CROYDON IN CRISIS: Council chief exec and Mayor pass the buck to central government for borough’s continuing financial problems, while confirming that they are to axe another 360 jobs. Watch the world’s worst comedy double act – Perry and Kerswell – in a ‘sombre’ and ‘grim’ hour-long staff webinar recorded yesterday.
By KEN LEE, our Town Hall reporter
Croydon households living in Band D homes will be paying close to £250 per month in Council Tax from April, the second-highest in all London.
A 4.99% Council Tax increase in 2025 will mean that residents are paying 27% more this year than they were before Conservative Mayor Jason Perry came into office in 2022 – yet the council is still having to go to government again for “exceptional support”, this time £136million, because Perry is unable, again, to balance the bankrupt borough’s budget.
In Greater London, only Liberal Democrat-run Kingston will be charging its residents more in Council Tax than Croydon. Kingston’s Band D annual bill is going up from £2,374 to £2,488, according to a report in the Evening Standard.
In Croydon, the benchmark Band D household Council Tax will go up by £113 from April, to a total of £2,480. With residents generally paying Council Tax in 10 instalments, that means monthly payments from April to January of £248.
Tax hikes: how the newspaper formerly known as the Evening Standard is covering London Council Tax
Much of that money is simply to pay-off interest and loan repayments on the borough’s debts, accumulated over the last 15 years.
According to Jane West, the council’s finance director, in 2021-2022 (the year before Perry became Mayor on a manifesto promise to “fix the finances”), Croydon was paying £50million a year to service its debts. In the 2025-2026 financial year, the council will be spending £71million to service its debts, which total £1.4billion, according to council papers released this week.
As Inside Croydon reported earlier this week, the council’s spending has got out of control, with a £31million overspend predicted for the current financial year and a £98million overspend anticipated in 2025-2026.
“These are enormous numbers,” said West, the council’s senior numbers person, as she sought to reassure staff who had logged on for a webinar fronted by the world’s worst comedy double act: Jason Perry and Katherine Kerswell.
The world’s worst comedy double act: Perry (£84,000 pa) and Kerswell (£204,000 pa) agree it’s all somebody else’s fault
“It’s nothing Croydon has done wrong,” said West, who has been in charge of Croydon’s finances for almost three years. She then described the council’s latest request for a £136million capitalisation direction from government as “the only option”.
During the course of the webinar, Perry and Kerswell made the case that the rapidly increasing spend by the council was due to what Perry called “hyperinflation”, with councils hit by rising costs for delivering its legally-required services in housing and children’s services. Higher costs for school transport for SEND children is also now added to the mix.
“The government appears to be almost unaware of the economic pressures local government is under, such as hyperinflation and the other demands we have in the sector,” said Perry, who barely a week earlier had had a meeting with Jim McMahon, the local government minister. Did Mayor Perry not use that opportunity to make McMahon aware of the economic pressures his council is under?
There were further complaints from the people in charge that Croydon’s annual settlement from central government was, yet again, well below what similar and neighbouring London boroughs are receiving.
Mixed messages: in a series of slides at the webinar, council chiefs claimed that the council’s overspend is a sector-wide issue, when also claiming that ‘Croydon faces a particular financial challenge’
Kerswell described it as “a really sombre day for us all”, and also described the situation as “grim”.
Extraordinarily, with the Conservative Mayor sitting beside her, the council CEO then made a strong case for rent controls.
Croydon has the third highest number of households presenting as homeless in the whole country (only the cities of Birmingham and Leeds have more), and here in south London, Kerswell said, the cost, per night, of providing temporary accommodation had risen from £54 to £71.
“The government could intervene in that and say people should stop profiteering over a really, really difficult situation for families facing homelessness,” said Kerswell.
Kerswell used a large chunk of time in the webinar to outline a justification for her penchant for spending millions on external consultants, and for an “investment” of £42million by the otherwise cash-strapped council in “digital implementation”.
Kerswell says that this programme will deliver more than £100million in “benefits” over the course of four years.
Some of the savings are also likely to come in yet another round of job cuts, with around 360 roles to go – about 10% of the council’s workforce.
But for now, after almost five years in office and with the council’s finances in no more robust a state than when she arrived, Kerswell is pinning her hopes on another government bail-out.
“I’m hoping they will give us the answer that we need,” said Kerswell.
“There will have to be a solution.”
Because whatever that might be, the council chief executive who is paid a salary of £204,000 to deliver solutions has not yet managed to find it.
Read more: Labour accuse Perry of ‘mismanagement’ of Town Hall finances
Read more: ‘Mayor and CEO are respected and provide strong leadership’
Read more: Police drop all investigations into council’s financial collapse
Read more: Mayor Perry busts his unbalanced budget with £42m overspend
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We can’t get rid of the Kerswell, but hopefully she will retire soon (without a thumping great golden handshake retirement payment ?!), and her successor surely can’t be worse, but do we still have to wait for another year (until 2026) to get rid of Pompous, piss-poor, powerless, part-time Perry ?!
Hyperinflation? Hyperbole, more like it. The highest inflation rate in the UK since Perry took office was 11.1% CPI in October 2022, for one month only. The most recent available figure is 2.5% for December 2024.
That’s nowhere near the accepted economists description that hyperinflation occurs when the monthly inflation rate exceeds 50%.
When Perry starts using a wheelbarrow to take home his ill-gotten earnings for being Mayor of Croydon (plus his London Councils bonus ), like in the Weimar republic over a hundred years ago, we’ll know that things are truly hyperinflationary.
Judging from the reported wisecracks made at the webinar yesterday, Kerswell and Perry’s “Little and Large” tribute act would fill the Fairfield Halls and the takings would clear the council’s deficit
What a “Pompous Kerswell”, start by cutting your £204 000 Pa, having watch this Im livid
“The government could intervene in that and say people should stop profiteering over a really, really difficult situation for families facing homelessness,” said Kerswell who took a payout of £420,000 from taxpayers when she left Kent after 16 months.
I don’t know Kerswell or Perry and, as they refuse to engage with IC or any proper media, I can’t form a balanced view of their performance or lack of it, but it does look as if readers are looking to outdo each other in their criticism. At least we haven’t reached hanging and quartering, boiling in oil or the Iron Maiden yet. So, may I suggest – the ‘Comfy Chair’, in case anyone is old enought to fremember the Python sketch
You would think paying £2500 a year we would be living in Richmond , Hampstead or Dulwich. Far from it. Imo, for what we are getting in Croydon, paying £500 per annum is more like it.
The Standard reports debts of £1.8bn. Wtf. Last year it was reported to be btw £1 4- 1.6bn across a few sources …isn’t anyone SERIOUSLY CONCERNED?
Also, Westfield can come in and say they will invest £2bn ( adjusted from inflation from original £1.4bn figure 12 years ago) but are they intentionally waiting it out for everyone to go bankrupt?
According to the latest council papers, it is £1.4billion.
Westfield plays no part in the council finances (the town centre is not council property), beyond minimising business rates because of the dereliction they have caused.
Can’t trust The Standard ! Thanks for the heads up
Definitely can’t trust The Standard, they just reported that Croydon was the Silicon Valley of Europe! The only chips being processed here is at the fish and chips shop!!
We don’t need a Mayor, a CEO, and an Assistant Chief Executive. Kerswell and her Deputy should go and we get a full-time Mayor.
We don’t need both Heather Cheesbrough and Nicola Townsend. The former should go either through resignation or performance. We don’t need seven Chief/Heads of HR – especially with a reduced work force and their failure to deal with chronic under-performers.
Scrap the layers and layers of management – we don’t need executive directors and directors – those additional layers just slow down organisations. We don’t need a Director of Digital and two Heads. Look how poor digital is! It’s impossible to find anything on the website and it’s filled with out-of-date pages and documents.
We don’t need a Head of Business Performance & Business Intelligence – clearly that role hasn’t worked as the Council is neither performing nor intelligent. The Interim Director of Commercial Investment and Capital is paid 170k. Where do these pay scales come from? We are paying above private sector rates for so many roles on top of the 28% pension contribution and extremely generous holiday allowances.
The problem is that the people making the decisions about who will go are at the top. And it’s the little people will lose their jobs.
Perry came in promising to clear up the financial mess that was left by successive Tory and Labour administrations. He’s failed miserably in this as he has in most of his other promises. I hope the voters remember this if and when he is up for re-election next year.
Croydon is without doubt the most badly run local authority I’ve ever lived in.
Opting in a referendum to have an executive mayor was a profound mistake.
But does anyone remember during last year’s general election campaign that our current prime minister promised when interviewed on televisionand radio – repeatedly – that an incoming Labour government would freeze council tax for 2025/26 to give already financially overburdened households – many of which containing “working people” – breathing space in a cost of living crisis?
Does anyone remember that promise being made?
Is it really conceivable that the previous Conservative government left such an enormous blackhole in central government finances that at least the promise to freeze council tax for 2025/26 could not be kept?
Water bills. Up! And no root-and-branch reform of the water regulator which is failing consumers. Energy bills. Up! And no root-and-branch reform of the energy regulator which is failing consumers. Council tax. Up! And what is central government doing to restore central government funding to local government that begun being taken away when the Conservative-LibDem coalition entered government in May 2010?
Is this government ensuring unwittingly that it becomes a one-term only government and ushering in the Trump tribute act that is Reform UK?
Must have missed Starmer’s Council Tax freeze, John. Can you direct us to any record of it?
Starmer said “There is a choice on tax. A Tory choice – taxes up for working people, tax cuts for the 1%.
Or a Labour choice. Where we cut business rates to save our high streets and where, if there was a Labour Government, you could take that council tax rise you just got and rip it up.
A Labour Government would freeze your council tax this year – that’s our choice.
A tax cut for the many, not just for the top 1 per cent.
So take this message to every doorstep in your community: Labour is the party of lower taxes for working people.”
Thing is, he said it in March 2023, in the run up to council elections that May.
A week is a long time in politics, and what he said then as Leader of the Opposition and is doing now, months later, as Trump’s Quisling, is altogether different
So it was never a General Election pledge
One doesn’t need to be an economist or a psephologist to know that if central government does nothing to alleviate – or indeed proactively increases – the cost of living in the short-medium term, that government is unlikely to be returned to government at a subsequent general election.
The Democrats in the US discovered that to their cost in November 2024 when voters were complaining that the costs of staples such as eggs, and petrol were taking too much out of their diminishing disposable incomes.
Labour’s hoped for economic growth is unlikely to be achieved in one Parliament in any event, but especially with all the nonsense going on currently in the US and elsewhere.
I understand that you don’t usually allow links to third party sites, so the below (which is a video clip from the Independent online which has found itself on YouTube) is for you to review:
https://youtu.be/nvQbeTk9zJM?feature=shared
He made broadly similar statements numerous times in 2023/24.
The Conservatives and Reform are already making lemonade about what the PM said about council tax when he was in Opposition and what is about to happen in 2025/26.
Yes. Unequivocal. And pretty damning, too.
Thank you.
Todays headline is “Croydon Council asks for £136m government bailout”
You can’t make this shit up after the ppl we trusted taxed the shit out of us and yet need more money ! This will never end!
I don’t see how the council is ever going to get out of this hole. We’re what, 5 years into this mess and it’s worse than ever. The council have cut every service (except the head honchos…. even saying that, their salaries barely make a dent in the issue), council tax has gone up consistently yet they’re still even more in debt. I don’t know the answer, heads should roll but that won’t help the people of Croydon. What happens if the debt carries on rising? I know the government won’t bail them out because it incentives other councils to do the same. It’s just such a mess and the people of Croydon will be paying for it for decades to come.
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