CROYDON IN CRISIS: After more than four years, the two men who presided over what at the time was the biggest financial collapse in the history of local authorities in England have been allowed back into their political party. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Happy days: Tony Newman (right) pictured with MP Steve Reed OBE before his suspension
The Labour Party has ended its suspension of Tony Newman, the controversial and discredited former leader of Croydon Council.
Inside Croydon also understands that the similar “administrative suspension” that has been in place since February 2021 on Simon Hall, the councillor for Fieldway ward and Newman’s cabinet member for finance in the six years leading to Croydon’s financial collapse in 2020, has also been removed.
According to sources close to the Labour Party, “You can’t keep someone suspended forever.”
When approached to deny that Newman and Hall’s suspensions had been lifted, a Labour Party spokesperson said: “We are unable to comment on individual membership or disciplinary matters.”
The disciplinary process had dragged on for more than four years, much of that period being while David Evans was General Secretary of the Labour Party. Evans, Newman and Hall had been close campaign colleagues, with Tony Bliar’s former aide – now Lord Evans of Penge – having overseen Croydon Labour’s 2014 local election campaign that placed Newman and Hall in charge of the Town Hall finances. Ten years later, Evans was helping Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves win power at Westminster.
Old mate: David Evans presided as General Secretary while his friends were suspended
Today, Labour sources suggested that the decision to end the suspensions was taken by a panel of Labour’s all-powerful National Executive Committee. The decision was conveyed to Newman and Hall last week.
Labour is likely to come in for criticism for its handling of the Newman and Hall disciplinary cases, from within and outside the party, both for the length of time it took, and for the timing of the end of the suspensions.
“They’ve shown all the comic timing of a very unfunny comedian,” one party source in Croydon said today.
“This could have been done at any time since 2023, really. But oh no… Labour decides to drop the suspensions just as the party in Croydon has selected its ‘fresh break’ candidate, Rowenna Davis, to be their candidate for Mayor in 2026.”
The fates of Newman and Hall seemed inevitable 18 months ago once Croydon Council, under Tory Mayor Jason Perry, admitted that there were no options for legal recourse against the duo, and when the Met Police decided almost a year ago to abandon its investigations into the events that led to what was, at the time, the biggest financial collapse in the history of local authorities in England.
The council, and the people of Croydon, have continued to suffer the consequences of the financial death-spiral that occurred when Newman, Hall and Negrini were in charge, with hundreds of staff being laid off and a range of services to residents axed, while Council Tax has soared to record levels.
Gone, but not forgotten: ex-CEO Jo Negrini got a £437,000 pay-off
Newman had long been a controversial figure, in Labour and broader Town Hall circles.
A series of independent investigations and Reports In The Public Interest confirmed how he had presided over a dysfunctional council, with wide-ranging complaints of bullying and racism.
And that was before considering the calamities of Brick by Brick, the Fairfield Halls fiasco and the dodgy purchase of the Croydon Park Hotel, together with Newman’s opting to preside over the meeting that handed a £437,000 “golden farewell” to his chief exec, Jo Negrini, because of an breakdown in their working relationship.
The party suspensions came five months after Newman and Hall resigned as council leader and cabinet member. Newman had been a Croydon councillor from 1994 to 2021, and leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall for 15 years until his resignation in October 2020. Newman is understood still to be resident in Woodside, his partner, Louise Szpera, a long-standing member of MP Steve Reed OBE’s Westminster staff.
Hall, an accountant by profession, moved some time ago with his family to north-east England, where his partner, Rob Elliott, is understood to be seeking selection to stand as a Labour local election candidate.
In October 2020, at the time of his resignation as a cabinet member, Hall said that he was “proud” of his achievements.
Back in the fold: former New Addington councillor Simon Hall
Hall and Newman resigned just days before the council auditors, Grant Thornton, published a Report In The Public Interest which was hugely critical of the way in which the council, and its finances, had been managed while the pair had been in charge.
Newman was found to have authorised £100million-worth of council borrowing, towards the purchase of the Croydon Park Hotel and other commercial properties, without going through the proper Town Hall processes.
Another report, a rapid review commissioned by the government, identified Newman and “… an inner circle of a small number of cabinet members who have been very controlling in their management of the council and its finances”.
The rapid review found that “council officials were instructed by members of Newman’s cabinet to rewrite some of their reports, in effect to disguise the council’s mounting financial problems”.
Despite such findings, and the long withheld recommendations of the council-commissioned Penn Report, first published by this website, in 2022, in a statement issued through a flashy West End PR firm, Newman and Hall maintained that they were the wronged parties in all of this: “Decisions made by the council were made in good faith and were made collectively by the entire cabinet. No evidence of wrongdoing on our part has been found, because no such evidence exists.”
It was an odd kind of denial from Newman that relied on his assertion that there was “no evidence” of wrong-doing.
“We acted at all times with integrity and honesty,” Newman said at the time.
A poll of Inside Croydon readers found 97% disagreed with Newman’s claim.
Newman preferred to cast himself as a massive incompetent, rather than a crook: “Things can go wrong without there being any wrongdoing,” he said.
Newman’s Numpties: only five of Newman and Hall’s colleagues from 2018 remain as Croydon councillors, but the reputational damage caused by that administration still lingers
And the lifting of Newman and Hall’s suspension handed a massive political stick with which local Tories could use against Croydon Labour’s new hope, Rowenna Davis.
On hearing the news, Jason Cummings, the council’s present cabinet member for finance, told Inside Croydon: “That Labour would allow Tony Newman and Simon Hall back into membership just gives the lie to Croydon Labour being ‘under new management’ – their group leader is a Newman cabinet member and their Mayoral candidate a Newman campaigner and supporter.
“Croydon Labour haven’t changed at all.”
The 2026 local election campaign is well underway.
Read more: Men who led council to bankruptcy say they did nothing wrong
Read more: Perry admits he can’t take action against council’s bankrupters
Read more: Negrini pay-off arranged after ‘breakdown’ with leader Newman
Read more: #PennReport: Croydon has been let down by political leaders
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Jason Cummings is, as ever, wrong.
Croydon Labour’s excellent Mayoral candidate, Rowenna Davis was *never* a ‘Newman campaigner and supporter.’
Supporting and campaigning for brilliant and highly-regarded Waddon Labour councillors, like Robert Canning and Joy Prince, as I also did, is NOT the same as supporting and campaigning for Tony Newman.
The Tory councillors will keep repeating that lie because it’s not like they’ve got any record they can defend so they only have attack mode.
A Nikolai Yezhov style remark that shows that Labour’s unfortunate culture remains unchanged.
Andrew, for what it is worth, I always had a great deal of time and respect for you as Robert and Joy’s fellow councillor in Waddon.
Whatever else may have occurred between you and the Labour Party, I have always appreciated the support and consideration you have personally shown me, and I genuinely enjoyed canvassing with you. I also know that many Waddon residents have sung your praises, as they have done with Robert and Joy, and as they now do with your successors, Rowenna and Ellily Ponnuthurai.
However, without wishing to speak on behalf of Rowenna, I know her to be a person of immense integrity who recognises that the Labour Party is not defined by any one single individual but is a broad political movement that has delivered immense progressive and vital change to Britain within its 125 year existence. When people like Rowenna, Ellily, Joy and I campaign for the Labour Party (through good times and bad ones), it is in support of that overall positive change, and not in the interests of any one individual, or individuals, within the party; however, as I have already stated, I do, at the very least, have the upmost faith in all of Waddon’s various Labour representatives over recent years, yourself included.
I am sorry if you regard my words as mindless propaganda, but, with all due respect (and, as I say, I still have a lot of respect and time for you on a personal basis), I do think likening them to Stalinist complicity is more than a little hyperbolic.
Mathew: can you explain to the audience the circumstances that led to you to being an (unsuccessful) council candidate for South Croydon in 2018, and Tony Newman and Clive Fraser’s Stalinistic role in that?
I have nothing to hide. I personally think it’s unfortunate that Steven Downes, the author of this article (if it’s okay, I’ll refer to Steven in the third person, and IC as a separate entity, unless you have any objection), was deselected by Tony Newman. I never met with Newman at any instance before the selection process, or any time between it and the (unsuccessful) result. However, as a Labour Party member in the Croydon South constituency (albeit, for the interests of full transparency, not the South Croydon ward), I felt obliged to do what I could to represent the party in the absence of a third candidate for that ward, irrespective of any feelings, good or bad, I had regarding Newman (which is entirely consistent with everything I stated in my earlier posts).
All I can say is that one of the other applicants to replace Steven as a potential South Croydon candidate in 2018, is a semi-regular contributor to Inside Croydon. I believe he doesn’t have a very high opinion of me (for unrelated matters), but, for what it’s worth, I have NO animus towards him, and certainly NONE towards Steven. I simply mention this detail because I hope and assume it’s understood that not every candidate who stood in 2018 was in any way aligned to Newman. I certainly wasn’t.
However, I do sincerely apologise to Steven if my actions as a relatively novice political campaigner/candidate at the time strike him as remotely questionable. I certainly don’t regard them that way, but I entirely sympathise with him with respect to the possible optics.
Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Mathew.
I was asking purely to seek from you an objective, first-hand confirmation of what an egotistical, megalomaniacal, bullying and anti-democratic autocrat Newman really is.
Which, in a way, you have done. Sort of.
And to think: had Newman waited a week or so, he just might have achieved what he and Negrini had sought for several years (at significant public expense): the closure of Inside Croydon.
So we can add “not very bright” to those descriptions of him.
Excellent point. I await an answer…..
I apologise if I misinterpreted your post as hostile. If it was simply to adduce what type of person Tony Newman is, I have no inclination to disagree. I don’t think anyone who knows me or has met me, including a few posters here, could honestly say that I am a Tony Newman apologist, either now or when he was in power.
As an aside, and this *isn’t* in reference to anything IC has stated here, whatever disagreements we have within the political left, I hope we can all engage with one another in good faith. I’m not expecting all of you here to have particularly favourable opinions of Croydon Labour, even if my own belief is that they are the only viable alternative to the Tories and, heaven forbid, Reform (should they ever become an electoral threat in London, and right now, that, thankfully, seems to be a very remote possibility), particularly when it comes to the Mayoralty. There are many of us within Croydon Labour who are progressives and have worked, volunteered with, and campaigned with members of other progressive organisations and parties, including the Croydon Greens, whose engagement in, among other issues, defending Nightwatch from Mayor Perry’s ludicrous attacks, I particularly value.
I’d personally appreciate some discernment and constructive cooperation, where applicable, between relatively likeminded individuals within Croydon, across the progressive end of the political spectrum. Once again, that *doesn’t* mean I expect some of you to remotely change your feelings about Croydon Labour.
But as you well know, Mathew, and as the expulsions of the likes of Marc Wadsworth and suspensions of David White demonstrate, that is exactly the kind of tolerant attitude that the Labour Party of McSweeney, Newman, Reed and Starmer will never tolerate. And it is why you will find your campaigning sessions much lonelier experiences than they once were.
Mathew, they were all in the same party. They’re still in the same party, one that is patently rotten, as has been demonstrated by allowing Newman and Hall to get away with all the stunts they presided over.
Compare what those two did without penalty with what Labour’s kangaroo courts did – unfairly – to David White and Andrew Pelling.
Then consider what they didn’t do to the other half of the Gang of Four, Alison Butler and Paul Scott.
Labour are corrupt and cannot be trusted
You didn’t mention the illegal hacking of Inside Croydon and the subsequent cover-up, by the likes of Clive “Thirsty” Fraser.
Or the selection stitch-up of democratically elected candidates…
Or the role of Chris “Thirsty” Clark, Newman and Fraser in the attempt to cover-up a violent sexual assault on a young woman by a colleague councillor.
It wasn’t just the finances that they fucked over.
Very true.
Good points well made. But they won’t impress the followers of the cult
But they might remind some of them quite what shits they share ethical space with.
Just a reminder that it was Jason Perry who hired Jo Negrini at Croydon to head the redevelopment of the central business district. Newman and Perry should be viewed as the two sides of the same coin that has left Croydon in ruins.
Perry didn’t make Negrini the CEO of Croydon council or bung her nearly half a million quid of our money to piss off and keep her mouth shut. That dishonour belongs to Newman and his mates
Wrong again. The CEO appointment and pay-off was entirely down to Newman. No one else had a say. They wouldn’t dare.
And that’s where Del Boy’s right: the council has replaced one autocratic megalomaniac with another. And both Newman and Perry have been conned into *thinking* they are in charge, when really Negrini (and her closest colleagues) and now Kerswell are allowed to carry on doing exactly as they wish, with the end result we all have to live with.
Newman hasn’t got the brains to even conceive let alone execute a gagging order with money to seal the deal. If it was indeed all down to just one person, her name would be Jo.
Delboy is right about two cheeks of the same arse if you apply that definition to Perry and Davis. Both believe in the war on wildlife and spending what little money our Council has on keeping grass verges and open spaces manicured for people to park their cars on and let their dogs use as toilets
Don’t trust Labour full stop or the voting system, no truths they lie to get in
Forgiveness by the Labour Party is a valued theme here.
Picking up your earlier Stalinist theme, Rowenna Davis could always denounce Newman and his numpties (and evil Evans), in the vein of Khrushchev and his speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”
Labour have not apologised for what happened. That might be a good approach for a Labour mayoral campaign.