KERSWELL’S CHAOTIC COUNCIL: A journeyman council director notorious for charging fees of £1,000 per day and taking massive pay-offs has quit as Croydon’s head of planning, following an investigation by this website. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
On his way out: Adam Wilkinson lasted barely a fortnight working for Croydon Council
Adam Wilkinson, the journeyman civic official described as an “interim specialist” who took up the role as Croydon’s “interim director of planning and strategic planning” at the end of May, yesterday resigned his position.
Wilkinson’s resignation follows Inside Croydon’s report which revealed that he was recruited by Croydon Council at around the same time that his private consultancy company was being formally dissolved as a consequence of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs having the business wound-up for its failure to pay tax, owing tens of thousands of pounds.
According to the council’s published records and Freedom of Information responses, Wilkinson had been working for Croydon Council only since the end of May.
His appointment had been recommended to the cash-strapped council’s appointments committee by council chief executive Katherine Kerswell (£204,000 per year) and approved by Mayor Jason Perry (£84,000 per year).
Under Kerswell and Mayor Perry, the council has become increasingly secretive, anti-democratic, and some even say underhanded. Croydon Council has made no announcement about Wilkinson’s abrupt departure, not even informing staff and elected councillors internally.
“Why am I not surprised that I find this out from Inside Croydon, about very important council business that I should be told direct?” one exasperated Katharine Street source said last night.
Inside Croydon had already reported how Wilkinson had enjoyed a career consisting of often short-stay, usually very lucrative posts in local government, which included pocketing more than £500,000 in a couple of golden handshakes and generous settlement payments as he bailed out of other council jobs.
Records show that in his previous jobs, Wilkinson was often paid fees, travel and accommodation expenses and VAT totalling around £1,000 per day, even for part-time roles.
Due diligence: Adam Wilkinson’s often controversial career was not difficult to track down. This was The Times from 10 years ago
At Southampton City Council, where Wilkinson worked between 2022 and early 2024 as “executive director – place”, according to official returns his “role was undertaken… via an external company”.
His payment for the 12-month period 2022-2023 was £242,146. Excluding VAT.
Then there were the golden handshakes Wilkinson managed to receive along the way.
In 2008, Wilkinson received a £365,000 pay-off from Kent County Council after working there for just a year.
In 2015, Wilkinson got £140,000 as part of a voluntary redundancy package from Derby City Council.
It is not yet known what terms were agreed over Wilkinson’s abrupt departure from his Croydon job. The council’s propaganda bunker never even got round to announcing his arrival. But Croydon Council now has even more questions to answer over Wilkinson’s brief stay as head of its notoriously badly managed planning department.
Wilkinson was taken on as a temporary replacement for Heather Cheesbrough.
Cheesbrough was a Jo Negrini appointee who during her time in charge of Croydon’s planning department misled over her own qualifications (or lack of them) and covered up for one of her senior planners, who failed to declare that he was married to the director of a local property developer.
Gone: former council planning chief Heather Cheesbrough
After almost a decade working in Fisher’s Folly, Cheesbrough left Croydon in April, apparently seeking a “career break”.
The council will have had at least three months’ notice of Cheesbrough’s departure, but according to a senior source on Katharine Street, their recruitment of a permanent replacement has been compromised because the best potential candidates are already in jobs, and often with six-month notice periods. “And you need leadership in the interim,” the source said.
If Wilkinson, who lacked the qualifications usually required for a senior planning appointment, was the best that Kerswell and Perry could come up with, then this raises serious concerns over the council’s Human Resources department and their use of executive head hunters, and the apparent absence of any proper due diligence over their selected candidate’s background.
The hiatus created by this latest council recruitment omnishambles comes at a turbulent time for local authority planning departments, and Croydon’s in particular.
As well as the government and London Mayor proposing wholesale changes to the planning system, rolling back of the Green Belt, and with the latest Westfield planning application for Croydon town centre expected to be submitted some time later this year, the currently leader-less planning department is also facing a hearing later this year over its draft Croydon Plan.
Wilkinson’s hurried exit will be a cause of embarrassment for Mayor Perry’s loyal Tory councillors, who had defended the appointment of Interim Adam potentially on £1,000 per day, saying that the council was “paying the appropriate market rates to attract candidates with the skills and experience we need”.
The trouble was, Wilkinson also had the kind of experience that would not usually be tolerated among staff at a public body.
Inside Croydon’s investigation involved conducting a basic check of Interim Adam’s official records at Companies House, which show that Wilkinson was the sole director of a company declared insolvent in April 2025, after HMRC stepped in in December 2023.
A winding up order against Adam Wilkinson Consultancy Ltd was then made by the Official Receiver on January 31, 2024, “under the provisions of the Insolvency Act 1986”.
Serious matters: Adam Wilkinson could not pay his tax bills and had his company wound up by HMRC
By January 2025, matters came to a head with Leeds-based Lewis Business Recovery and Insolvency setting out to the High Court the grounds for compulsory liquidation of Adam Wilkinson Consultancy Ltd. “The only asset of the company was an overdrawn director’s loan account in the sum of £27,850”.
Lewises wrote to Wilkinson asking for the money. He “advised that he was unable to repay the loan account due to his own personal financial circumstances”. Lewises liquidators effectively concluded it would not be cost-effective to get the money back, and so let Wilkinson off the hook.
Adam Wilkinson Consultancy Ltd was formally dissolved on April 13 this year. Its founder’s name does not appear on an official list of disqualified directors. According to the liquidators, “no ethical issues have come to light during the period reported on”.
Wilkinson had done nothing wrong in seeking alternative employment. But the decision-making process of the organisation that hired him, Croydon Council, probably does need careful scrutiny.
Since the end of January, there have been just two meetings of the appointments committee, the most recent, on May 27, to discuss “Senior staffing matters”.
Another disaster: council CEO Katherine Kerswell had not told councillors of Wilkinson’s sudden resignation
The meeting was to consider in secret a report from chief executive Kerswell recommending an appointment. The report was approved by Councillor Jason Cummings, the cabinet member for finance.
The meeting was chaired by Mayor Perry.
Virtually all of its business was done behind closed doors, the public and press excluded from this travesty of democracy.
It is impossible, based on the scant detail that the council has reluctantly placed in the public domain, to know whether Adam Wilkinson was ever asked about his business affairs when interviewed for the Croydon position. It may be that, after due reflection following Inside Croydon’s report, Wilkinson felt he needed to resign the Croydon job, perhaps for failing to declare the collapse of his business and the unpaid tax.
Even in the face of this latest failure of Kerswell and Perry’s council, some loyalist councillors were last night briefing about “recent progress” at Croydon’s planning department.
“All politicial parties in Croydon want to see our town centre regenerated and our planning team working effectively,” one council source told Inside Croydon.
“I look forward to the council appointing a permanent replacement to drive these priorities forward.”
They suggested that the council might have to seek a replacement interim director, while they await a permanent candidate to become available.
In the meantime, the questions which Inside Croydon sent to Croydon Council about Wilkinson’s recruitment and terms of employment all remain stubbornly unanswered.
Though following the resignation of their chosen candidate after just a couple of weeks in post, Katherine Kerswell and Mayor Jason Perry have further questions to answer after their latest, and costly, piece of bungled administration.
Read more: Interim Adam gets council job as HMRC winds up his company
Read more: £1,000 per day ‘Interim Adam’ lands Croydon planning job
Read more: How the council’s planners help developers dodge conditions
Read more: Council in cover-up over planning’s husband and wife act
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