CROYDON IN CRISIS: Work has begun for the installation of bus shelters replacing street infrastructure removed by Croydon Council almost four years ago. But TfL is only providing shelters for two-thirds of the former sites. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Sir Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London is coming to the aid of Tory-controlled Croydon yet again.
But even TfL’s rescue mission with 114 new shelters will leave Croydon with more than 70 bus stops without the convenience of the shelters that they had had before the bungling council got involved.
Coming to a street near you, possibly: after four years, TfL has stepped in to replace Croydon’s missing shelters
Work began just before Christmas to survey the borough’s bus stops, preparing for the installation of replacements four years after 185 perfectly serviceable shelters were ripped out of Croydon’s pavements.
That removal of shelters was all part of a get-rich-quick scheme offered by a New York-based con man, which council directors have admitted more recently “was never going to be delivered”.
Installation work across the borough on the TfL replacement shelters is expected to begin next month, and should be completed by March. Bus stops with the most passengers will be getting their new shelters first.
Dodgy: Valo Smart City’s Isaac Sutton
Yet none of this would have ever really been necessary had it not been for the intervention of thunderingly naive or staggeringly incompetent council staff.
Croydon Council handed smooth-talking American businessman Isaac Sutton a 10-year deal to replace the borough’s bus shelters in a revenue-sharing scheme based on roadside adverts. This was despite the fact that Sutton’s Valo Smart City company had never built a bus shelter before, nor ever sold a single ad in this country. This, apparently, did not ring any alarm bells with senior management at Croydon Council.
None of the “smart” shelters promised by Valo Smart City were ever delivered, and not a penny of the £6.8million advertising income that was dangled before gullible officials at the cash-strapped council was ever received.
According to Nick Hibberd, the council’s corporate director of “sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery”, the Valo shelters “were never really funded”.
Statement of the obvious: Nick Hibberd told the scrutiny committee that Valo’s promise ‘was never going to be delivered’
Hibberd was addressing a scrutiny committee of councillors last year, where chair Alasdair Stewart asked the bleedin’ obvious: “Why did it take four years to find out?”
Between 2020, when the council still claims that it really did undertake proper competitive tendering for its street advertising contract, until the middle of last year, the council ran up untold costs in trying the manage its contract with Sutton and Valo, while its bus passengers were left soaking and shivering for four winters whenever they were waiting on the borough’s windswept streets.
The last set of accounts for Valo’s Croydon-based business showed the grand total of £660 cash in the bank, and £1.9million debts. Bailiffs found the Valo office deserted when they came knocking.
Although it does not seem credible, Croydon Council still maintains that it conducted proper due diligence on Isaac Sutton and his business track record. A simple Google search shows Suttonwas behind a series of failed or ghost businesses, and had been subject to 14 court dockets in the United States in four years.
“We agreed to a promise that was never going to be delivered,” Hibberd told the scrutiny committee. None of the elected councillors on the committee bothered to ask “Why?”
Waiting in the rain: Croydon Mayor Jason Perry has done nothing to replace the borough’s vanished bus shelters
The Croydon bus shelter saga is just the latest fiasco to afflict the council, where procurement processes have been a constant source of concern and suspicion.
It yet again demonstrates the staggering incompetence of Croydon’s dysfunctional council. Hibberd – who was not working at Croydon when the Valo deal was done – still took some time before he was eventually forced to admit to the scrutiny committee meeting that the authority really is incapable of managing bus shelter infrastructure. Whatever you do, don’t ever trust them to organise a piss-up in a brewery.
It is also another example of a Jason Perry broken promise. Perry had made restoring the bus shelters among his many election pledges before he was voted in as Croydon Mayor in 2022. Now, piss-poor Perry is relying on TfL to dig him, and blundering council officials, out of a hole.
Even by his own dim standards, Conseravtive Mayor Perry was glacially slow on the uptake about Croydon’s vanished bus shelters, still claiming until late 2023 that he was going to get fly-by-night company Valo to honour their contract and deliver the bus shelters.
At the scrutiny committee meeting to discuss the replacement plan, Perry was sitting alongside Hibberd when the council official admitted Valo’s promise was bogus. “That level of income was never going to be viable,” Hibberd said.
Perry sat there, looking gormless.
Admission of defeat: the council’s presentation on replacement bus shelters, after the abject failure of the commercial deal with Valo Smart Cities
The scrutiny meeting revealed that in 2024, when seeking replacement shelters, there was no third-party commercial interest in taking on a 10-year bus shelter provision deal with the council, which raises further question marks over the supposed competitive procurement process that was undertaken in 2020, when someone making decisions at the council actually thought doing business with Valo Smart Cities was a good idea.
According to figures laid out to the scrutiny committee, the council had only generated a maximum of £34,000 in annual advertising revenue from its bus shelters in the past – which makes the £650,000 per year plus offered by Valo seem all the more fanciful. And highly suspicious.
Not that anyone at Croydon Council twigged. But then, this was at a time of “peak Negrini” at Croydon Council.
Opama Khan, Croydon’s “head of digital services, access and reach”, was still claiming in September 2023 that the Valo bus shelter deal was “progressing well”. Croydon had ripped out its regular bus shelters two and a half years earlier.
Khan describes herself as a “specialist in delivering complex digital transformation, innovative public digital infrastructure and smart city innovation”. She also claims that she has a “strong track record of delivering strategic programmes within complex public and private sector organisations”.
Khan left her job at Croydon Council in March 2024, without a single Valo smart shelter ever being installed. Khan now works as “acting director technology and workplace” at Hackney Council. Lucky them!
Re-instated: one of the four TfL replacement shelters being installed last year
TfL came forward eventually to resolve the shelter problem in Croydon because they found that the absence of even such basic infrastructure was having an adverse impact on their passenger numbers on some south London routes.
But even they have undertaken to replace fewer than two-thirds of the missing shelters.
Hibberd, when asked by a committee member for a timeline of the council’s meetings with Valo, was unable to provide one. It sounded like it was all too much bother to dredge through the past to determine how we had reached this point.
“What I can say is that there were a very significant number of meetings that took place, both with Valo Smart City but also with out legal team in relation to trying to ensure we could get the Valo contract delivered,” Hibberd said, while Perry beside him scribbled some notes.
Lessons, Hibberd assured those paying attention, had been learned.
New bus shelters are to be located at the same bus stops that had shelters previously – apart from the 71 bus stops that won’t be getting a replacement. Locations with the highest footfall and least complicated installations would likely be the first considered, but the decision would be TfL’s, not Croydon Council’s or its residents. That control had been ceded to TfL who were providing the new shelters under what one official stressed is an “agreement”, and not a contract.
The messaging was clear: “TfL were experts in bus shelter delivery who best understood their customers and had existing relationships with suppliers,” the meeting minutes note.
As the past four years have shown, providing a borough’s own bus shelters and maintaining them is expensive, and not something that is within Croydon Council’s area of competence.
But then, what is?
According to the meeting minutes: “The Executive Mayor…”, meaning Perry, “…acknowledged that it had taken a long time to remediate the situation, but stated that it had been important to protect the council from legal exposure.”
And there are upsides to having TfL take over the management of Croydon’s bus shelters, since the transport authority already provides a large amount of infrastructure in the borough including the trams, some A roads, traffic lights and ULEZ cameras. “TfL and the council already worked in partnership on a daily basis,” the meeting was told.
Which only serves to raise again the question of why anyone in the senior echelons of Croydon Council ever thought it was a good idea to pursue a business relationship with a character as dodgy as Isaac Sutton?
Read more: Perry in another U-turn over borough’s vanishing bus shelters
Read more: Perry drops action against bus shelter firm and loses £500,000
Read more: Company behind ‘smart’ bus shelters has CCJs for unpaid bills
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The whole saga appears to be straight out of the Arthur Daley or Derek Trotter catalogue of get rich quick schemes. Maybe someone did make some money as there appears to be no business justification for engaging with Valo Smart City.
You might think that, David.
We could not possibly comment…
“(Opama) Khan left her job at Croydon Council in March 2024, without a single Valo smart shelter ever being installed. Khan now works as “acting director technology and workplace” at Hackney Council. Lucky them!”
She is another example of the scandal of the local government gravy train. Even when Croydon eventually rids itself of the Kerswell, she will simply swan off to another council to ruin them as well !
Katherine Kerswell is 63. This has been all about an extra five years in her pension pot.
There is an unwritten code in both public service and politics that one’s integrity will erode the higher up one rises. With very few exceptions those who rise to the top have also sold their souls.
Despite this serious character flaw, there are many who appear quite nice charismatic people and are often seen asking for our vote every four years.
In terms of keeping the rain off, good.
However, even in Bromley Borough, and perhaps elsewhere, when bus shelters are replaced, the Countdown display of routes and arrival times, is getting omitted to be transferred by TfL.
This is a very useful service, for instance, in deciding which bus to wait for if there is a choice, giving hope to passengers and, very importantly, allowing them to see the bus arrival times without the risk of putting an expensive mobile phone with bus time app on display and poring over it as prey to the next electric scooter or bike thief.
Mmm, Valo had never built any bus shelters before and Polaska who have the contract for the Purley Pool rebuild don’t seem to have delivered any similar projects. Good “lessons learnt” example there….