CROYDON IN CRISIS: While the council goes cap-in-hand to the government for another bail-out, Fisher’s Folly has been taking delivery of 4,000 shiny new laptops for staff. As political editor, WALTER CRONXITE, reports, opposition councillors are fuming
The bright and breezy announcement appeared this morning on Croydon Council’s intranet: 4,000 shiny new laptops for staff have arrived! Whoop-de-bloody-whoop!
What was not included in the council’s internal comms message was that the estimated the cost of the Croydon laptop deal is close to £5million.
The decision to splash the cash was contained within an “officer-delegated report”, meaning that elected councillors never got much of a say in how this significant chunk of public money is being spent.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Conservative Mayor Jason Perry will be seeking to pass a budget which will bring the increase in Council Tax paid by residents since he took office to 27% – giving Croydon the second highest Council Tax in the whole of London.
Some opposition councillors are fuming that the generous re-equipping of the council staff is happening at the same time that council frontline services are being axed.
“We all know Croydon’s going through difficult times,” said Rowenna Davis, the Labour councillor who had been chair of the council’s scrutiny committee. “We know our Council Tax is going up, we saw the four library service closures…
‘It’s shocking’: Rowenna Davis won’t be accepting her new laptop
“At the weekend, I was out talking to people about the fact there will be no Croydon-run youth service anymore. But I wake up this morning and this is what I see on the council intranet…”
In an impassioned social media video, the councillor turned her camera to show the message from the council heralding the arrival of 4,000 laptops, all using the new Windows 11 operating system. “The wait is over,” the council’s internal website proclaimed, as if Fisher’s Folly had been enduring something like the Siege of Mafeking. “New laptop roll-out begins!”
You can almost imagine council CEO Katherine Kerswell saying: “Rejoice at that news!”
As with so much about Croydon Council, senior figures tend to overdramatise the work that they are doing, making even routine distribution tasks seem like conquering Everest. “As you can imagine,” they said, “this is a huge task…”
As part of the phased distribution, the council told staff, “We will email you when it is time for you to collect or have your laptop delivered to your home.” Which is nice.
Davis was underwhelmed at this news. “Four thousand shiny new laptops all being delivered.” Davis told her social media audience that she already has a council laptop. “I don’t need a new one,” she said.
“It’s shocking to me that we’re always told there’s no money, right? But there is money for shiny new laptops for council officers… 4,000 of them. There is money for consultants. There’s never money for the people.
“It’s always money for the council. I just don’t get this Mayor’s priorities.”
The new IT equipment follows recommendations by Boston Consulting last year, which included an upgrade of the council’s systems. Boston spent just a few months working at Croydon, during which time their over-riding finding was that the council’s website is a bit shit.
The wait is over: how the council broke the news to staff this morning. The roll-out is reckoned to be costing £4.8m
For this, Boston Consulting were paid £1.8million by the cash-strapped council.
At a council webinar last week (which was leaked to Inside Croydon; you can watch the whole demoralising hour by clicking here), the council chief exec spent several minutes going through the consultants’ recommendations, in an effort to justify their costs.
Kerswell and Mayor Perry’s plans hinge on even more “digital first” approach to council work. Kerswell highlighted last week how some staff had complained that their council-issued computers worked slowly and performed poorly.
The last time that all staff had their laptops replaced was around 2015. It was a period notable for the then council CEO, Jo “Negreedy” Negrini, demanding that she be provided with a top-of-the-range Apple MacBook, so she might undertake some “design work”. This was despite the fact that the Mac was incompatible with the council’s in-house computer system, or that she was rarely actually seen to use her £10,000 piece of kit in meetings…
In a council report last year paving the way for the latest re-equpping exercise, it was stated that there were around 3,700 laptop, desktop and tablet devices currently in use by council staff, mostly Lenovo Thinkpad laptops, “many” of which were then up to seven years old.
“They are at their end of life and need replacing,” the council report stated.
At that time, the council’s own figures suggested it had 3,200 staff. So that suggests a lot of money being spent on “spare” laptops.
In 2019, Croydon hired a contractor, Littlefish, to handle its in-house IT maintenance on a five-year deal, which was later extended by an additional 12 months through to March 2025. Littlefish was paid £1.7million for the one-year, 2024 to 2025 contract extension.
The council has been tendering for a contractor for a 2025-2030 IT maintenance agreement. “The contract will support the council’s ICT priorities and will allow the council to deliver a more modern ICT service for users,” said an official report last November.
“We are adopting a model that facilitates change at speed improving the agility and efficiency of the council.” Oh, how we laughed!
According to the author of the report, senior official Marie Snelling, the IT agreement will “support the council priority of OUTOME 1”, her capitalisation: “Balances the books, listens to residents and delivers good, sustainable services.”
It is hard to know who the council chiefs are trying to convince with this kind of hogwash, or how many actually believe the bullshit.
Odd priorities: council CEO Katherine Kerswell (£204,000 pa) and Mayor Jason Perry (£84,000) have overseen an overspend on budgets of £130m between 2024 and 2026
Davis, who is a councillor in Waddon, will be seeking selection by Labour to be the party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor at the May 2026 elections. Mayor Perry, despite his appalling track record of serial failures, has been selected to seek a second term.
Croydon Labour might actually begin its selection process for its mayoral candidate by the end of this month, according to party sources.
In the meantime, Davis intends to plug on using her old but perfectly functional council-issued laptop. “I won’t be accepting a new one!”
The Croydon Labour group, having ultimately abstained on Tory Council Tax increases the past two years, might usefully return the new laptops to the Town Hall, and save the council, and Council Tax-payers a few quid.
Read more: Council Tax hits £2,500 per year as debts continue to mount
Read more: Croydon In Crisis: budget overspend now close to £100m
Read more: Labour accuse Perry of ‘mismanagement’ of Town Hall finances
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As Croydon Council can’t still have 4,000 staff (if they ever did have that number?), what happens to the left-over laptops? Almost certainly they will go the families of staff (from the top down, until they have allocated all 4,000)?!
Far from making any effort to rescue the council’s finances from the bankruptcy under the previous ‘administration’, the current mob are expecting the national government to bail out Croydon while they continue to squander money ?!
What will be happening to the “old” laptops?
Surely Croydon Council will be supporting the London Device Bank initiative (part of Get Online London) which is being run by the London Office for Technology & Innovation (LOTI) and The Good Things Foundation https://loti.london/get-online-london/donate-a-device/
Good idea, but don’t bank on it; this is Croydon Council, a byword for waste and incompetence…!
My council issued laptop barely functioned, half the keys didn’t work, and God forbid I tried use it without plugging it in. I’m supposed to work around the community but my laptop made it impossible. I’m not the only employee in this position. I’m all for bashing the council but there’s definitely a LOT of employees who need this. I had to hand it back to IT when I left so that it could be reused even though it barely worked!
They also need to order some calculators. Jim has queried the 4000 staff numbers. Well in their Workforce Profile 2022/3 the Council stated that they had 3181 staff with somewhat less FTE. That’s a big difference. With forthcoming staff reductions recently announced they will only “need” less than 3,000. I wonder what is going to happen to the spare 1,000+ laptops?
As to the justification that such expenditure will help “balance the books”, clearly there is a total lack of understanding as to the scale of the financial problems and what might be a realistic way of addressing them.
Some perspective is needed. That is £1250 per device, to cover support and maintenance for 4 years to replace a technology estate that is 10 years old. I don’t know the detail of the specs or the contract for support but you’re not going to be shaving much of that and being a functional organisation in 2025. I’ve got a lot of time for Rowenna but on this I’m not sure what she, or you, would prefer to see.
Laptops that are 10-years-old and running on old operating systems are slow and vulnerable to malware and failure. Replacing them makes economic sense, although whether “almost 4000” are needed for just over 3000 staff is a moot point
Croydon the “digital first” Council. The one that has no obligation to respond to any emails.
The cost of these new laptops is a drop in the ocean compared with the massive and mounting overall debt. At least Kerswell can say I modernised the Council on her retirement if anything else.
I am by no means supporting Croydon Council’s perilous state, bear in mind that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, meaning a lot of organisations will be needing to buy new devices.
Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements that the current machines may not have, and at some stage the decision may have been taken to replace the entire lot, with a common hardware platform for easier support, as opposed to piecemeal updates for perhaps the more recent machines that could theoretically support W11.
The other aspect that would drive this is that Croydon will need to meet cyber security certifications (e.g. Cyber Essentials) the latter of which state that unsupported hard/software cannot be left within the organisation.
Nobody likes Windows 11 but then again the other options won’t have appealed.
To be fair, Microsoft are stopping support for Windows 10 in October. After this point, if you are not on Windows 11, you are vulnerable to future security breaches – Microsoft won’t patch/fix anything older than Windows 11. Windows 11 imposes some minimum hardware requirements, so older kit won’t be compatible – so the choice is either to update laptops, or accept the liability of being insecure.
On balance, this seems an eminently sensible choice to then make; and if some kit is 10 years old (which is technology terms is old) then there may even be modest productivity boons, plus residual smaller benefit to recuitment/rentention (but the security is the main thing).
I suspect I’ll get down-voted for this, and I fully accept the optics of spending are really unfortunate… though I’m not sure when a good day to anounce it before October would be! And the counter-point (of everything grinding to a halt because of faulty technology) doesn’t seem much better.
I was also going to ask what happens to the old kit, but other commenters have beaten me to it! I’ve heard instances in the private sector of older such laptops being securely wiped, then sold to staff for cheap, with the profits going to charity… I wonder if Croydon are paying Boston Consulting to take them off their hands, and are therefore missing a trick?
Since they are probably paying £100m a year on their £1.4 bn debt bomb.. they might as well milk it . It’s ridiculous but these fucking idiots in charge never learn.
It’s £71m in the coming year.
So they have loads of laptops running windows 10, Oh dear what can we do, have they never heard of Linux , its free and Linux can be used for business, and is often preferred for server environments due to its open-source nature, high security, stability, and cost-effectiveness, allowing any businesses to save on software licensing fees while still accessing a robust operating system , also its more than happy to run on older low spec machines without any fuss, they probably run a server based system now which is again probably hooked up to a linux server. Oh you cant run Linux you have to be a nerd to understand it, well you dont you just need to be a common or garden user with the technical nouse of a six year old.
Remember when Negrini was throwing millions at a team of teccies, calling the department Digital Croydon? Yeah, the people who did the deal for the bus shelters…
Back in the early days of this century Croydon signed an unwise exlcusive contract with an American outfit for supply and maintenance of desktop PCs – they later realised that this meant forking out a fortune for replacements and maintenance. The IT director left sometime later. I am investigating
Not mention tablets bought for sen transport busses at stubbs mead.