CROYDON IN CRISIS: The council’s library closures did not stop with the four public libraries which shut last year, as the Tory Mayor pushes through more service cuts without debate or consultation
Half cut: Croydon Central Library, next to the Town Hall, where the third floor has been blocked off to the borough’s residents without any public discussion or scrutiny
Mayor Jason Perry, after shutting down the borough’s youth outreach service, denying the public access to Access Croydon and moving to cut the borough’s school safety patrols, all done by stealth, has now overseen the closure of a large part of the borough’s main library.
The third floor of Central Library, located on Katharine Street as part of the council’s flagship Clocktower arts and culture centre next to the Town Hall, is now shut off to residents. Permanently.
According to one member of library staff, they have been told that the third floor is “no longer needed”. By whom, they failed to say.
Other members of the council’s library staff have said that the closure is “permanent”.
This is just the latest service reduction for Croydon’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers that the £84,000 per year Tory Mayor has imposed without any public discussion or Town Hall scrutiny.
The third floor had included the reading area where residents might scour hard copies of national daily newspapers. Except Croydon Council has stopped its subscriptions to the newspapers.
“I didn’t notice any permanent signage anywhere confirming that the third floor of the library was closed permanently,” one loyal reader emailed Inside Croydon after their latest disappointing visit to the town centre.
“The escalators to the third floor were locked and blocked off on the second floor.”
Croydon Central Library was built as an extension to the Clocktower complex, opening with what was originally a four-floor library space in November 1993. Croydon Central Library was the third-most-used public library in the country in 2010.
False promise: the council website offers longer opening hours in libraries, as it closes four of them
Having asked one librarian about the fate of Central Library’s third floor, our reader went to check with another member of staff. “Perhaps the third floor was simply being refurbished?” they said.
“So I went to the ground floor and asked another librarian, and she confirmed it was closed permanently, she said because ‘it was no longer needed’.”
The banks of desks with computers offering interweb access, which used to be on the third floor, are now situated on the second floor of the library. This might be to provide ease of access to all those who turned up at Fisher’s Folly, are denied access to the council offices, and then arrive at the library needing to book an appointment.
“Libraries and the knowledge and learning one can access through them have always been enormously important to me,” our reader says.
“I know that our economy is in a parlous state since Brexit and that from May 2010 onwards, central government has starved local government of funding. But to see services at Croydon’s main library slashed so egregiously is chilling.”
Perry and the council propaganda department were approached to explain the closure of part of Central Library, but failed to respond. As usual.
The Central Library closure comes shortly after Perry’s propaganda department was boasting on the council’s website of longer opening hours at the borough’s public libraries. “Libraries open longer for more people to enjoy,” they said.
Though not if you are in Broad Green, Old Coulsdon, Shirley or Sanderstead, where Perry pulled down the shutters permanently last year.
The closures will, according to the council’s own figures, save less than £500,000 per year, while opening up the possibility that the library sites could be part of the cash-strapped council’s asset disposal strategy.
The costly consultation to find excuses to close libraries was commissioned by Perry’s council during Croydon’s year as London’s Borough of Culture.
As Inside Croydon reported in 2023, “It seems highly likely that ‘reduced usage’ of the libraries will be used by Tory Mayor Jason Perry as one of the major excuses for closing a quarter of the borough’s libraries.”
BBC News has reported that Croydon’s lost libraries are among 190 to have closed across the country in the past year, as local authorities seek ways to save money as their costs of providing housing and children’s and adult care continue to soar.
Children’s services, adult social care and housing the homeless are all statutory services which councils, like Croydon, have to provide by law. Public libraries are also a statutory service. But that has not stopped library closures.
Because while councils have a duty to provide a public library service, the scale of that provision has never been defined in law. Thus Croydon has gone from providing 13 public libraries for its 390,000 residents to providing nine public libraries – with two of those set to be downgraded to “hubs”.
Mayor Jason Perry’s argument for the closures, despite overwhelming public opposition aired in every public consultation on libraries in the borough (there have been four such consultations since 2012; only Perry has gone ahead with closures), was: “Less than 10% of our residents were actually visiting libraries.”
Perry’s figures were based on usage while the majority of Croydon’s libraries were open only two or three days per week.
And Mayor Perry lied to the BBC.
Perry told the BBC that the libraries with reduced opening hours were “not really serving their local communities”.
Residents’ views ignored: the public consultation was conducted by Mayor Perry’s council, but not listened to
According to the BBC, the Mayor told them that his decision on which libraries to close “was really down to usage”.
The BBC quoted Mayor Perry as saying: “Those that were the lowest usage essentially were the ones that were then shut.”
Which is untrue.
According to Croydon Council’s own figures, from the report from consultants used to justify the closures, Bradmore Green and Sanderstead both had thousands more users than Purley, New Addington and South Norwood libraries. And Broad Green had better usage figures than three other libraries, two of which remain open today.
The figures used to justify the closures were, at least, questionable. “Documents produced by the council ahead of the closure decision highlighted that ‘active user data’ did not include visitors using the library as a study space, to use the wifi or to attend an event or group.”
Read more: No money, no plan, no honesty: Mayor still closing four libraries
Read more: Consultants’ year-long study looks to close four public libraries
Read more: Lip-service webinars fail to consider libraries’ community future
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Someone broke into part-time Perry’s Castlemaine Avenue mansion recently and stole all the books in his private library. The worst part? One of them hadn’t even been coloured in!
What is wrong with Perry? Absolutely bloody useless.
Can’t we start a petition to get him removed, along with his cronies? Kerswell is just a big a waste of space as Perry
There are elections in May 2026, Peter.
I know. Think of the damage they’ve already done and then what more they could do until then.
Croydon doesn’t have good form when it comes to petitions involving the mayor…
So, we should just accept the dross that’s on offer?
That’s what elections are supposed to be for, Peter.
The biggest problem in local politics is that most local taxpayers don’t want to engage in the political process outside of putting an X in a box every 4 years. And then we complain about the councillors and MPs we get and why taxes go up. Really, we just want to work, pay bills, mind our business and enjoy our own money. People, look at the your councils, they’re run incompetently!