EXCLUSIVE: KEN LEE, our Town Hall reporter, with a leaked internal memo on the appointment of the latest corporate director for Fisher’s Folly
In the hot seat: Nazeya Hussein
Nazeya Hussein, after a career working in local government, has been announced as the new, albeit interim, head of the department known among Fisher’s Folly insiders as “Screw You”.
Screw You, or SCRER according to acronym festishist Katherine Kerswell, the council chief exec, stands for sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery.
There, Hussein is to take over as corporate director from Nick Hibberd, the British international ocean canoeist who after two years spent up shit creek without a paddle at cash-strapped Croydon is bailing out to take on the £187,000 per year job as Bristol City Council’s CEO.
“I wish him every success,” Kerswell gushed with her usual levels of insincerity in an email sent to all staff at the council this morning.
Kerswell’s email was poorly drafted, even a little deceiving, in that it suggested that Hussein “is currently the executive director of place at Lewisham Council”.
Town centre blight: Catford, like Croydon’s North End, has suffered from stalled development for years
Hussein worked at Lewisham Town Hall for only 18 months, all of it as an interim, and must have decided to leave, or had it decided for her, six months ago, as her erstwhile employers were recruiting for a permanent replacement on a salary of “up to £164,000” as long ago as May. If Hussein applied for the permanent position, she didn’t get it.
Hussein may be jumping out of the Lewisham pan into the Croydon fire, as our south London neighbours have similar regeneration issues – that is, nothing is actually happening – over schemes to revive Catford town centre. Kerswell must know this only too well: she pays her own Council Tax on a £1million-plus house in Blackheath, part of Lewisham borough.
“She knows south London well!” gushed Kerswell in her note to staff announcing Hussein’s appointment.
Hussein also sits on the board of the top local government officials’ “union”, SOLACE, the Society of Chief Executives and Senior Managers, where she is the lead on EDI, or equality diversity and inclusion for all English local government.
Hussein arrives in Croydon with the long-delayed Westfield Masterpaln Mk3 promised for early 2025 – when the shopping centre developers are expected to seek to turn the dilapidated town centre that they have blighted for more than a decade into a swathe of thousands of flats, with a bit of retail and hospitality tacked on for appearances sake.
She also has to see in the new Croydon Plan, a document which the Tory Mayor wanted to rewrite, but which the new Labour Government and London Mayor Sadiq Khan might yet have something to say about. How Hussein handles Croydon’s notorious head of planning, Heather Cheesborough, could prove instructive – her predecessors failed to rein-in the council’s dodgy planning department.
“Nazeya is a very experienced and passionate local government officer, and I look forward to welcoming her to our Croydon community,” Kerswell wrote.
Top job: Lewisham’s recruitment ad to replace Hussein appeared six months ago
“As those colleagues working in SCRER will know, many of the Mayor’s Business Plan priorities rest in this directorate.
“To ensure we don’t lose any pace on these important projects, and to deliver a smooth handover, Nazeya will work three days a week at Croydon alongside Nick, starting on Monday November 4.” Which confirms that Hussein had already left her Lewisham job, and prompts the question of why she was never offered the position permanently.
Hussein’s “decision to leave Lewisham fits in with a long-term trend of a high turnover of chief executives and senior officers at Lewisham Council”, according to iC’s Catford correspondent. Can it really be that there are other rotten boroughs in south London as badly managed as Croydon?
Kerswell would have none of it: “Let’s all extend a warm Croydon welcome to Nazeya!”
Gone but not forgotten: it is a decade since Jo Negrini arrived as exec director for ‘Place’ in Croydon
Hussein’s immediate predecessors in Croydon before Hibberd include Shifa Mustafa (or “Must have Fridays off”, as she was known to her staff) and Jo Negrini. So the bar is set very low indeed when it comes to delivery.
Hibberd is leaving a directorate in some disarray, having overseen a fixed consultation and botched closure of four of Croydon’s public libraries, with the “handover” of the buildings to community groups going just as badly as you might expect.
And it was Hibberd who handed a £40million, eight-year contract to rubbish contractors Veolia, less than two years after the council sacked the firm for failures in their service which have lumbered Croydon with the title “London’s filthiest borough”.
Hibberd was appointed by Kerswell in 2022. Hibberd’s time in Croydon has been marked by the on-going failure to replace 180 bus shelters around the borough’s streets, as well as the deeply lacklustre year as the Borough of Culture, while spending millions of tax-payer pounds on special CCTV cameras only to discover that they would not work in this country.
It is to be hoped that Hussein has a trawl through the Inside Croydon archives before her first day next week, so that her month-long transition period with Hibberd won’t be wasted by covering up the non-delivery of her Bristol-bound predecessor.
Read more: Perry allows Westfield to spend £6m ‘fine’ on own interests
Read more: Contractor repaid £3.25m to council over school streets failure
Read more: How businesses profited at expense of the Borough of Culture
Read more: Perry in another U-turn over borough’s vanishing bus shelters
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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
It is interesting that ‘economic recovery’ is in the job title.
That is quite a recognition that Croydon needs an economic recovery and that the Borough has not been participating in the modest UK growth since the 2007 financial crisis.
Since the beginning of the century Greater London has added over a million extra jobs but Croydon has stagnated at the level of employment it had in 2000.
There have been hints from the current Mayoralty of a desire for new businesses that would aid a share for Croydon in extra business rates to the benefit of the bankrupted council.