After raising your Council Tax by 27% and still needing bigger government bailouts than ever before, now the Tory Mayor wants four more years.
By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor
Rubbish Mayor: Jason Perry hired the same contractors who were sacked two years earlier, and wanted to charge extra for replacement bins
Be afraid, Croydon. Be very afraid.
“I’m just getting started.”
Those were the final words of Mayor Jason Perry’s “State of the Borough” speech last week, at the council’s annual meeting.
Yes, the bloke who promised to “fix the finances”, and didn’t.
The geezer who has hiked your Council Tax by 27% in two years.
The fella who has closed libraries, is sacking lollipop ladies and yet managed to find the cash to award himself and some mates a pay rise. He says he’s “just getting started”.
Poor old Croydon.
Perry’s speech came towards the end of the annual council meeting, where the first hour and a half had been spent with various self-congratulatory, back-slapping speeches (including two by the same councillor), all claiming that they’ve been doing a great job, and quite a bit of time wasted while a couple of councillors raided the Town Hall dressing-up box to put on silly hats and some costume jewellery.
In and out: Labour councillor Kola Agboola (right) handed over the ceremonial chains of office – and £28k in allowances – to Tory councillor Richard Chatterjee
They call it the “mayor-making”. Going out was Kola Agboola, the 2024-2025 civic Mayor. Coming in was Richard Chatterjee, the 2025-2026 civic Mayor. Chatterjee will be paid £28,282 over the next 12 months for the role of ceremonial mayor, basically for dressing up in a silly costume and cutting the ribbons at a few school fetes and village fairs.
Croydon Council, you may recall, has debts of at least £1.4billion.
The council holds just five meetings of the full council each year in the Town Hall Chamber to debate important business around how the borough’s services are delivered and paid for. And this annual bore-fest, where no substantive business was done, represents 20% of all meetings of your full council.
The only functional part of the meeting is to announce the new ceremonial Mayor for the coming year and to thank last year’s Mayor. That ceremony could be done in 10 minutes – although they took 15 minutes just getting changed in and out of the Trumptonesque robes.
Hours of paid staff time are wasted on a pointless meeting that could have been dealt with in an email.
But the elected Mayor, Jason Perry, thinks nothing of wasting your money on promoting himself.
It’s not as if the council does not have a myriad of important and pressing matters to discuss – like Perry’s plan to push the council into bankruptcy (yet again), or the ongoing destruction of our library service, or the badly bungled outsourcing of the carer’s centre.
None of these important matters got discussed at the annual council meeting, which was devoted to a public dressing up parade and another of Mayor Perry’s pretty awful speeches.
Real business wasn’t allowed to be discussed, and no questions were allowed to be asked. For that, the public has to wait another couple of months until the next full council meeting, which isn’t until July 16.
The agenda for the annual council meeting agenda was as follows:
Gone missing: Scott Roche bunked off the annual meeting
Apologies for absence – at least seven of Croydon’s 70 councillors – 10% – couldn’t be bothered to turn up, even for this annual meeting, with glasses of sherry in the (ceremonial) Mayor’s Parlour afterwards. You’d be forgiven for thinking some of these councillors – like absentee cabinet member Scott Roche and his Tory colleague Simon Fox – are collecting money for old rope.
Minutes of the last meeting – suitably edited
Disclosure of interests – where some councillors completely forgot that they are supposed to declare and update their register of outside interests
Appointment of the new ceremonial Mayor and Deputy Mayor – a choreographed bit of pomp and ceremony involving costume changes, corporation jewellery, and self-regarding speeches.
Appointments – the annual opportunity for the two largest groups of councillors, Conservative and Labour, to reward their cronies with some extra allowances and rig the committees to help to avoid any proper scrutiny of either of them.
Once we waded through all of that, we were left with the (elected) Mayor’s annual statement.
In his speech, a shameless piece of self-aggrandising propaganda, 12 months ahead of the local elections, Perry claimed that he had made real progress.
Wembley whinger: Mayor Jason Perry’s ‘State of the Borough’ speech was full of exaggerated claims
If progress looks like a £136million bail-out from central government, while squandering millions more on consultants and axing further services, then maybe Perry’s claim to have made progress is valid. Few would agree with Perry’s assessment, though.
In his speech, one of Perry’s proud claims was closing the pedestrian underpass on Wellesley Road. He’s not planning on putting in any replacement crossing anytime soon. Given his removal of other road safety features, it does seem that Perry thinks making Croydon’s roads more dangerous is one of his signs of “progress”.
Another of Parry’s proud claims was that the council now had a map of its green spaces. Given that Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791, this is not really much to shout about.
Most people would assume that any sensible council would know where its parks and green spaces are anyway. One Katharine Street insider also suggested that the only reason why Perry started this exercise was because the Greens were pointing out that he couldn’t claim to be protecting our green spaces if he didn’t even know where they were.
Others were probably closer to the truth: only with all of the borough’s open spaces logged can council bureaucrats begin the process of flogging off some of them to developers.
Perry also claimed that he was responsible for restoring our bus shelters. But Perry’s council completely failed to do this – in fact, the exec director in charge of the shambles publicly admitted that the council was completely incapable of organising a procurement process for bus shelters, and that Croydon had to be bailed out yet again, this time by Transport for London.
Eye, eye: the re-hiring of rubbish contractors Veolia has reached the pages of one of the country’s best-selling magazines
Handing a £40million, eight-year contract to rubbish contractors Veolia barely two years after sacking them for failing on the job has landed Croydon residents with the entirely predictable outcome of missed bin collections and mounting piles of stinking rubbish.
This, according to Perry, was nothing more than “teething troubles”.
Cuts to youth services were referred to as “reforms”.
And inevitably, Perry even claimed that he had scored the winner in the FA Cup semi-final that got Crystal Palace to Wembley… Well no, he stopped just short of that. But it didn’t stop him claiming that Palace’s on-field success was all part of his own masterplan “to restore pride” in Croydon.
Just as the audience was about to fall asleep, everyone was jolted awake by Perry confessing that he had lied to Croydon residents. Perry admitted that he isn’t going to fix the finances and claimed that it couldn’t be done in just four years.
Perry didn’t mention his other big failures, the Council Tax hikes and years of cuts to Council staff and public services, nor where he had got caught out in the nick of time over the disposal of public open space to the Addington Golf Club or the auctioning off of Heathfield House (which might yet still get pushed through).
But he did finish with an unveiled threat.
“Four years was never going to be enough,” he tells us now.
“I’m just getting started!”
Be afraid, Croydon. Be very afraid.
Read more: Complaints against Perry’s council on rise, Ombudsman says
Read more: Kerswell’s ‘Stabilisation Plan’ has failed before it is approved
Read more: Council chief West warns staff that finances ‘remain serious’
Read more: Council Tax hits £2,500 per year as debts continue to mount
Read more: Cash-strapped council has spent £6.4m… to make more cuts
Read more: Government grants Perry’s record £136m council bail-out plea
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The 27% hike in council tax was caused by the antics of the previous Labour administration — as you well know.
That is far removed from the truth. The figures and history contradict you.
In late 2022, Perry issued Croydon’s third S114 notice. It’s a notice of effective bankruptcy. He’d fumbled the finances, rather than fixed them.
And while other troubled local authorities asked Gove for permission to raise Council Tax in April 2023 by 10%, Perry went in studs up and HE REQUESTED permission for a 15% hike. No one else. This was Perry’s own big idea.
In 2020, Croydon Council was around £63million over budget, which caused the council’s first S114. Croydon borrowed £59million from central government between 2019 and 2022, the year Perry became Mayor.
Since Perry became Mayor, he has added £249million additional borrowing to the council’s pile of toxic debt.
That’s been entirely on Perry’s watch, assisted by Katherine Kerswell, the chief executive whose salary he recently increased to £204,000 by an inflation-busting 6.25%.
Facts don’t lie.
And if you try to post bare-faced lies to this website again, you will be blocked for a clear breach of our publishing rules.
Don’t block him. It’s always good to see hecklers put in their place
Rules is rules, Arfur.
Four more years? For more tears
I do like Perry’s Reign of Error.
Perry at large!
The other aspect of this farcical mayor making pantomime is that Green and Lib Dem councillors are not allowed to speak on ANY of the agenda items. Labour and Tory groups effectively shut out any genuine opposition to their collaborative years of failure.
We haven’t got democracy in Croydon, we have a dictatorship
Oh come on. You are being totally unfair to part time Perry. He really is the state of the Borough.