EXCLUSIVE: After nearly a decade in charge of Croydon’s planning department, one of Jo Negrini’s closest colleagues is to leave Fisher’s Folly.
By our Town Hall correspondent, KEN LEE
Heather Cheesbrough, Croydon Council’s “director of planning and sustainable regeneration” (try not to laugh), is to leave her £130,000-plus job.
Patronising: council director Heather Cheesbrough, leaving after almost 10 years overseeing planning in Croydon
Katharine Street sources say that staff were informed of this important development (no pun, etc) on the council’s intranet system yesterday. There has been no public announcement or confirmation from the council.
“She’s supposedly taking a career break,” one source said. “But it all seems somewhat sudden.”
Cheesbrough’s departure comes as the government prepares to introduce a new, anything-goes planning system (with more powers delegated to council officials, like Cheesbrough, and less power for the public), while the London Plan, with its overview of development and housing delivery across the capital, is in a state of flux.
Cheesbrough joined Croydon Council in 2016, the first, and most significant, appointment made by Jo Negrini after she had herself become chief executive and was seeking her own replacement at director level.
Cheesbrough’s somewhat high-handed approach towards the borough’s residents, and councillors, saw her swiftly become a figure of public distrust and anger second only to “Negreedy” herself.
The company that bankrupted a borough: Brick by Brick was on Cheesbrough’s watch
She was supposed to have left the council once before, in late 2020 when the whole Negrini empire was collapsing about her following the CEO’s abrupt departure and the council’s first admission that it was broke.
Somehow, Cheesbrough stayed on, somehow persuaded to stay.
Cheesbrough’s cover-up of an undeclared relationship between a senior member of her her planning staff and private developers (usually a sackable offence), her secret promotion within her department of someone who had been working for a developer, and years of highly questionable, often dubious, reports by her staff recommending and sanctioning questionable, sometimes even unlawful, overdevelopment around the borough, saw Cheesbrough come to embody residents’ frustrations with their council.
Yet, even if you take a step back from the planning department’s all-too-cosy relationship with developers, Cheesbrough’s decade in charge of development in Croydon can only be assessed as an abysmal failure.
Cheesbrough championed the unpopular planning policy, SPD2, which helped to push through block after block of flats in a relentless overdevelopment of suburban areas. Mayor Jason Perry scrapped that planning policy.
Sketchy: Westfield’s £1.4bn scheme for Croydon town centre never got off the drawing board
The £1.4billion Westfield non-development that has blighted and wrecked Croydon town centre was on Cheesbrough’s watch, although neither she nor her planners can be held responsible for the fickleness of multi-national developers wary of the collapse of the high street retail sector.
Brick by Brick was another Negrini and Cheesbrough co-production, and one which ultimately bankrupted Croydon Council while delivering precious few of the council homes Croydon needs so desperately.
The Fairfield Halls fiasco was part of the Brick by Brick disaster, and one where Cheesbrough’s colleagues somehow failed to notice a £40million overspend on the regeneration project in the midst of the collapse in the relationship between the council-owned company and its partners, a major development management firm.
Even to the last, Cheesbrough’s staff have been rubber-stamping approval for money-spinning private developments which even their own official reports state will actually cause “harm” to the area.
By 2022, the council’s planning department under Cheesbrough was assessed as being “all but broken”, according to a Planning Advisory Service report. That report found “a hollowed-out department”, which was unable to recruit “good people” because of the council’s “toxic reputation”.
If Croydon, and its planning department, has a toxic reputation, it is one which Cheesbrough has played her part in creating. This included Cheesbrough making false claims of her membership of a professional body.
Yet when an elected councillor called for her dismissal for this and other failings, Cheesbrough, without a scintilla of irony or shame, filed a 1,000-word formal complaint under the council’s Code of Ethics. Cheesbrough, as far as Cheesbrough was concerned, could do no wrong and was above all criticism, or scrutiny.
Inside Croydon understands that under Mayor Perry, there has been some desire to winkle Cheesbrough out from her office in Fisher’s Folly. “It all takes time,” one source suggested, enigmatically.
Cheesbrough’s haughty disdain for Croydon and its people is well-illustrated in this 15-minute film that was made just over a year ago:
The “Croydon vernacular” indeed.
She couldn’t even get the nickname of the Bridge to Nowhere correct.
As a Katharine Street source said of the news of Cheesbrough’s departure this morning: “Well, there’s a £130,000, or more, saving for the cash-strapped council’s budgets. Will anyone notice when she’s gone?”
Read more: How the council’s planners help developers dodge conditions
Read more: Suspicions over secrecy surrounding Slominski’s return
Read more: Council in cover-up over planning’s husband and wife act
Read more: Council delays and lack of enforcement cause residents misery
Read more: Director of planning’s bogus claim over Institute membership
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