CROYDON IN CRISIS: After four years of waiting in the wind and rain, the borough’s bus passengers are about to have much-missed street furniture replaced – but no thanks to Mayor Perry and our dysfunctional council.
PLUS: the official list of the locations for replacement shelters
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Re-instated: Transport for London is installing 99 bus shelters in the coming weeks
Transport for London is spending £3.2million to replace 99 bus shelters on the streets of Croydon that the borough’s incompetent senior council officials ordered to be ripped out in 2021 after they had struck a “deal” with an American con artist.
In total, around 110 bus stops will be equipped with shelters under the TfL programme – 75 sites fewer than Croydon Council had offered under its worthless £6.8million contract with Valo Smart City.
TfL already operated some of its own bus shelters in the borough, and they installed four new shelters at town centre bus stops last year.
“We want to make bus journeys in Croydon more attractive and comfortable, which is why we’ve been working to ensure that, wherever possible, there are replacements for all 110 stops that had shelters in 2021,” a TfL spokesperson told Inside Croydon.
In 2020, when negotiating a “smart” shelters deal with American-owned Valo Smart City, Croydon officials included a total of 185 “sites” in the deal. But not all of these were bus shelters. Nearly 60 were roadside advertising columns or rectangular posts, all of which had a power supply to enable poster ads to be illuminated.
“Shelters are being installed where there is the greatest need and where they can be most effective at improving journeys for passengers,” TfL told Inside Croydon.
“More than 88,000 people a day use the bus network in Croydon and the new shelters will encourage even more people to use one of the borough’s most affordable and sustainable modes of transport.
Carl Eddleston, TfL’s director of network management and resilience, said: “These new bus shelters will provide much needed travel infrastructure to the residents of Croydon and we’re delighted to be installing these 99 new shelters. London’s bus network plays a vital role in keeping the capital moving and we hope that these new shelters will encourage more local residents to use the network.
“We’ll continue to work with the Croydon Council and all boroughs to improve our infrastructure and enable more people to choose sustainable forms of travel.”
After four wet and windy winters, TfL’s decisive action brings to an end another embarrassing saga of incompetence at Fisher’s Folly.
Croydon had been one of only two boroughs in the capital to manage its own bus shelter portfolio, under a deal with JC Decaux that maintained the street equipment and shared modest advertising revenue with the council.
Long wait: not a single ‘smart’ shelter, with wifi and digital equipment, ever got beyond the stage of shiny CGI pictures
But in 2020, Croydon handed smooth-talking American conman Isaac Sutton a 10-year multi-million 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.
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.
Croydon Council still maintains that it conducted proper due diligence on Isaac Sutton and his business track record. A simple Google search shows Sutton was behind a series of failed or ghost businesses, and had been subject to 14 court dockets in the United States in four years.
None of the “smart” shelters promised for Croydon 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.
In fact, as well as tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of legal fees incurred in chasing down the bogus businessman to get him to deliver what they now admit he was never going to deliver, Croydon Council also squandered more than £100,000 in lost advertising revenues that would have been received over the course of four shelter-less years under the previous, “non-smart” arrangements with street-side advertising specialists JC Decaux.
The question asked of senior council officials by one perceptive councillor at a scrutiny committee last year remains stubbornly unanswered: “Why did it take four years to find out?”
Opama Khan, Croydon’s “head of digital services, access and reach” when she worked in Fisher’s Folly, 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.
Even by his own dim standards, Conservative Mayor Jason 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.
This week, piss-poor Perry, describing the replacement of the bus shelters as “one of my key priorities”, he said, “I am glad to see site surveys happening across the borough.” Which is nice.
Not for the first time, London’s Labour Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, is getting Perry out of a hole of Croydon’s own making.
TfL came forward 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.
TfL explained the choice of location for the replacement shelters by saying, “All remaining locations have already had TfL shelters installed, are planned to have shelters installed as part of a different programme or are in locations where shelters are no longer needed or suitable.”
The decisions now are TfL’s, not Croydon Council’s. 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. Minutes of a council meeting say, “TfL were experts in bus shelter delivery who best understood their customers and had existing relationships with suppliers.”
The implication is clear: this is another area in which Croydon Council is not competent.
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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