CROYDON IN CRISIS: Local MP and opposition councillors accuse the council of having no clear plan on what will replace an in-house team which works to reduce drugs and knife crime and to engage the borough’s youngsters. By our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE
Gang hot-spot: crimes committed near McDonalds on Church Street have been used by Mayor Perry as an excuse to shut down the council’s youth service
The failure in policing large gangs of schoolchildren congregating around local branches of McDonalds is the latest excuse offered by Croydon Mayor Jason Perry for axing another council service, its Youth Engagement Team.
Mayor Perry wants to outsource the council’s responsibility towards the borough’s young people to outside groups, doling out hundreds of thousands of pounds in grants from City Hall and elsewhere to a variety of organisations, some of which are run by people who say that they are former gang members.
The cutting of the Youth Engagement Team has been described by a local MP as “a betrayal of Croydon’s young people”.
Since 2021, £1.5million of grants from MOPAC, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, have been allocated to a collection of groups operating in Croydon, supposedly providing youth services and anti-knife crime “initiatives”. Opposition councillors have expressed worries that some of that money simply “disappears”, without ever being used for the purpose intended.
This financial year, 2025-2026, the cash-strapped council is diverting £200,000 of its own money to these external, and largely unaccountable, groups. The council’s in-house Youth Engagement Team has, meanwhile, seen its budgets reduced to nothing.
The decision was smuggled out in a council report last week which revealed that Perry’s foregone conclusion had been based on a consultation which in almost six months had spoken to no more than 40 people.
Policing issues: after years of cuts, Mayor Perry is using town centre gang crime as an excuse for axing the council’s Youth Engagement Team
“I’m surprised,” one Katharine Street source said today. “I didn’t know Jason Perry had as many as 40 friends.”
The latest report is simple confirmation of a foregone conclusion.
It was just before Christmas that the heartless council began a redundancy process with around a dozen social workers and specialist youth workers based in New Addington. Having failed to “fix the finances”, Perry fancies flogging off the Fieldway Centre, where several of the youth workers had been based.
In a pattern of conduct which is becoming increasingly common, and troubling. Perry’s “Executive Mayor Key Decision” will not be debated at a full council meeting until next month, at the earliest, which is liable to be too late to save what’s left of the council’s youth service.
And Perry is battening down the hatches for the political criticism he is liable to face, carefully noting in his report that “core funding” for YET – the Youth Engagement Team – was reduced in the council’s March 2022 budget, pointing a finger of blame at the previous Labour administration.
Of course, since Perry came to power at the Town Hall, the borough’s finances have got worse. Much worse.
Perry’s report is full of profoundly weak excuses for abandoning YET.
“A review of the service in 2024,” the report states, “concluded that the service offer is not well understood by partners and the service lacks some of the targeted interventions which are necessary to have a lasting impact on anti-social behaviour.
No debate: Perry has made an executive decision, avoiding all discussion
“As a result, the Violence Reduction Unit were required to commission additional resource in April 2023 to address concerns around large groups of young people congregating and occupying the local McDonald’s and surrounding streets,” the report states.
That may refer to the brief use of knife arches at the entrances to some of the town centre’s fast food restaurants.
The overall responsibility for policing the borough’s streets remains with the Metropolitan Police, rather than with YET, something Perry’s report fails to make clear.
Instead of the NSO team, Mayor Perry has been funnelling public cash, from central government grants, to his mates at Croydon BID, the business improvement district, for them to spend on a private security firm and its high street bounty hunters. Perry is a director of Croydon BID.
Section 507b of the Education Act 1996 says that all young people aged between 13 and 19 years (and up to 25 years for those with special educational needs and disability) have the right to access youth work activities for the improvement of their wellbeing and to promote their personal and social development.
Perry’s council has its cop-out, though. “It is not compulsory on the local authority to directly provide these services,” the report says. So that’s all right then.
The “consultation” conducted by the council to cover its arse over the axing of the YET is embarrassingly thin.
“The service has carried out a review and subsequent consultation with everyone involved with the YET service,” Perry’s report claims. That’s supposed to have covered staff, parents and young people, as well as schools, charities, the faith and voluntary sectors.
Three demands: Croydon East MP Natasha Irons has laid out conditions she would like the council to meet over the future of the Youth Engagement Team
According to Perry, the consultation started on December 5 last year and continued until April 25 2025 – so the best part of five months. In all that time, they managed to speak with just 31 children and got “feedback” from nine parents.
“Feedback from the voluntary youth sector advised that the offer did not reach the children who were at risk,” the report states, without mentioning that the “voluntary youth sector” will include some organisations who stand to benefit from the diversion of council cash and grants from the YET.
The report gives one line to the responses received from the users of the YET service. “Responses to the consultation advised that the universal offer was well-received by the children it reached,” a single line which underlines the recklessness of Perry’s latest cuts.
Croydon East’s Labour MP Natasha Irons told Inside Croydon: “Closing the Youth Engagement Team is not just a budget cut, it’s a betrayal of Croydon’s young people.
“This team has been a lifeline, building trust, understanding local challenges and providing the consistent support that many young people have come to rely on. Replacing it with a patchwork of commissioned and volunteer-led services risks leaving young people without the consistent support they need,” Irons said.
“Croydon’s young people deserve more than temporary fixes. Youth services need statutory protections to ensure consistent investment and high-quality support. Without legal safeguards, vital services like the Youth Engagement Team can be cut on a whim.
“I will continue to push for stronger protections for these essential services.”
Labour sources have begun to express significant concerns about this outsourcing of a vital, potentially life-saving, service.
“Relying on volunteers from various organisations might lead to high turnover and create inconsistency that could be damaging to young people – some already vulnerable,” Labour said. Others working in the charity and voluntary sector are also questioning the effectiveness of some of the regular recipients of the often generous public grants allocated via Croydon Council.
Earlier this year, it was confirmed that Mayor Perry had ruled that there was to be no Serious Case Review into the circumstances surrounding Hassan Sentamu, the teenager convicted of the frenzied murder of schoolgirl Elianne Andam outside the Whitgift Centre in September 2023.
No review: Perry’s council and the police opted not to conduct a Serious Case Review into the circumstances surroundinng the murder of Elianne Andam in 2023
Serious case reviews can be called when there is concern about how authorities worked together to protect the child – and while Elianne Andam, the victim, was never in council care, her murderer, Hassan Sentamu, certainly was.
Sentamu had spent much of his life in foster homes and had been “mentored” by other, non-council “out-reach” groups at the time the knife attack on 15-year-old Andam.
For some reason best known to himself, and to local police chiefs, Perry determined that there was nothing to learn from this terrible tragedy.
Perry’s report also fails to explain who will oversee the delivery of his new, non-council, outsoured youth services.
Croydon’s troublingly persistent high levels of youth knife crime, the gang culture and drugs-related crime, and the closure of the Youth Engagement service, also need to be set against the background of a 73% cut in council spend on youth services since 2010.
MP Irons is demanding that the council should keep its in-house youth service “in areas such as New Addington, with large numbers of families and young people”, and she wants a full public consultation over YET’s future and for councillors to be given the opportunity to scrutinise Perry’s plans.
According to Irons, Perry’s council is “asking us to trust in the future model, but we still aren’t clear on what that model will look like”.
And Amy Foster, who works in Irons’ parliamentary office as well as being a Labour shadow cabinet member at the Town Hall, said: “There is scant public detail on how the millions in government funding Croydon has been awarded for Family Hubs will be spent, while vital support for young people disappears with no clear plan in sight.
“Once again, Croydon’s young people pay the price for Tory neglect.”
Read more: 20 safety officers axed in Croydon’s latest ‘cuts by stealth’
Read more: Council failed to tell affected schools about their lollipop cuts
Read more: Bench removal confirms Perry’s PSPO is yet another failure
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From the report you linked to, is this paragraph:
“On the 17th January 2025, Director of Social Care and the Director of Education met with the Head Teachers impacted by the deletion of the YET service. Four Head Teachers attended the consultation and raised concerns around who would provide workshops. However, they accepted that they could and should commission or undertake the work themselves.”
If any of the Heads who attended that meeting are reading this, let iC know (in confidence, naturally) if you agree with that conclusion, and if so, what you are now proposing to do about it.
Strikes me that Perry is happy with washing his hands of the blood of children killed because he thinks working on his re-election bid is more important than lives
Children want to feel safe – it’s as simple as that. If children don’t feel safe they take measures to protect themselves based on what their peers and those who influence do.
Targeted intervention at a young age is a brilliant way to stop youth violence. PPPPPerry is just ensuring more youth violence. He has blood on his hands.
“Jason’s Pal”? We didn’t think he had any. Please try to come up with a more credible pseudonym.
P-P Perry ( £84k a year) at his worst!
Conservative cuts are appalling and make all of our lives worse.
But Labour aren’t changing anything.
It does feel a bit hypocritical for Labour to be complaining about the cuts while they refuse to restore the funding that Councils need to deliver services.
Are you saying that the these community organisations shouldn’t be supported? What is your point? We know you hate the Mayor, hate Croydon, hate everything about it but surely it can’t be a bad thing if those with knowledge and experience get involved. We have a Labour Mayor in London who doesn’t seem very interested in tackling youth crime either so I think constantly saying Tory cuts is a misnomer, and we haven’t seen much commitment from the Labour Government on this either.
You make a series of seriously flawed assertions, so perhaps it is not a surprise that you fail to understand the fundamental point being made here. It is that there are experienced and trusted professionals working for the council, who are properly accountable, who are losing their jobs because Mayor “Fix the Finances” Perry wants to do their work on the cheap by siphoning off money to go to non-council groups, some of which may not be as well-trained, or as experienced, or a professional as those he is replacing.
Perry has pulled this stunt before, diverting public money into the coffers of Croydon BID for their private security patrols. Perry is a director of Croydon BID.
This isn’t what good governance looks like.
But our guess that’s not a priority for you.
We should stick with the current professionals. You don’t change a winning horse we used to say.