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’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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