Jason Perry and Croydon Conservatives are about to give a hearty slap on the back, and an extra eight grand of tax-payers’ money, to one of the Town Hall’s least busy, possibly laziest councillors.
Richard Chatterjee has been a Croydon councillor for 22 years, yet he is one of the least well-known of the borough’s 70 councillors.
That’s possibly because he is one of the councillors that does the least work, according to official figures obtained from Croydon Council through a Freedom of Information request.
They show that the councillor for Shirley North managed the grand total of just 12 members’ enquiries in the whole of the past year – just about one a month!
That, at least, is an improvement over the previous FoI’d period, when Chatterjee managed to submit just two enquiries on behalf of residents in Shirley.
Nonetheless, the retired civil servant still trousered £20,277.60 in councillor special responsibility allowances last year – he has one of the Town Hall’s many “non-jobs”, as vice-chair of the scrutiny committee.
Having a mayor: Richard Chatterjee
And next Wednesday, at the pointless mutual back-slapping event of the annual “mayor-making”, Chatterjee will step up to wear the chain and robes of office as the borough’s deputy civic mayor. Yep, we’re not just paying powerless Perry £82,000 for not doing very much, but we have a ceremonial mayor (for 2024 to 2025, that is to be Labour’s Kola Agboola, following his magnificent service to the borough in his… [checks notes]… three years as a councillor) and a deputy, who both get extra dosh for doing very little.
In Chatterjee’s case, this version of Buggin’s turn might see him get a little bit less council cash than he was paid last year. But if things go to plan, and Chatterjee steps up to be civic mayor in 12 months’ time, he can look forward to a very generous £27,592 for doing next-to-nothing while wearing fancy dress.
All of this, however, does not win Chatterjee our 2024 Toss-car, for the councillor who did the least casework during the past year.
The Shirley councillor’s new-found productiveness saw him rise from bottom of the work-shy league table to be just the 10th worst in the year just gone.
But Inside Croydon can now confirm that the Croydon councillor who submitted the fewest members’ enquiries between May 2023 to this year was…
Drum roll…
Labour’s Alisa Flemming with a grand total of:
1
Numptiest of Numpties: Alisa Flemming, who submitted just a single member’s enquiry all year
Yep. That’s right, one of the numptiest of Newman’s Numpties, a former council cabinet member who did more than her fair share to bankrupt the borough, submitted just a solitary member’s enquiry throughout 2023-2024.
In so doing, Norbury Park councillor Flemming, who has been on the council since 2010, has set a new Croydon all-comers’ record, beating the two members’ requests submitted in a year by Chatterjee in 2023.
Based on the basic councillor’s allowance paid to Flemming (no special responsibilities for her these days), that single members’ request cost the borough’s residents almost £12,000.
But that does not make Flemming the borough’s most expensive councillor…
For the second consecutive year, that unwanted honour goes to Conservative cabinet member Scott Roche.
Roche (Shirley South) is one of three councillors who submitted just two members’ enquiries in the year – and that’s one fewer than he bothered doing in the previous civic year.
Roche is a full-time politico, his combined income of around £80,000 per year all paid for by the tax-payer. Cushty!
He has a day job as an assistant to an MP (Sutton and Cheam’s Paul Scully) which sees him paid up to £42,000. On top of that, he was paid £39,195.12 for his role as Perry’s cabinet member for streets and environment.
Based on that, Tory Roche is Croydon’s most expensive councillor, each of his member enquiries costing the Council Tax-payers of this borough £19,597.56.
Nice work if you can get it…
In the bottom four with Roche is another Conservative councillor for Shirley, Sue Bennett. The people of Shirley seem especially ill-served by their seemingly lackadaisical councillors.
Croydon’s councillor relegation zone
61, Richard Chatterjee (CON) 12
62, Patsy Cummings (LAB) 10
63=, Eunice O’Dame (LAB) 9
63=, Mohammed Islam (LAB) 9
65, Jason Cummings (CON) 6
66, Adele Benson (CON) 5
67=, Sherwan Chowhury (LAB) 2
67=, Scott Roche (CON) 2
67=, Sue Bennett (CON) 2
70, Alisa Flemming (LAB) 1
That bottom 10 includes five of Labour’s 34 councillors and five of the 33 Conservative councillors.
The LibDem and Green councillors appear to have worked hard enough to avoid such embarrassment.
Expensive: Tory cabinet member Scott Roche
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.
Jason Cummings, the cabinet member for finance (and the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Croydon East when the General Election comes round), is a ward colleague of Roche, and another in the bottom 10 for recorded members’ enquiries (six all year…).
He told Inside Croydon that the members’ enquiries numbers is “just one metric on it’s own”.
Cummings said: “Most of what we do can’t be ‘searched’ very easily. Time spent with residents’ associations, for example, meeting prep, officer meetings, estate walkabout, casework not in the app, email responses, street-based defect reporting, graffiti, there are loads of things that we do that take lots of time but no system logs them.
“I work full time as a councillor, so I don’t feel like I’m poor value, but if people want to present me that way then they can. It goes with job these days.”
None of which explains why Croydon Council still fails to publish this data, as is common practice with many other local authorities.
Last year’s league tables: Revealed: Croydon’s laziest and costliest local councillors
This year’s league tables: Toss-cars 2024: How much work has your councillor done?
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
You do your readers and Councillor Roche a disservice.
He may appear to be the joint second most bone-idle Member of Croydon council, but you’ve not included his media appearances.
Barely a month goes by without his cheesy smile appearing in a publicity shot, alongside our part-time Mayor, quite often taken in a children’s playground. All that hard work takes time, effort and money (all of it ours).
Funny how Scott gets more media appearances with Jason than anyone else in the Cabinet. Are our council taxes being used to further the career ambitions of the soon-to-be redundant PA to Paul Scully MP?
I think we should be told
I am uncertain what exact time period your article covers but nevertheless you are correct… what is done in the dark will always come to light!
Here is my confession…until recently I had been a little bit naughty and had not been submitting my casework through the correct channels via the members app. I experienced issues with the app and had been submitting it directly to the relevant officers for which I have been reprimanded and am now submitting it correctly.
I’ve taken a brief trail through my sent emails for the year… I have not included duplicate emails or intermediary responses on the same cases. I have not included external emails to outside organisations such as Croydon University Hospital or friends of local parks etc or helping to arrange two separate funerals. Equally if a ward colleague submits an enquiry first we copy each other in so we don’t then resend it. There are a few colleagues who I have asked to submit casework on my behalf via the app many related to fly tips whilst I didn’t have access and they are welcome to confirm if they so wish.
You are welcome to undertake an FOI to corroborate the information below. I accept that your article is based upon the information you may have been supplied with rather than any ill will and respond in that spirit to offer further clarification.
Best wishes
Cllr Alisa Flemming
Below is some of the casework undertaken relating only to internal council structures:
June sheltered housing
June nursery
June immigration
June fostering
June nursery visit
June planning
June local parade
June rough sleeping submitted by Cllr Karen Jewitt
June housing re chase
July vehicles in norbury park
July local community sports request
July housing
July DV case
August housing
September housing
September housing DV
September YP intervention support
September social care
October housing
October housing
October housing
November housing/health
November planning
November food poverty
November housing
December education
December housing
December housing
December Remembrance Day
December housing
February 2024-parking
February faulty lights
25 April helped me to start reusing the correct channels
April onwards back to submitting via correct channels.
Touché Inside Croydon. First time for everything.
Now Councillor Flemming has changed the narrative we can focus on other matters.
Such as how the Conservatives generate their candidates for higher offices in Politics.
Councillor Roche has never shone as somebody known for hard work as a bread and butter grafter in the work they are employed to do. This may not be surprising representing the dead zone of Shirley where performance seems to be measured in how little you do. A true definition of Conservatism.
Somehow he moves forever forward into positions of greater power and acquires the inevitable MP sidekick roles and local government cabinet sinecure. When he commenced his career he made a great deal of his identity as a gay man the best part of a decade ago. Over the last few years this aspect has not been so prominent in his utterances. So perhaps the suppression of beliefs is an attribute that Conservatives deem as positive for higher office.
After the eclipse in the rise of Mario Creatura in local Croydon Politics he is now clearly the younger Tory destined for a run as an MP or the easier waters for a Shirley politician on the Greater London Assembly and accumulate a huge pot as old Dorset Silent Steve O’Connell is now enjoying. Lets hope for our sakes he does not fall into those grooves of self serving mediocrity.
My thoughts too Delboy. It’s no accident that our money is being used to generate publicity for Perry’s right hand man