DODGY LEAFLETS: The Tory campaign to save Jason Perry’s political career is underway, with the Conservatives delivering pamphlets making all kinds of exaggerated claims. As KEN LEE reports, some community groups have not been fooled by Perry’s false claims
Dodgy leaflet: a Norbury community activist has helpfully annotated the disingenuous Tory leaflet
With little, if any, help from their council, the community in Norbury is rallying around to get things done, after decades of neglect from the local authority.
Tony Hooker, of the Litter Free Norbury campaign, has managed to get street bins reinstated and leads on regular litter picks (because rubbish contractors Veolia rarely sweep the streets), and he has conducted some impressive number-crunching of data and FoIs to demonstrate the council’s general uselessness.
It is Hooker who obtained the data that exposed that there has been only four prosecutions for fly-tipping by Croydon Council since Jason Perry became Mayor in 2022 – with just one successul case in 2024.
Now Hooker is sorting out the rubbish that has been landing on the public’s doormats: Jason Perry’s latest “Newsletter”, a thinly disguised propaganda pamphlet from the Tory Party, full of half-truths and outright lies.
The next Croydon local elections, and D-Day for Perry’s re-election, is Thursday May 7 2026.
Hooker writes: “A newsletter emanating from the Mayor covering initiatives in Norbury, including street cleaning, has recently appeared through some residents’ letter boxes.”
Hooker’s a stickler for the facts. He’s anotated all the dodgy details throughout the leaflet, which has been delivered by the Tories to a staunchly Labour-supporting area in the knowledge that for Perry to win a borough-wide election in 2026, he needs to con people from Crystal Palace to Coulsdon into voting for him, despite his 27% Council Tax hikes.
“A few things struck me,” Hooker wrote of the leaflet, “so let’s do a bit of fact checking.”
“1, Latest News”
Hooker’s not at all impressed by the £84,000 per year Mayor’s turn-round of “news”, pointing out that it is almost 18 months since he took part in a photo-opportunity (all paid for out of your Council Tax) when doing a bit of power-sparying in Norbury.
“2, Data-driven cleaning”
“It is claimed,” Hooker notes, “data was used to identify and clean fly-tipping hot spots. Well, who provides that data? Us, by reporting the issues on LoveCleanStreets.” LoveCleanStreets is the council’s Crap App, which after almost a decade, still has no category for reporting a missed bin collection.
Hooker is not impressed by the Tories’ bogus claims. “The notion that they identified the hot spots to clean them is fanciful – we report the issues, such as fly-tips, every day. Veolia (usually/hopefully) responds and picks them up. This is not a ‘Blitz clean’ activity – it’s simply Veolia doing their job.
“It was also advertised as part of the Blitz initiative that Veolia will be ’emptying bins’. Jeez, come on: it’s what they are paid to do!”
Veolia, it is worth remembering, are the rubbish contractors that were doing such a rotten job of emptying our household refuse bins and sweeping our streets that Croydon, Merton and Sutton all sacked them 18 months ago. And after spending nearly £1million between them on separate procurement processes, guess who the three boroughs have taking over their waste and street cleaning contracts from April 1?
No prizes for guessing it’s Veolia! The council’s propaganda department has even started issuing press releases to claim what a wonderful new deal Mayor Perry has struck with the same contractors he sacked…
Hooker’s takedown continues: “I’ve been told that [Croydon Council] does not have the resource [or] capability to generate the heat maps that [Litter Free Norbury] has created to make this analysis.
“Veolia will undoubtedly know, because they have to clear them every day, but one can’t imagine they were just sitting there waiting to clear the next fly-tip!”
“3, Graffiti removal – a partial success”
Success story: Norbury residents have been impressed by the grafitti removal, though less so around shop shutters
“The removal of graffiti from public areas was probably the most successful aspect of the Blitz,” Hooker says. “The reinstatement of this service has probably been the biggest improvement we have seen in cleaning up Norbury.
“However, the removal of graffiti from shop shutters was very hit and miss. All of the businesses I spoke to said a council officer dropped a letter in and then they never saw or heard from them again. Many shops who had said they would have been happy to have had the service were left in the dark.
“The other aspect that appeared to be successful was the coordination with [Transport for London] as they were very active in repainting their street furniture – unlike the council, it must be said.”
“4, Jet-washing of pavements and gulley cleaning”
“I saw some jet washing taking place around the bigbelly bins, and they may have had some cleaning, but this activity was previously on a six-monthly service contract. This may have been cancelled by the council, so doing this as a one-off ‘special’ activity is not a substitute.” You can’t blag your way past Tony Hooker, it seems.
“I did not see any other ‘mechanical washing’ of pavements taking place and could not find any evidence of that, but clearly [it is] something that should be done routinely.
“Additionally, none of the other bins were cleaned, despite it actually being part of Veolia’s contract to do so four times per year!”
And here we have one of the fundamental issues with Veolia and their contracts: “For some reason the council has never enforced this clause and has shown zero interest in doing so when we have raised it with them.” So we have all been paying a contractor for delivering a service which they fail to perform, and our council does nothing about it.
Hooker continues by reminding us that gulley cleaning “isn’t a one-off activity”.
“It should be part of a planned maintenance programme. It is sad that what was routine activity is now treated as some kind of a special undertaking.” Which sums up so much of the claims being made by Mayor Perry, in his desperatation for people’s votes in 2026.
Hooker also takes issue with some of the photos used in Perry’s Norbury leaflet, highlighting that they include imagesfrom other parts of the borough. Does this suggest that “Pwoud Cwoydonian” piss-poor Perry doesn’t know his way around his own borough quite as he should do?
And Hooker sums up: “Mayor Perry’s publication paints a misleading picture, seemingly crediting him alone for Norbury’s ‘cleanliness’.
“The truth? This is a community effort, driven by dedicated residents and volunteers, not just political headlines.
He did warn us: Mayor Perry’s warning soon after taking office is just about the truest thing he has said
“There is no mention of all the fantastic work undertaken and organised by the community organisations, such as Litter Free Norbury, the residents’ associations and friends groups, as well as individual street champions who work tirelessly, as unpaid volunteers, to ‘tidy up Norbury’ on a daily basis. Often where the council’s paid contractor fails to do so.”
Hooker is also at pains to stress that Litter Free Norbury is non-political. “We don’t pin a specific coloured rosette to our hi-viz jackets.” He appears to hold all politicians in similar contempt, with good reason.
And his assessment of the Perry leaflet?
Hooker gave it a more-than-generous
4/10
“Overall, a pretty poor publication, Mr Perry,” Hooker writes.
“In respect of the Blitz campaign, we were grateful to have had some focus on Norbury, and this was the first attempt at undertaking this kind of initiative. It was disappointing, however, that the council did not ask for any feedback to provide key learnings to assist with future bltizes.
“Communication from the council… was extremely poor. But no surprise there. It always is.”
Read more: Councillor slams ‘shameful and deceitful’ waste figures
Read more: Just four prosecutions for fly-tipping in Croydon under Perry
Read more: #Binmageddon: Now Croydon named worst in UK for fly-tipping
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He wants your vote, he will be everywhere even at the opening of an envelope!! – if he was invited…
And all that time, he is failing to do the job that he is paid to do.
The bad news re. Powerless Perry trying get re-elected next year, to inflict a lot more shit on the borough’s residents is that for many years when Croydon was a swing borough, each of the two rubbish parties forming the Croydon duopoly tended to get two terms (8 years) each. The first term tended to be a landslide win after the rubbish performance of the other mob, but the second term was with a reduced majority as people had started to see through the lies, but the borough would swing back to the other bunch of idiots after 8 years. This might mean that Jason Perry gets away with another term, which is grim !
The good news is that as the second term tends to be with a reduced majority, and Jason Perry only won by about 600 votes for his first term, that suggests that not many more people need to avoid voting for him to ensure that he does lose, and his only achievement after 3 years of failing to rescue Croydon Council seems to have been eating ALL the pies in the area. I do cling to the hope that he will do a Jonathan Driver, to spare Croydon from further punishment ?!
That’s not how the mayoral system works. There’s no “majority”, in the old sense of the number of councillors in the Town Hall Chamber.
If Jason Perry wins by a single vote in May 2026, he is Mayor for another four years and can continue to line his own pockets while singularly failing to deliver for the people of Croydon. You have been warned.
All of Perry’s rivals for the £84k job as Mayor of Croydon should make it clear that, unlike the part-time incumbent, if elected they will work full-time.
Love Clean Streets might not be as crap as some people think. Its owners point out that one of its features is Hot Spot Mapping, something which will come as news to Mr Hooker and to Croydon council’s street cleansing management.
The version used in Hammersmith & Fulham allows you to report missed bin collections, something denied to us plebs in Croydon.
In Lewisham you can use Love Clean Streets to log faulty street lights, whereas in Croydon you have to use a clunky web page.
The shortcomings are more to do with Croydon council’s tolerance of municipal mediocrity, and the laziness of our elected representatives.
You’d expect Perry’s go-to for photo shoots, Councillor Scott Roche, to be on top of this and fix things. He’s now paid £40,175 to be the Cabinet Member for Streets and Environment, and as well as showing up at the Town Hall every once in a while, he is paid by us to turn up at meetings like the Croydon & Lewisham Street Lighting Joint Committee and London Councils’ Transport & Environment Committee where he can speak to intelligent people and learn from them.
Instead, he’s learned from his short-sleeved boss that you can take the money without really doing anything to earn it
The LoveCleanStreets app offers a very quick and easy way for residents to report many issues they see on their streets. Litter Free Norbury has successfully campaigned for improvements, such as the 2-way interface from Veolia that provides real-time updates on reports – this is not available in many other boroughs.
It is not news to me at all that the app features capabilities that Croydon Council are not utilising. For instance, as you allude, the Council has the option to make use of its Scheduled Services features which would allow residents to report missed bin collections. The Council has actively decided to not offer this option to residents, instead requiring them to go via MyAccount.
The main issues we face are not caused by the app at all, but by the Council’s teams and contractors.
For example:
1. Veolia regularly closing out fly-tips and other reports without attendance/resolution.
2. Veolia’s own system regularly “rejects” reports – a common example here is for reports made on footpaths.
3. Council’s internal teams rarely updating the status of reports.
4. Graffiti reports not being closed, despite the service actually undertaking the work.
5. The removal of certain options, such as the ability to report “Waste on Private Property” – the Council binned this option around the time they got rid of the NSOs.
All of these issues we have highlighted directly to the Council Officers/Exec and Cllr Roche, but they seem either incapable or disinclined to resolve any of the issues.
Roche is an expensive waste of space.
It says a lot about Perry’s judgement that he continues to employ him as a Cabinet Member and pay him £40k of our money. It also says a lot about the talent pool in Croydon Conservatives that Perry can’t seem to find anyone better.
Of the seven meetings of London Councils’ Transport and Environment Committee in 2023 and 2024, Roche bothered to turn up just once.
Last year Roche was No2 in the iC Toss-Car awards for being workshy https://insidecroydon.com/2024/05/17/toss-cars-2024-we-name-croydons-most-work-shy-councillors/
Will he hit the top spot this year?