CROYDON IN CRISIS: All those public consultations that don’t ever make any difference to what the council sets out to do? This week, one director made it clear that they are indeed pointless exercises, as KEN LEE reports
Budget showdown: our bankrupt borough is facing even tougher times. But one director believes her spending should be allowed to increase – whatever the public thinks
Croydon Council is ploughing on full steam ahead for the financial rocks once again, with a budget overspend this year predicted of more than £20million and a shortfall between income and expenditure for 2025-2026 of a whopping £83million. And all with this year’s budget and Council Tax-setting meetings for Croydon’s dysfunctional council coming up next week.
Yet at a meeting in the Town Hall Chamber last Tuesday, one senior council director, despite admitting “significant underachievement of income” by her department over the past four years, was lobbying to reverse cuts to her budgets and seeking an increase in her staffing.
“Having a permanent planning team is very important,” the very self-important Heather Cheesbrough told councillors on the streets and environment scrutiny sub-committee.
It was this meeting at which Cheesbrough, Croydon’s head of planning, who is paid around £130,000 per year, and her colleague Karen Agbabiaka (£119,000 pa as the director of streets and environment), had presented a case for making job cuts in other areas of the council, but turned up without one or two essential details. Such as how many positions were for the axe.
Above scrutiny: Croydon Council’s long-standing planning director Heather Cheesbrough
Cheesbrough was less shy in coming forward, however, in making her case for increasing the number of staff in her planning and regeneration department. It was all about administering Croydon’s Local Plan, the forthcoming revised London Plan, and handling planning applications for schemes across the borough.
At one point, seeking to justify an increase in spending in her department when most other areas of the council are making cuts, Cheesbrough said this:
“The Local Plan sets out the spatial strategy for development in the borough and so helps to crystalise in a spatial way the Mayor’s business plan, so the Local Plan is an important document in terms of carrying forward, spatially, the Mayor’s business plan.”
Clear?
Cheesbrough added: “Having a permanent planning team is very important.
“It’s always nice to have more staff.
“The team is very professional and very committed.”
Cheesbrough wanted previous cuts to her budget reversed into what councilspeak describes as “growth” – a £484,000 increase in her department’s spending.
But there was a snag.
The scrutiny committee was supposed to review information on this and two other budget proposals to decide whether they 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 “these proposals align with the Mayor’s Business Plan.”
Before Christmas, the 2025-2026 budget proposals were put out for public consultation.
‘Significant concern’: scrutiny committee chair Alasdair Stewart
The scrutiny committee’s chair, Conservative councillor Alasdair Stewart, asked what the public response had been to the suggestion that Cheesbrough’s planning team should benefit from an extra half-a-million pounds a year from a council notorious for having no money.
“I think it would be well-received by residents to have a permanent planning policy team,” Cheesbrough said.
Stewart pressed Cheesbrough.
What had been the result of the public consultation on this point?
“We’ve not had any feedback,” Cheesbrough was forced to admit.
“Can I take it from that that none of the proposals from the papers have been informed as a result of that public consultation exercise?” Stewart asked.
Cheesbrough said that she was not aware of any “adverse feedback”.
“But was there any positive feedback?” Stewart asked again.
“We haven’t had any,” Cheesbrough conceded.
“We can go back and check,” she offered, presumably in the knowledge that the budget-setting council meeting was just a fortnight away.
Louis Carserides, a Labour councillor on the committee, then asked what many residents often ask whenever the council carries out any kind of public consultation: “So what was the point of the consultation in the first place?”
One of the council’s longest standing directors had basically given the game away.
Pointless consultation: Louis Carserides
“Just for absolute clarity,” Councillor Carserides asked, “the results of the consultation have had absolutely no bearing on what’s in front of us today?”
Cheesbrough, looking a little discomforted, muttered something into her microphone about “finance colleagues would have been aware”.
Cheesbrough had begun her presentation by admitting that the planning department had been generating significantly less income for the council because of a reduction in the number of planning applications being submitted. Yet she went on to say that the extra £484,000 for planning “was a non-negotiable” as a “growth” item.
No one on the scrutiny committee bothered to adapt Carserides’ question to, “So what’s the point of the scrutiny committee then?”
The scrutiny chair drew a conclusion, Stewart saying that he has “significant concern that the proposal seems not to have been informed by public consultation – either positively or negatively.
“Or in any way,” Stewart said.
So nothing much at Croydon Council has really changed at all.
The cash-strapped council’s budget-setting meeting is on February 12. Conservative Mayor Jason Perry will push through another 4.99% Council Tax increase, meaning that since 2023, your Council Tax will have been hiked by 27%, to record levels, as £130,000 per year Cheesbrough gets a pay rise and, probably, extra planning staff.
Read more: Directors leave scrutiny short of answers over council job cuts
Read more: 92% of readers disagree with Kerswell’s Peer Review findings
Read more: Planning director worried about her career? So she should be
Read more: Home owner’s victory after four-year battle with planners
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