CROYDON IN CRISIS: The council has made no announcement about who has taken over the borough’s top planning job, but this website has discovered that Heather Cheesbrough’s stand-in replacement is an ‘interim specialist’ who has pocketed more than £500,000 in severance deals from other local authorities. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Yorkshire grit: Adam Wilkinson has done the rounds of local authorities – sometimes working for two at the same time
It has been two months since Heather Cheesbrough left her £130,000 per year job as Croydon Council’s “director of planning and sustainable regeneration”.
Yet there has been no official announcement, no press release nor any photo op with gurning Mayor Jason Perry welcoming her replacement.
There may be good reason for that.
Inside Croydon has conducted a preliminary check on the career record of Adam Wilkinson and discovered a litany of often short-stay, usually very lucrative posts in local government where Croydon’s recently appointed “interim director of planning and strategic planning” has pocketed more than £500,000 in golden handshakes and settlement payments, in addition to his very generous wages and pension pot.
As an “interim”, it could well be that Wilkinson is only working as the most senior official in Croydon’s planning department for a brief period, until a permanent successor for Cheesbrough can be found (though the council’s HR department will have had three month’s notice of the exec’s departure to identify the right candidate).
And as a stand-in, Wilkinson could be paid on terms at the cash-strapped council that include fees of close to £1,000 per day. It is, after all, the kind of deal that Wilkinson has secured for himself in previous positions.
It is not known whether all of Wilkinson’s recent employment history was included in his CV or job application when he was being hired by Croydon, though his appointment is likely to have been approved by both Mayor Perry and his chief exec, Katherine Kerswell.
A decade ago, The Times reported how Wilkinson was “a Northern Powerhouse chief on £1,000 a day”, and that he had previously received two payouts worth a total of £500,000 in what The Thunderer described as a “’revolving door’ scandal”.
“‘Revolving door’ scandal”: how The Times reported on Wilkinson’s special arrangements with councils 10 years ago
Then, Wilkinson was working three days a week as interim chief executive of the North East Combined Authority. He was costing the taxpayer the equivalent of an annual salary of £248,000.
Wilkinson had just been paid £140,000 as part of a voluntary redundancy package from Derby City Council in January 2015.
This followed a £365,000 pay-off Wilkinson received from Kent County Council in 2008, after working there for just a year.
That’s the same Kent County Council that would be heavily criticised again after making a £420,000 exit payment in December 2011 to its departing managing director, who had been in post just 16 months. The name of the civic bureaucrat trousering such a generous “golden handshake”? It was, of course, Katherine Kerswell…
At Kent CC, Wilkinson worked as director of environment and regeneration, but terminated his £70,000-a-year job after just 12 months, having belatedly discovered that commuting weekly from his family home in Yorkshire to the council offices in Maidstone “wasn’t working out”.
He was reported as saying at that time: “I was living in Maidstone during the week and going back to West Yorkshire at the weekend. It was tiring and stressful.”
Might Wilkinson be shuttling between West Yorkshire and south London while being paid by Croydon Council?
When Wilkinson rolled up at the North East Combined Authority, he was not working as a member of staff but was paid through a limited company — what The Times report described as “a tax-efficient arrangement”. They meant tax-efficient for Wilkinson, not for the tax-payer.
Then, Wilkinson was paid £825 a day, plus an agency fee of 16%, and was having his accommodation and travel paid for, too. “He will remain in post for six months to nine months until a permanent chief can be hired by the authority,” The Times reported in 2015.
Looks familiar: Adam Wilkinson is not the only senior council staffer to have taken a big pay-out from Kent
Might Wilkinson be operating a similarly “tax-efficient” scheme while working for Croydon Council?
Before he found such lucrative work at the NECA, in 2014, Wilkinson had landed a three-year contract extension as CEO at Derby City Council.
He quit that job in January 2015 (“voluntary redundancy”), helped on his way with £100,000 “compensation”, plus three months’ pay.
It was the “right time to look for a new challenge, perhaps in a different sector”, Wilkinson was quoted as saying by his erstwhile employers then.
But BBC Radio Derby’s council correspondent described the rapid exit as “not a surprise”.
“I’ve been told by multiple sources at the council that he has been looking for alternative employment,” the BBC reporter said. “It’s been something of an open secret within the Council House.” He suggested that Wilkinson’s relations with the council’s elected leadership “were uncomfortable”.
After Kent, Derby and the North East, by July 2017 Wilkinson had moved on to Northern Ireland. And south-east London. At the same time.
Even by Wilkinson’s standards for flitting between jobs, what he pulled off now was surprising, as he was pocketing generous wage packages from two local authorities at the same time.
Newry, Mourne and Down Council had appointed Wilkinson as their interim director for regulatory and technical services, working three days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, according to the Newry Reporter) and being paid “in the region of £70,000 at a rate of £834 plus VAT per day plus daily receipted expenses up to a maximum of £165 per day”. So another “tax-efficient” Wilkinson arrangement at public expense.
Yet at the same time, Wilkinson was also the interim managing director of BexleyCo, Bexley’s development company. Yes, even Tory-run London boroughs were setting up their own versions of Brick by Brick.
At BexleyCo, Wilkinson was to “take the lead role in establishing the company”, a Bexley Council statement said at the time. So Bexley’s very own Colm Lacey.
The Bexley Times reported that Wilkinson would be on £145,000 per year as managing director for a three-to-four-day week (on top of his three days in Newry… do the math). “I feel honoured to have been offered the opportunity to fulfil the role as BexleyCo’s first managing director and I look forward to starting on July 3,” Wilkinson was reported as saying in a council press release.
Wilkinson’s latest civic love-in didn’t last very long. According to Companies House records, Wilkinson – who described himself as a “management consultant” – was appointed as a director of BexleyCo on June 28 2017 but had resigned by October 13 that year.
By January 2018, Wilkinson had moved on to Slough, the town that Betjeman wanted bombed and where Ricky Gervais set up his office.
Wilkinson had nabbed himself another interim appointment, as chief exec of Slough Borough Council. But this time, Wilkinson quit without any compensation package.
In fact, Wilkinson quit the day before he was due to start in the role. “Adam has withdrawn for personal reasons,” Slough’s council leader informed a town hall meeting.
Jobs as interim chief executive at Cornwall and Isle of Scilly “leadership board” and as “director of economy and growth” at Cornwall County Council were to follow, while Wilkinson also had a spell as “interim commercial director” at Manchester City Council.
More recently, Inside Croydon has found reports of Wilkinson jumping on the council gravy train in Southampton, where from April 2022 he was working as “executive director – place”. According to the city council’s annual returns, the “role was undertaken by Adam Wilkinson via an external company”. Payment for the 12-month period 2022-2023 was a breathtaking £242,146, excluding VAT.
Local newspaper reports of his appointment deployed massive understatement when they described Wilkinson as “an interim specialist”.
His time in Southampton appears to have concluded in early 2024, without any need of a pay-off, freeing up 61-year-old Wilkinson for his big opportunity in Croydon.
It’s uncertain how long “Interim Adam” will be working at Fisher’s Folly, or whether he might be working remotely from West Yorkshire, or quite how much he is to be paid. All questions that have been put to Croydon Council.
But it is rather odd that Wilkinson has not had one of those obligatory photo ops with Mayor Jason Perry welcoming him to Croydon Council. Whatever have they got to hide?
Read more: How the council’s planners help developers dodge conditions
Read more: Suspicions over secrecy surrounding Slominski’s return
Read more: Council in cover-up over planning’s husband and wife act
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By the looks of him he’s spent the entire amount on pies.
Gurning Perry looking for similar pay deal?
how the heck does this council expect to be taken seriously when it spends money on a clown like this he is simply a bloodsucker taking money for nothing mind you how many of them are already in senior posts in croydon roll on the local elections and hope we get councillors who can actually MAKE our council work for us the ratepayer
The public sector needs serious reform. Payouts of £420k after 16 months for Kerswell and £365k after 12 months for Wilkinson? A tribunal wouldn’t award them that if they’d be fired on the spot. This is money that we (taxpayers) have to work for and earn and they are being made millionaires for failure. Let’s not pretend they were paid off because they were any good. And if he’s working through a limited company outside of IR35 whilst taking that role, then HMRC should be taking a look at that – because he’s an employee.
The only positive here is that he can’t be any worse than Cheesbrough.
He’s just another person who has managed to construct an impressive looking CV over the decades but his only actual achievements are the public paying him millions whilst delivering very little in return. He’s nothing more than a professional at getting overpaid public sector jobs. This is a huge problem of council culture up and down the country, all the while pretty much none of them are balancing their budgets. Councils are working very nicely for people like Adam Wilkinson whilst failing the rest of us.
Would the planning department really cease to function without an interim director?
My experience in IT was that more work was done when the managers weren’t around, interfering and asking dumb questions.
This is an old argument. We don’t need bosses – let the workers run things. Never works – imagine Inside Croydon without an editor, where the junior subs run things. Never gonna work
The junior sub took over in 2011.
A putsch🤡
No. A properly and fairly negotiated workers’ takeover.
Yorkshire grit? Did you leave the letter ‘f’ out?
If he wants any credibility (and he may not care) then he needs to clean up the planning department quickly. He should deal with Dodgy Gentry and the others and examine some of the questionable planning decisions that have been made. IC can help him identify them.
Is the new interim head of planning a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (“RTPI”)? Does he hold accredited degrees in town planning, urban and regional planning or similar fields that are accredited by the RTPI? Does he hold an MSc in spatial planning, urban planning or town planning?
Did he obtain a Level 7 Chartered Town Planner degree via an apprenticehip?
Is he a RTPI Chartered Town Planner obtained through having years of extensive experience?
You don’t need qualifications to run Croydon council. Mayor Perry never mentions his. His sidekick Councillor Roche hasn’t got any worth mentioning, despite what he thinks.
Former Deputy Council Leader Alison Butler hadn’t got any full stop. Tony Newman wasn’t so much qualified as certified.
Politicians don’t want people cleverer than them telling them what to do. It undermines their inflated sense of self-importance, their delusions of grandeur.
If Katherine Kerswell has got any qualifications, the government never saw fit to list them on her biography on their website.
As for Adam Wilkinson, he is admirably qualified to work for Croydon council. His company, Adam Wilkinson Consultancy, was compulsorily liquidated on 13 April 2025 by the Official Receiver: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09638414
I disagree. This fellow is supposed to be interim head of the planning department. As such, I would expect him to know something about the planning system in England, planning law and policy and the work those who report to him do, either through educational attainment or experience. Preferably both.
Just as I would expect the head of the Council’s legal department to at least be a qualified barrister or solicitor.
How can he hold sendible conversations with colleagues in the department about planning if he has no knowledge of the subject?
His role is very specific and different from being executive Mayor or council chief executive.
The head of the council’s legal department’s previous job was as an estate agent.
Fair enough, but the former head of legal’s previous job doesn’t tell me whether or not that person passed the exams necessary, and undertook the practical training period required, to qualify as a barrister or solicitor in England and Wales, or qualified as a lawyer outside of England and Wales.
There are many ex lawyers who go into estate agency.
No serious public company (nor private company for that matter) would hire a head of legal who wasn’t qualified legally. You can’t “wing it” when talking to subordinates about what they are doing with litigation, mergers and acquisitions, etc.
If the Council is employing heads of department that require a specific set of skills and experience, who don’t hold relevant qualifications (nor experience), especially when “lay” councillors are looking to such people for accurate, appropriate advice, is it any wonder that our Borough is £1.5 billion in debt?!
First, you mistake sarcasm for serious commentary. Now, you respond to a serious factual response with a statement of the bleedin’ obvious.
Stephen Lawrence-Orumense gets quite shirty if you dare to question his qualifications. He trained as and qualified as a barrister.
What’s unclear is why he could not find work as a barrister when he was employed in his family’s estate agency business immediately before he landed a big bucks job at cash-strapped Croydon Council. You’ll need to draw your own conclusions.
It’s clear that SLO is no Perry Mason, and certainly no Rumpole of the Bailey. Council work would seem a tad mundane for someone who, when undertaking his pupilage, must surely have dreamt of inhabiting the Inns of Court.
Can anyone shed light on the circumstances surrounding SLO’s departure from the legal department at Sutton Council? Was it because he was an outstanding civic legal administrator?
The 2015 job description for the then post of Director of Planning and Strategic Transport said, under “Specific Minimum Qualifications and Expertise”, that they wanted someone with “Full membership of the RTPI or qualified by skills and experience to secure full RTPI membership”.
It would therefore be reasonable to expect that any interim or permanent appointment to a successor role would be RTPI qualified
You couldn’t make it up. A bankrupt council hiring a public servant who has been paid to leave his jobs (it takes a lot to lose a public sector job – just ask Kerswell) and their own company subject to a compulsory liquidation.
Did they do their due diligence? Is there any barrel left to scrape?
Croydon is doomed.
Heather Cheesborough and Nicola Townsend are, I believe, both members and look at their astonishing incompetence.
Consultancy is one of the biggest scams in the business world. Getting paid big bucks for giving advice. People are hired just to take up space at the business, give opinions, ideas or submit a report that states what the management was going to do anyway. £1,000 a day? Nice work if you can get it!
Everything the council does is an appalling gravy train to waste our money. There’s been a “refurb” of a council block on my street going on for 5 months now, the “workmen” just sit around all day smoking. It’s a scam to rob our money the council has gleefully signed up to. Of course literally nobody at the council will even reply let alone explain why a month’s work (max) is still not done in 5 months. The public sector is like a trough for c*nts.