KEN LEE reports from the frontline of budget discussions at the cash-strapped council, after a meeting where everyone is working very, very hard, but no one in charge bothered to turn up equipped to provide any answers
Very, very important: council director Heather Cheesbrough
Councillors from both larger political parties were left stunned and more than a little peeved at a Town Hall meeting this week when two of Croydon’s most senior directors turned up for the meeting to propose job cuts – but then admitted that they had no idea of how many jobs they wanted to axe.
Heather Cheesbrough and Karen Agbabiaka rolled up at the Town Hall for the streets and environment scrutiny sub-committee on Tuesday evening, where neither of them could answer some of the most basic questions put to them by councillors.
The committee of elected councillors was meeting to review information on three budget proposals to decide whether the proposals are “deliverable, sustainable and not an unacceptable risk”, what impact the proposals might have on the services provided by the council, to ask whether all reasonable alternative options had been explored, and whether Mayor Jason Perry will like the suggestions. Or, in councilspeak, “Do these proposals align with the Mayor’s Business Plan?”
Inside Croydon reported earlier this month on the somewhat credulous findings of the LGA Corporate Peer Challenge, the latest report to be published about the workings of Croydon’s cash-strapped and dysfunctional council.
This Peer Review included the assertion: “Members of the [Corporate Management Team] operate well together as a cohesive and supportive body, and are highly thought of internally and by external partners.”
Yes: highly thought of.
And: cohesive and supportive.
No answers: Karen Agbabiaka
Yet has anything really changed?
This latest scrutiny meeting felt like a throwback to the bad old days under former chief exec Jo Negrini, when her sidekick, Colm Lacey, could turn up for a review of his latest business plan for housebuilders Brick by Brick with every single financial detail deliberately left blank.
Lacey used to approach scrutiny by councillors with undisguised contempt. On Tuesday night, Cheesbrough and Agbabiaka just appeared to be incompetent and unprofessional, two other core attributes that had managed to help bankrupt the borough in the past.
Cheesbrough is the council’s long-standing head of planning who is paid around £130,000 for doing whatever it is she is supposed to do, while Agbabiaka is on close to £119,000 per year as the director of streets and environment.
But at least they showed up to face questions.
Katherine Kerswell, the council’s chief executive (now on £204,000 per year), was down to attend, but she was a no-show. Scott Roche, Mayor Perry’s choice as cabinet member for streets and environment (£39,195 per year in allowances), failed to turn up, too.
Listed on the council’s agenda papers as expected to attend was Steve Iles. Iles was Agbabiaka’s predecessor, and he hasn’t worked at Croydon Council since August 2023. Not surprisingly, Iles didn’t show up, either.
The meeting was all about one of the council’s directorates: “sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery”, but there was no head of department present available for questioning. Nick Hibberd, who had been doing the job, has quit Croydon, to become chief executive at Bristol City Council.
Unscrutinised: Steve Iles, a long-time council director, was listed in the official council papers as ‘expected’ for Tuesday’s meeting, even though he hasn’t worked in Croydon for more than a year
And Kristian Aspinall, Cheesborough and Agbabiaka’s colleague in the directorate, who is in charge of culture, libraries and community safety, wasn’t there, either. Apparently, he had a more pressing engagement.
This was a particular pity, because according to Cheesbrough and Agbabiaka, it was jobs under Aspinall’s control where the cuts were mostly being made – someone muttered that it might be something to do with libraries, but they couldn’t be certain. Could they get back to you on that, one or other of the clueless directors asked the committee’s chair, Conservative councillor Alasdair Stewart.
‘A bit more generous with the information’: the frustrated councillor Louis Carserides
According to Agbabiaka, these “savings” were all about deleting jobs that had been standing vacant for some time. Beyond just taking the notional, unpaid employment costs off the books, it was not explained how deleting unfilled jobs, where presumably no salary was being paid, could generate any real savings for the cash-strapped council.
The absence of any proper details was too much for Louis Carserides, a Labour committee member. “Can I ask that the officers are a bit more generous with the information in future?” Carserides said, trying hard not to sound too annoyed by the charade going on before him. This was, after all, he noted, all about “a specific agenda item”.
He needed the information, Carserides said, “So we can ask the questions that need to be asked.” He has a point.
Certainly Stewart agreed. Such information as how many jobs you want to cut was “a minimum requirement”, the unimpressed committee chair suggested to the directors. The committee’s work was made “absolutely impossible” without it, Stewart said.
“It would have been nice just to get an understanding of the impact on services,” Stella Nabukeera, another Labour councillor, said.
Carserides came back in, highlighting that the agenda item was all about the “re-alignment” of staff budgets – Cheesborough had spent 20 minutes earlier supporting a proposal to reverse earlier cuts to her own department, because its work was “very important”.
A savings figure of £600,000 per year was mentioned: “How have we come to that figure?” Carserides asked, not unreasonably.
‘Impossible job’: scrutiny chair Alasdair Stewart
“Each of the DMTs have worked very hard to come up with the savings we’ve brought forward,” Cheesbrough said, slipping into councilspeak, where every sentence must include at least one acronym. In this case, DMT is “Directorate Management Team”.
The DMT must have worked very hard indeed, but just forgot to tell anyone how many jobs were for the axe. “There have been underspends for a number of years, with vacant posts sitting there, unfilled,” Cheesbrough asserted, without sharing with anyone how many of these vacant positions there might be.
Cheesbrough and Agbabiaka promised to go back to their pal, Kristian, get the details off him and report back. Which would be nice.
But there is one slight problem with the process of scrutinising the work of the council’s very well-paid decision-makers and how they prepare the annual budget. The streets and environment scrutiny sub-committee is not due to meet again until April 1. The cash-strapped council’s budget-setting meeting is on February 12.
Read more: 92% of readers disagree with Kerswell’s Peer Review findings
Read more: ‘Mayor and CEO are respected and provide strong leadership’
Read more: IT’S OFFICIAL: Croydon still among country’s worst councils
- Listen to our latest Croydon Insider podcast by signing up as a supporter of this website today.
- Click here to sign-up and listen-in
FREE ADS: Paid-up subscribers to Inside Croydon qualify for a free ad for their business, residents’ association or community group, just one of the benefits of being part of our online community. For more information about being an iC subscriber, click here for our Patreon page
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
