A Top 10 no council wants to be in: but the Local Government Ombudsman prefers a more statistically nuanced league table of complained about boroughs
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Four years since Katherine Kerswell was installed as Croydon’s chief executive, and figures from the Local Government Ombudsman confirm that our council is among the most complained about in England. And soon, our council might be forced to admit their mistakes to the public. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Among the worst: Croydon is getting hundreds of complaints under council CEO Katherine Kerswell
It’s official. According to new figures released by the Local Government Ombudsman, Croydon Council is among the worst of all local authorities in the country – by whatever measure you might choose to use.
It is now four years since Katherine Kerswell was parachuted in to the top job at Fisher’s Folly, following the abrupt but very rewarding exit of Jo “Negreedy” Negrini.
Despite surrounding herself with more director-level council bosses than even empire-building Negrini ever employed, Croydon’s £192,000 per year CEO is presiding over a local authority that is in the “Top 10” of councils for the volume of complaints, for the number of complaints upheld by the Ombudsman, and for the number of complaints upheld per head of population.
Croydon is one of only two local authorities to make it into the worst 10 performing councils according to the LGO’s statistics by any measure. So top marks for consistency, if nothing else. The other to make all three Top 10s of those Ombudsman figures is Tory-run Surrey County Council.
The harsh reality of the LGO figures ought to be a wake-up call to elected Mayor Jason Perry, as he enters the final stretch of his four-year term. The Ombudsman’s numbers suggest that he has made little difference to satisfaction levels – dissatisfaction levels – with the cash-strapped council among the borough’s long-suffering residents.
What’s worse for Kerswell and piss-poor Perry is that the recently appointed Ombudsman is considering forcing recalcitrant councils to publish on their own websites the official reports on all the complaints upheld against them – an obvious step towards improved openness, transparency and improved governance, but something the CEO and Mayor have so far refused to do in Croydon.
The Local Government Ombudsman’s annual report for 2023-2024 shows how they handled 17,937 complaints from the public. That’s up from 15,488 in 2022-2023.
It is also worth pointing out here that just lodging a complaint with the LGO is neither simple nor easy, and usually requires a resident to have some knowledge of how to navigate through a maze of red tape and civic procedures. They need to be organised and determined.
Procedures vary from authority to authority, but in all cases, a resident must first lodge a complaint with the body they want to complain about. Yes, that’s right: ask the council to mark its own homework. This can often take several weeks.
Then, if the council fails to resolve the issue satisfactorily, Croydon residents are expected to lodge a second complaint… again with the council. They get to mark their own homework for a second time. This process often takes even longer.
Only if this “Stage Two complaint” fails to deliver a resolution can a member of the public escalate the matter to the Ombudsman – and they have to do that within 12 months of the issue arising.
So any numbers reported by the Ombudsman represent the tip of a complaints iceberg.
The LGO has gradually revised the way that they have presented their data, to the point where they now provide figures for the total number of complaints received and the total number of complaints upheld, and then for the upheld number calculated per 100,000 population in the local authority.
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (to give it its full title) has long avoided doing anything so crass as to create league tables of the worst offending boroughs. But there’s nothing to stop us doing that with a bit of number crunching on the official data.
Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, once again tops the table for outright number of complaints, at 493. The “Top 10” of most complained about councils is dominated by Tory-run county councils in the south-east, with Surrey, Kent and Essex ranked third, fourth and fifth.
More than one-quarter of the total complaints received by the LGO over the past 12 months, 4,666, were about education and children’s services, the most complained-about category of service.
The LGO received a total of 186 complaints about Croydon Council.
Of these:
- 30 were about Adult Social Care;
- 23 were about Benefits and Tax;
- 9 were about “corporate and other services”;
- 22 were on Education and Children’s Services;
- 19 were Environmental Services, Public Protection and Regulation;
- 21 for Highways and Transport;
- 48 were on housing;
- 12 were on planning and development;
- 2 “others”.
Those figures placed Croydon as the 10th most complained about council in the country. Only one other London borough, Lambeth, attracted more complaints (249).
But what that “volume” league table does not measure is the validity of the complaints. Bigger authorities, like Birmingham and Transport for London (422 complaints received), are going to attract more complaints just because of the size and scale of their operation. And even the worst-run councils might, just might, have one or two busy, vexatious residents out there.
So a fairer measure of council incompetency might be found in the number of complaints upheld by the Ombudsman.
Over the course of the last year, when it comes to the number of upheld complaints, Surrey County Council tops the table with 141 – 43.5% of the 324 complaints received.
So much for “well-run” Tory shire councils – four of the worst five are/were Conservative-run county councils. Birmingham is second on the upheld list, 115 of their 493 – 23.3% – being upheld.
Fair measure: there are other measures of a council’s performance, or lack of it, including housing ombudsman complaints and Council Tax charges. But these figures of upheld complaints per 100k population put Croydon firmly among the worst authorities in the country
Inevitably, Croydon Council makes it on to the list of the “Top 10” of upheld complaints, with 43 of the 186 upheld (23.1%). Croydon is the worst performing of all London councils for upheld complaints.
But when averaged out over the size of its population, the sort-of-official rottenest borough of 2023-2024 happens to be Haringey, the north London council scoring 13.8 upheld complaints per 100,000 of population (they had 36 complaints upheld out of 167). Haringey is one of seven London boroughs in the Top 10, just ahead of Kensington and Chelsea (13.7 upheld per 100k), while overall Torbay ranks third (12.9 upheld complaints per 100k).
And once again, under Kerswell and Perry, Croydon is right in there among the worst of the worst, ranked eighth in England and fifth in London, with 11.6 upheld complaints per 100,000 population, worse than even Lambeth or Tower Hamlets.
In fact, Bromley (Tory-run) has done worse than Croydon in the past year, with 12.1 Ombudsman-upheld complaints per 100,000 population.
None of which matters one jot if the public don’t get to discover how well, or badly, their local council is performing.
While councils have to lodge an adverse Ombudsman’s report with councillors, there is currently nothing to force councils to report to the public when they have had a complaint upheld against them.
Nor are they compelled to publish the Ombudsman’s usually detailed findings of their own shortcomings on their own websites.
New vision: Amerdeep Somal, the Local Government Ombudsman
Amerdeep Somal, the lawyer who was recently appointed to the LGO’s top job, appears more willing than her predecessors to remedy this.
“Where we have found a council at fault, it has a statutory duty to report our findings to elected members,” she said, using councilspeak. She means councillors.
“There is no duty for councils to report our findings to members of the public, such as on their websites, but I would welcome any such practice that councils take to widen the transparency and scrutiny of how complaints are responded to.”
There are, of course, other measures of how well a council is performing, such as the complaints upheld by the separate Housing Ombudsman (Croydon’s one of those landlords that regularly gets a slapped wrist), or there is a league table of local authorities by the scale of their Council Tax charges, another area in which Croydon Council shines, but not in a good way, thanks to Mayor Perry’s 21% hikes.
But as previous studies have shown, Croydon’s poor performance is something that goes back several years.
We wanted to put the suggestion of having Fisher’s Folly better scrutinised and more transparent by having its LGO reports published on the council website to Croydon’s chief executive, Katherine Kerswell.
But she is on the third week of a long summer holiday.
As a well-known fortnightly satirical magazine might put it: Trebles all-round!
Read more: Council chief Kerswell has doubled up on £140,000+ executives
Read more: Kerswell’s council keeps payments to top earners secret
Read more: Criticism of Kerswell’s election count ‘justified’ says report
Read more: Croydon’s council close to the top of the table – for complaints
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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
Switching to mayoral system hasn’t helped. Voting the Conservatives in instead of Labour hasn’t made any difference. A new CEO and a so-called improvement panel have both cost a fortune with nothing to show for it.
It’s time for real change and new approach
Who’s going to invest with our crime rate and minority population on low incomes? Unless private equity and venture capital firms come in and completely gentrify the town, by knocking down everything and rebuilding the town as an Entertainment destination with bars, cafes, restaurants, night clubs and venues for pop concerts and indoor sports that go from day into late night. And creating homes and flats at higher rents and mortgages aiming at the successful remaining middle-upper class of the next generation. This will push out the current minorities and working class even further out of South London… Would that be a good thing…?
But that’s exactly what has been happening, or in Westfield’s case threatening to happen, for the past 20 years
What, exactly, do you mean by ‘minority’? Currently, 51% of Croydon’s population (all ages) are Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups. By 2025 this is predicted to be 56%. Unhelpful terms I think we all need to avoid using. From now on, of course.
And I am a Black person in Croydon, and I can say unless the town is attractive to a new generation of middle class British people who are trained in new technologies and are self-employed high earners, new investment will NOT come here. When “Location, Location, Location” start talking us up, maybe we’ll be on the right track… Go to Bromley and look how well it is kept. The people and council care.
And we cannot pin our hopes on Westfield, that is done. Retail is dead. I’d prefer to see our town rejuvenated as a place for people to socialize in day and night. There is no other town in London that has such wasted potential as ours. It’s unbelievable.
A hat trick of failure.
Personally I can’t see any reason why local authorities aren’t already compelled to publish all upheld complaints against them on their own web sites.
Not that doing that would suddenly improve the situation.
The only long-term solution is to ensure proper funding for local government and professionalize local politicians by paying them to do a full-time job which would mean people from different backgrounds and god forbid people with disabilities could actually afford to do the job and they could get proper on the job training, to ensure that they learn how to do things like scrutinize proposals from officers.
I know the second suggestion won’t be popular, but we pay surgeons, we pay shop assistants, why oh why are local Councillors treated like some halfway between volunteers and employees of the people.
Poor Kerswell – she was doomed from the moment she refused to engage with Inside Croydon! Of course, that includes ALL media. And, most of all, ordinary Croydonians. Like me.
I wonder how many others like me have come to the conclusion that all complaining does is waste more of your time and increase feelings of anger and frustration?? I’m one of the lucky ones because I am moving – I’m done with Croydon.
My friend moved to a countryside town and my mother’s friend’s daughter raises her children in a coastal town. Thank goodness they don’t have to worry about their kids getting into fights, stabbings or seeing open drug use…
Piss poor as standard
Council tax goes into a black hole. Useless mayor out
180 per month on council tax. Absolutely disgusting…
Sorry ’bout that, but complaining makes me feel better Especially if it’s featured on Inside Croydon!