CROYDON COMMENTARY: This website’s editor, STEVEN DOWNES, on why a Mayor who keeps getting caught out in untruths really needs to start being more honest with the borough’s residents
Cause for concern: the council-owned (for now) Fairfield Halls arts venue
If ever there was an example of Mayor Jason Perry “being in office but not in power”, it was played out in the panicked and entirely disingenuous reaction on Friday to this website’s exclusive report that the government-appointed improvement panel has suggested that the council should sell the Fairfield Halls.
The response also demonstrated how Mayor Perry and the council’s propaganda department really do think that the Croydon public are all idiots.
Before we published our exclusive last week, we had sought comments from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – who engaged the improvement panel that has been esconced in Croydon since 2021 – as well as Mayor Perry, the council press office and the 20th Century Society.
Perry and the council press office never answered our questions. They still have not.
But they dropped their chips when Inside Croydon went public with the latest potential catastrophe that the council has managed to inflict on the borough and its residents.
For a while, the Fairfield Halls story was right at the top of the council website, drawing even more attention to the prospect of the sale of the arts venue. And Mayor Perry even included mention of it in his little weekly homily to the people of Croydon.
Under the headline, “Statement on Fairfield Halls“, the council said: “We have no plans to sell this iconic Croydon entertainment venue, and it is not on any list of council-owned properties to be sold.”
This is what journalists call a “non-denial denial”.
No one had said that the council had any “plan” to sell the Halls.
The fact that the Fairfield Halls is not on any asset disposal list is entirely down to the circumstances at the cash-strapped council. It is something that could change as soon as tomorrow, if Mayor Perry is required to do so by the improvement panel and MHCLG.
“We haven’t been instructed by our government-appointed panel, or by the government, to sell it,” Perry and the council said. He could have added the word “Yet”. This was just a couple of days after Perry revealed that they will soon be going cap-in-hand to the government for the latest bail-out – £136million this time. Just what strings might be attached to that next government bail-out, do you think?
“Instead,” the council continued, tartly, “as agreed with our panel, we’re working with the operators to help ensure the venue’s success, now and in future.” Ha! “Our panel”. As if.
The Halls’ (generally lacklustre) artistic programme is another matter, and a distraction from the issue at hand here – the real possibility that the venue could be sold because of the council’s out-of-control finances.
What piss-poor Perry and the those inhabiting the propaganda bunker at Fisher’s Folly didn’t know when we reported it last week was that while we quoted Councillor Ria Patel as having been told the shocking suggestion at one of the quarterly briefings by the improvement and assurance panel, we also had other sources present at the meeting when the idea was floated.
We have also spoken to councillors from the Conservatives, Perry’s own political party.
One leading Tory councillor confided that while they had never heard the improvement panel specifically say that the Fairfield Halls needed to be flogged off, “Their general position was ‘sell everything’, so it would not be a surprise if they did suggest it sometime, somewhere.”
Perry’s reputation for being less than frank with the public is growing all the time.
Might the Farfield Halls be up for sale? “Denied it in the weekly Croydon Council propaganda email, so it is probably true,” one resident said on social media, disproving Perry’s faint hope that he can fool most of the people most of the time.
Norman Lebrecht, the veteran music journalist who runs a very popular classical music website, wasn’t having any of Mayor Perry’s denials, either.
“The Executive Mayor of Croydon has written below, insisting the Halls are not for sale,” Lebrecht wrote on slippedisc.com.
“However, the govenment has made the sale of assets a condition of its bailout. Croydon is no longer in a position to determine the Halls’ future.” Which sums it up quite neatly.
As a MHCLG spokesperson told Inside Croydon: “The improvement and assurance panel continues to work with the council to identify suitable properties to include in the asset disposal programme.” After four years in special measures, there are very few council-owned properties left to “identify”.
Perry has been in office but not in power since November 2022, when he issued Croydon Council’s third Section 114 notice and then went to MHCLG and specifically requested to hike Council Tax by 15%. A statutory intervention followed, and the improvement panel has been in effective control ever since.
Perry’s porkies are mounting up.
There was the time he told a Town Hall meeting that Brick by Brick had managed to build a house without a staircase. Shocking, if true. Turned out to be just the Mayor’s own little fantasy.
Then there were his denials that he wanted to hand over parts of Shirley Heath public land to the posh Addington Golf Club. Those denials fizzled out when this website confirmed that the Mayor had been holding secret meetings with the golf club.
And when council spending was getting out of control last year, Perry appeared in a video and referred to “a slight overspend”. At that point, the council overspend was at least £20million.
Perry is the man who last week said, “We’re very clear, we want to be transparent.”
Yet the £84,000 per year Mayor has failed to declare on his council register that he has pocketed a cushty £10,000 from the London Councils organisation.
So what else isn’t he telling us?
And is there anything that Perry says that can be believed?
Read more: Kroll Report provides no answers to £73m Fairfield fiasco
Read more: Fairfield Halls left haunted by acts from its more glorious past
Read more: Police drop all investigations into council’s financial collapse
Read more: CEO Negrini’s long campaign to shut down Inside Croydon
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Anyone know how much Fairfield Halls is losing every year?
As long as it remains an arts venue, I don’t mind who owns it. Someone else running the venue might be able to make it a more innovative and exciting destination for art lovers.
I kind of agree, but wouldn’t it be nice if it could make some ongoing profit to go into the council’s funds.
And then, when you woke up from a blissful sleep, you found yourself back in the real world…
The vast majority of arts venues in this country depend absolutely on grant funding, whether from local authorities or national agencies.
I can’t remember the last time that the Fairfield Halls attracted an Arts Council grant (was it, perhaps, for the series of international concerts in 2022-2023?). It’s programme fails to attract that kind of arts support. It benefited from Mayor of London money for its couple of concerts during the Borough of Culture year.
The whole premise of BHLive being brought in was so that Croydon Council *would avoid* having to pay what had become a £1million per year subsidy for the venue, some of which was put into the performance programme.
The council still has to pay for maintenance and repairs, as the building owners. Were BHLive more invested in their Croydon responsibilities, they would be actively seeking other funding sources to support a more varied and interesting, a more attractive programme.
But the idea of the venue being a revenue source for the council? Dream on.
If the council is forced to sell it, it is unlikely to be able to pick and choose who buys it.
The ” rush for cash ” by selling Council bricks and mortar properties gathers pace month by month. What next ? Perhaps Fisher’s folly as a prime site and let every employee work from home with their shiny new laptops.
Is Jason Perry arranging a “Flog it” TV Special in the Fairfield Halls to sell every remaining bit of Croydon silver he can muster up?
It’s a Labour government that is going to do this to us. Remember that next May when Croydon Labour are asking you to vote for their nominee to replace Mayor Jason Perry
Local Government settlement represents an increase of 6.8% this year, after a decline in central grant funding of 46% under the Tories who also created the speculative environment that Croydon, Woking, Thurrock et. al. struggled under. Incidentally I’m pretty sure Val Shawcross would’ve been a much better bet than Porkie Pie Perry… it’s a shame that the fall out between the local party and Andrew Pelling shot that possibility to bits.
That “fall-out” being the Labour Party suspending Pelling for having the audacity to speak out against and vote against cuts in Council Tax benefits for the poorest in the borough.
Which brings us back neatly to (sort of) to the point that Arfur was making about the Reform-lite Labour Party.
The Government are continuing to push councils to sell our buildings to millionaires instead of increasing taxes on millionaires
Millionaire Mayor Perry says Fairfield Halls isn’t currently for sale and hopes you won’t realise it might be next
Wouldn’t it be great if we had politicians who realised that public buildings and public services are there for the benefit of the public – not just profit making assets
I don’t think you’re right there Peter. Perry doesn’t dress like a millionaire. If he had cash to splash, he could shell out for shirts with sleeves that went all the way down to his wrists instead of stopping just above his elbows. Thankfully he isn’t so skint he’s forced to wear shorts all the time
He owns a house worth more than £1million, so millionaire mayor is a neat fit. Unlike Perry’s suits
It was listed at £1.1m, Perry paid £1.35m, it’s now worth 7% less. No wonder he hasn’t fixed the council’s finances
There are lots of little old ladies in Croydon who own £1m homes and are trapped in them. They are not millionaires but I guess a green solution would be to compel them to cover their roofs and gardens with solar panels and convert their lofts to grow quinoa. The homes could then be compulsorily purchased by the Green Co Op Land Bank and the old ladies put to work teaching primary school children about the benefits of a vegan diet