There’s only a handful of opportunities each year for the public to question the way their council is being run, but as ANDREW FISHER, pictured right, discovered when watching last night’s full council meeting, it is increasingly obvious that the elected Mayor and council directors prefer not to provide any answers
It has often been said that Croydon Council is a bit rubbish. But that was taken to extraordinary levels in the Town Hall Chamber last night, where elected Mayor Jason Perry, and we must assume the senior executives who actually run the local authority, went to great lengths to avoid being answerable to the people they claim to serve – Croydon residents.
Lots of hot air: the latest full council meeting was an exercise in avoidance of questions
With important, campaigning petitions signed by thousands of residents being ignored, fobbed off or just lost in council spam folders, this rare opportunity for the public to question the council – under Mayor Perry there are just four meetings of full council per year – saw much time devoted to fly-tipping
The substantive business of the night kicked off with a public question, about moving to a plant-based food only policy, with the questioner, a Mr Mehta, highlighting the “noxious gases” from animals.
The Town Hall Chamber is certainly no stranger to hot air, and as last night’s meeting wore on, the topic of noxious smells and waste appeared to be paramount.
This, remember, at a local authority that has been effectively in special measures for more than four years, has £1.5billion of debt, and which as recently as February was admitting that it is unable to balance its future budgets, and so needed another £132million of special financial assistance from central government.
Former Conservative council candidate Kosta Dexiades (who stood for the Tories in Addiscombe West in 2022) complained about the levels of fly-tipping in the borough. The Conservatives in the Chamber responded by claiming that the time taken to clear fly-tipping had reduced.
That did not wash with the Labour opposition, who highlighted Croydon’s unwanted status as the fly-tipping capital of England. Indeed, earlier this year Inside Croydon reported that since Mayor Perry took over in 2022, there have been just four prosecutions for fly-tipping in Croydon.
Pension questions: resident Ita Gallagher got to ask about Croydon’s investments in arming Israel from the public gallery above the Chamber
From the public gallery, Ita Gallagher asked a question on the subject of divestment of the council’s pension fund investments in Israeli arms companies, and asking the council to ensure its investments were not supporting Israeli war crimes (a subject on which David White recently wrote earlier this week).
Until earlier this week, it seemed that council bureaucrats would not allow such a question, but after a meeting between Green councillor Ria Patel and the council CEO, Katherine Kerswell on Monday, the question of divestment was hurriedly added in what the council calls a “supplementary agenda”.
Jason Cummings, Mayor Perry’s cabinet member for finance, gladly handed the floor over to Callton Young, the chair of the council’s pensions committee. Young explained that Croydon’s money was all pooled with other London boroughs, that divestment was not feasible and that it risked “financial detriment”. Gallagher was suitably unimpressed – a feeling that’s unlikely to change when she gets to have her requested meeting with Young.
One of the petitions which were initially left off last night’s agenda, over the state and future of council-owned listed building Heathfield House, did manage to get an airing – another last-minute addition with a supplementary agenda. In total, almost 2,500 Croydon residents had signed the petition, only for the council to claim they never received it, when all along it was sitting in someone’s spam folder.
As a sop to the petitioners, they were squeezed in with a less-than-satisfactory three-minute slot (successful petitions are usually invited to provide two speakers, and contributions from councillors included in a debate).
Lead petitioner Rebecca Atherton set out how Heathfield had been left vacant and unsecured for years, and despite proposals to bring the Victorian villa back into use in 2022, with grant funding available, instead the Mayor listed it for sale as a leasehold.
Her final plea was for a genuine public consultation on Heathfield House’s future.
Mayor Perry said that the house remains in public ownership, that it is not for sale, and has never been sale, except for what he conceded was an erroneous online sale listing.
After tetchily complaining about the use of his surname (Atherton referred to him as “Perry”), Perry rejected any consultation by declaring a lease on a long-term basis was the “best option”. That’s right, Perry, the Mayor who listens to residents. Except when he doesn’t.
But back to refuse collection and fly-tipping …
Eye, eye: the re-hiring of rubbish contractors Veolia has reached the pages of one of the country’s best-selling magazines
Stuart King, the current leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall, raised the decision of Mayor Perry to renew the multi-million deal with rubbish contractors Veolia, even at a time of rising complaints about the service provider.
King highlighted that there was no competitive tendering and that the new contract costs £2.5million more a year than last time.
Mayor Perry didn’t like this one bit, and was in full bluster mode – prices had gone up, Perry said, the contract was different and he was “clearing up Labour’s mess”. Mayor Perry didn’t say whether that was part of Veolia’s contract.
King hit back with his own soundbyte, saying that people were “paying more to get less” under Perry. Indeed, Council Tax has risen by 27%, services have been cut, but there’s still £2.5million extra for Veolia.
Croydon’s smaller parties appeared keen not to get dragged into rubbish debates.
Instead, Councillor Ria Patel asked the Mayor about plans for permanent installation of live facial recognition cameras in the borough. This was another area of public questioning that had not managed to get through the censorship applied by officials at Mayor Perry’s council.
Responding to the councillor’s question, Perry said he supported the police making LFR permanent, claiming it brought down crime.
Dodgy answers: Mayor Jason Perry’s struggled with numbers in his answers at last night’s council meeting
As Patel articulated her worries about civil liberties and misidentification, concerns shared by human rights group Liberty, the Mayor responded by claiming the technology had an “accuracy rate of 99.9%”, which sounds improbably high, and that it was taking burglars and rapists off our streets.
The Liberal Democrat councillor, Claire Bonham, took aim at the Labour government’s proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments and health-related Universal Credit top-ups. The Mayor could not answer how many people in Croydon might be affected but said the “drastic cuts” would have a “huge impact” in the borough, and “should concern all of us”. Maybe he has been reading Inside Croydon?
I can’t recall Perry or any other Conservative councillor in Croydon speaking out when Tory governments cut disability benefits – much as local Labour councillors have been silent as Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves announced cuts that go further than George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith ever dared.
As the clock ticked closer to 10pm, when the three-and-half hours allotted for the meeting would come to an end, it was finally time for Labour’s newly selected mayoral candidate, Rowenna Davis, to take to the floor. Unsurprisingly, it was on the subject of rubbish.
Davis was seconding a motion moved by her Labour colleague, shadow cabinet member Christopher Herman on, yes, you guessed it… fly-tipping.
63-0: the first motion to be put forward as mayoral candidate by Rowenna Davis was carried unanimously
Davis was quickly into full flow: “Croydon good at picking it up, bad at enforcement”, with 35,000 recorded fly-tips and only 15 penalty notices issued, she’s not wrong.
Davis said that this lack of enforcement resulted in a “total and utter injustice … Criminals are getting free rubbish collection”. She rounded off by warning Perry: “There’s one year left on your term, Mr Mayor.”
Labour’s plan to tackle the scourge of fly-tips includes resuming the practice of confiscating and crushing the vehicles used for fly-tipping, and publishing the details of enforcement cases where the fly-tipper receives a fine, so that residents can see whether fly-tippers are being held to account.
In a rare outbreak of bipartisanship, Simon Fox, the Tory councillor in Davis’s ward of Waddon, announced that the Conservatives had decided to back the motion. It was duly carried 63-0.
Mayor Perry, however, struck a rather more tetchy tone, chastising Labour for running down the borough and claiming, “We’re putting pride back in this borough.”
After failing to “fix the finances” as he promised to do when seeking election, Perry does need a new slogan – so abstract nouns are in fashion.
Above all else, though, and as this council meeting proved, Croydon’s Town Hall Chamber could do with a clear-out.
- As well as his column, Andrew is also conducting podcast interviews, in-depth and informed with specialists and national figures, sharing their expertise with Croydon, and available on Inside Croydon’s Spotify channel
The Andrew Fisher Interview is usually available only to paid subscribers of Inside Croydon. This month’s podcast is with disability rights activist Ellen Clifford, and this episode is free to access to all our readers
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
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Thanks for reporting Andrew – we appreciate it.
While things with Heathfield went as we expected (probs should have made a bingo card), we’ll keep pushing. It boils down to whether the council, and central govt, consider leasehold sale a form of sale. It would be interesting to know how many leasehold-title holding landlords were in the room, and whether they consider themselves the actual owners of their properties!
If Mayor Perry believes a long leasehold is the right path forward, then why not involve the community in that? It’s hard to understand why his administration refuses to recognise the community as a capable partner in shaping our shared spaces. For a building intended for “public benefit,” it’s striking how little input the public is allowed to have.