EXCLUSIVE: Our Town Hall number-cruncher, SANDRA STEAD, has checked out the updates to the register of interests of all 70 Croydon councillors and Mayor Perry – from 50p passion fruits to hundreds of pounds’ worth of free tickets to Selhurst Park
Keeping in check: iC has gone through councillors’ declarations of interests, because the council staff paid to do so have not been up to the job
After spending millions of Council Tax-payers’ pounds on the Town Hall’s drive to become “digital first”, and millions more on expensive consultants to tell them how to cut even more jobs (while Mayor Perry and Katherine Kerswell were awarding themselves with juicy pay rises), Inside Croydon has discovered what Fisher’s Folly really needs is… a simple spreadsheet.
This website has done the council’s Monitoring Officer’s job for him by exposing three councillors who failed to fulfil the requirements of the law and the council’s Code of Conduct by not updating their register of interests as required.
This week, we checked the declarations of interest of all 70 of Croydon’s councillors (who are all paid a basic allowance £11,692, for now, right through to the £84,000 salary to be paid to Croydon’s part-time Mayor).
The result is our exclusive table below, with councillors and Mayor listed alphabetically, and correct as at yesterday’s date, January 16, 2024.
You will notice that there appears to have been a flurry of update activity of late, possibly encouraged by our reports on councillors Clive “Thirsty” Fraser, cabinet member Scott Roche and Louis Carserides, which might have embarrassed others into doing the decent thing and keeping their admin up to date.
Declaration: Mayor Jason Perry likes cake.
Admin’s not a problem for Mayor Perry: he has staff, full-time council employees working for him, handling his correspondence (of which we are assured there is plenty) and even answering the phone for him for at least four hours each weekday.
They also make a point of filling in his register of interests – including listing his work as a wholesale trader selling flammable plastic cladding and his oh-so-close relationship as a director of Croydon BID.
They have also managed to keep a check on every single gift that Perry has received since he became Mayor in May 2022, from a coconut from Surrey Street stall-holder Jose Joseph (“est. value £6”), through to all those freebie tickets taken by the Crystal Palace season ticket-holder to enjoy corporate hospitality at Selhurst Park (to a total value of almost £500). It seems as though those football invites have dried up of late, now that Palace have got the planning permission for their new stand…
It would be fair to say that Mayor Perry is often a little vague about the true value of some of the multitide of freebies and gifts he has received since taking office. After all, how do you say to your host: “How much is this lavish three-course dinner, with wine, for myself and the lady wife, really worth?”.
Lush: Mayor Perry reckoned that a meal for four in this restaurant at Birch was worth just £100
And there may be some gifts that he only accepts out of politeness: three books from Croydon Harriers coach Mike Fleet? There’s been no sign of Mayor Perry getting into training for the London Marathon as a result.
Perhaps the stand-out example was the estimate by Mayor Perry, or one of his flunkies, of a dinner for four in the chef-led restaurant at the swanky Birch Hotel (better known as the Selsdon Park) valued at a mere £100. That seems very much on the low side, or it might explain why Birch went bust soon after.
In May 2022, shortly after the most recent local elections, Mayor Perry and Croydon’s 70 councillors started with a clean slate on their registers of interests. It has been their responsibility to ensure that their register of interests have been updated since then. Of course, if there’s been no substantive change to a councillor’s employment status, there would be no need to make any changes.
Nothing to declare: only one councillor has not updated their register since being elected in May 2022
Overall, it is Conservative councillors with the worst average “weeks since updated” score of 65 weeks, or 15 months.Maybe our Tory councillors really are all in stable, long-term jobs. Or just retired.
Labour are slightly better with and average of 56 weeks, or 13 months.
Curiously, Alisa Flemming, the councillor for Norbury Park and previously a cabinet member under discredited council leader Tony Newman, has never bothered to update her register of interests since the 2022 council elections. Flemming has been a Croydon councillor since 2010. Her last register update was November 4, 2021, when she declared that she has no job outside the council and holds no directorships in any commercial companies.
The Greens and LibDems, newly elected as councillors in 2022, are squeaky clean, although Ria Patel and Esther Sutton both declared the donation of a passion fruit from a Surrey Street market trader in their Fairfield ward, each with an estimated value of 50p.
Another curiosity is that veteran Tory councillor Margaret Bird (Old Coulsdon) declares that she has her green garden waste collected 26 times a year and that she is in possession of a “members’ parking permit” – even though the council has said that “there are no free parking permits provided to the Mayor or councillors” any longer.
All of the details for the Mayor and every councillor’s business and other interests should be available on their individual profile page of the council’s website. It is well worth a visit from time to time – these are people who seek your vote in order to take public office, and the public deserves some transparency and honesty about how they conduct themselves.
And as iC’s coverage has established, the council officials paid to keep a check on councillors’ conduct are simply not doing the job.
Read more: Planning councillor failed to declare his new job for 8 months
Read more: South Norwood councillor quits as special advisor at DEFRA
Read more: Cabinet member Roche goes months without updating register
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Is there an insinuation in this article that Mayor Perry sunk the Birch Hotel in Selsdon by producing a performance of the magnitude of Mr Creosote to blow it’s financial viability in one single visit?
You do have a vivid imagination, Delboy. But yes
If Larry the Prat won’t do this part of his job, the council should outsource the task – to Inside Croydon!
An interesting article, requiring some research, thank you.
A problem though, is whether Members have failed to declare new interests for up to 3+ years, or that they have truthfully had no interests to add in that time.
Is there a requirement to periodically, say quarterly, that their declarations are full and up to date? How soon after a change or receipt of hospitality, are they required to register it? I think there is also a minimum threshold, possibly £25?
I once attended another Town Hall, on the 90s, to view in person, a burgundy-bound paper register. Now the register is online.
The matter that arises, though, is that those who have declared their interests are the better ones. Those who have been in receipt of hospitality and deliberately failed to register it cannot be revealed by looking at the register.
This is a parallel of the infamous and ungainly phrase by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld re. Iraqi weapons, about ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’.