CROYDON COMMENTARY: This borough has been failed multiple times, by the Mayor, by the majority of opposition councillors, by council directors, and by the government. PETER UNDERWOOD, the Green Party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor in 2026, offers some suggestions
The people of Croydon have been let down by a bunch of failures. We have been left in a mess, and we now need big changes to get us out of it.
The biggest failure is Jason Perry. He has said his “top priority has always been to fix the council’s finances”. It’s clear he has completely failed.
Even worse than that, Perry and his Conservative council cabinet haven’t even managed to get the most basic financial management systems in place. They don’t know where the money is being spent, so how can they claim that they know what they are doing?
They have put our Council Tax up by 27% in two years, sold off our assets on the cheap, slashed public services and still failed to do the biggest thing they promised before the election.
Perry is claiming that bringing in government Commissioners is just a political attack by Labour. He says that if the government wanted them to do more, they should have said so. Surely any sensible person would have realised that if you are continuing to fail, then you shouldn’t have to wait for someone else to tell you do something about it.
If Perry had actually read the panel’s report, he would see that it was the improvement and assurance panel appointed by the previous Conservative government who have said he has failed. They were the ones recommending that Commissioners need to be brought in. The Labour Minister has just followed their advice.
Labour in Croydon, though, have no right claim they are any better. Their own record in charge of the council shows they were equally incompetent. For the last three years, Labour councillors have all failed to provide any sensible opposition. They have sat on their hands and let the illegal, unbalanced Conservative council budgets pass, instead of joining the Greens and voting against them. Labour’s Mayoral candidate was even chair of the scrutiny committee who were in charge of examining Jason Perry’s budgets, and yet she still didn’t vote against them. Yet another political failure.
The second area where there has been a complete failure is among the councl’s senior officials. There are clearly questions about the competence of senior officers if they don’t even know what’s happening in the areas they are supposed to manage.
A stain on their record: in 2023, 2024 and this year, Labour’s councillors eventually abstained and allowed Mayor Perry’s unbalanced budgets to pass
Yet since the start of the council’s financial crisis, the number of executive level officials at the council have gone up, and their pay levels have increased, too, while the number of frontline staff has gone down. This is the opposite of what should be happening.
A third failure is the failure of the improvement panel. Their report is littered with inconsistencies and excuses. It contains the wonderfully damming sentence: “We reported via a factual update letter the continuing positive progress against the Exit Strategy, with the exception of a significant deterioration in the Council’s financial position.”
In other words, the panel thought the plan they agreed was going wonderfully well, just apart from the bit where it was failing to solve the problem and things were actually getting worse.
It does lead you to question what insight and expertise the panel were bringing to Croydon’s plight if they agreed an improvement plan for the finances that didn’t lead to any improvement in the finances?
The next question is why were we were paying them so much money for the privilege?
Different kind of cuts: the Green Party’s Peter Underwood says he would bring a different approach to council cuts
The fourth area of failure is the government itself.
The most obvious failure of the Labour government is that they have refused to restore the funding to councils that was cut by the Conservatives over the previous 14 years. Labour have just continued the Conservative lies about everything being solved through mythical “efficiency savings”.
Councils across the country now don’t have enough funding to deliver the services they are legally obliged to provide. Croydon has faced increased pressure compared to many others and yet government funding has still not been returned to anywhere near the level that councils need.
Croydon is also still the victim of the unfair allocation system that means we get far less per person than many other London councils. The failure to fund Croydon fairly is yet another failure to add to the list.
The important question now is: what happens next?
It doesn’t look like Jason Perry or any of his cabinet will have the decency to resign. That means we will have to wait until next May to vote them out.
I am a candidate for Mayor of Croydon and my business qualifications and years of management experience in the public and not-for-profit sectors is helping convince more people that I am the best option to replace Perry. I’m not promising miracles, but I am promising to do the job that the executive Mayor should be doing.
Among the council’s most senior executives, there surely has to be a clear-out. There are just too many senior officers being paid far too much, and the latest improvement panel report implies that they are not up to the job.
As Mayor, I would be looking to restructure the council to make it less top-heavy, review which of the senior officers we wanted to keep, and aim to attract ambitious new people who relish the opportunity to show they can really fix the problems. Working at Croydon Council needs to be turned into a badge of honour, not a stain on your CV.
With regards to the new Commissioners, we need to keep a very careful eye on them. We will need to take a stand against more cuts to services, more selling off of our useful assets, or more of our money being wasted on consultants and the Commissioners themselves.
At government level, we need to keep up the pressure to end Conservative attitudes to public spending. As Mayor, I would work with other councils and MPs to collectively apply more pressure and increase the public demand for fair funding.
Judgement day has happened, and too many people have been found to have failed us. There is hope, but we need to change a lot at Croydon Council. I hope you will join me in working to make that happen.
Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
Read more: Mayor Perry: ‘Residents of Croydon have felt enough pain’
Read more: Borrowing plan would lead to council’s ‘collapse’ says report
Read more: Government sends in Commissioners to run Croydon Council
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I am not a Tory supporter, I have voted Labour most of my life. However I must acknowledge that the people who are primarilly resposible for the huge debts of Croydon Council are the previous Labour run administration. I will not vote Labour again, nor Tory for that matter.
It’s a bit of misconception. And while it does nothing to excuse the rampant nonsense committed against this borough by Newman, Scott, Hall and their mates, piss-poor Perry and his Tory chums would prefer everyone forgot about the steaming turd of an £800m debt that they left behind when kicked out of office in 2014.
Last time I did arithmetic, £0.8bn was more than half of £1.4bn…
This candidates historic facts of what Labour and Conservatives have done to Croydon and the people are accurate in addition to previous and current Governments. However he on behalf of the Greens don’t give a practical way forward apart from a wish to restructure Management ( without naming which directorate portfolio )and this article only concentrates on Finance. So come in on how will the Greens Manage to solve the Finances of Croydon. All local politicians are accountable Government Commissioners might do better.
May I add that currently there are at least 4 or 5 local authorities with Commissioners my research states from their websites and Government that they have brought improvements to:- Leadership & Governance, Council Culture,Services,Finance, Procurement, Waste, IT and the list goes continues. Not one local Politician or the Current CEO apart from social Housing can say they have improved things , the opposition parties point fingers but do not share the detailed plans to improve Croydon. Commissioners are in :- Nottingham, Thurrock,Birmingham and previous ones were Tower Hanlets, Hackney in London and others up north
Correct. As mentioned in IC yesterday, Look at Tony McArdle, lead commissioner of Nottingham. He is also current Chair of the London Borough of Croydon. Same clan of useless ppl. Same result.
Mr McArdle is not Chairman of Croydon there is no such position he is Chair of the Improvement Assurance Panel who oversee and recommend the nor the panel cannot make decisions. The Governance lies with the current CEO and the Executive Mayor. Commissioners have a Governance and and Decision making responsibility.
Pedantic Parry they’ll call you, Les!
Think most readers will have understood the shorthand.
And last time we checked, Croydon was one of just three £1,000-a-day gigs where McArdle was providing the “benefits” of his expertise.
That’s me all over
You say a £1,000-a-day like McArdle and Adam Wilkinson are the only ones getting paid that.
When you think about how few hours he actually puts in and how few meetings are held – just 10 in the last 6 months – that’s very likely what Jason Perry pays himself, if not a lot more. He’s bone idle
Peter, what makes you better than Mayor Perry or the other bullshitters gone before?Also, if you were Mayor of Croydon, would you work for no wage?
Why should he have to? It’s a full time job. Or it should be if the incumbent wasn’t so useless.
For several years the public sector has complained it is either desperately short of cash or is in fact bust. How on earth does the sector afford the ruinously generous funded and unfunded pensions that the private sector can only dream of. Those pension liabilities of £2.6 trillion are in simple terms, £40,000 of debt for every man, woman and child in the country. Factor in the official national debt which is also about the same and that £40,000 doubles. Shocking.
Then there are the huge pay-offs for failed council executives, ie, Jo Negrini, and the lucrative revolving door between councils.
Our national and local government is in a shocking state, worthy of a third world country.
Maybe you should ask why they’re a dream in the private sector? I’d imagine the vast majority of company directors have dignity in their old age, but couldn’t say the same of their retired employees. That’s not the public sector’s fault is it?
I’m fearful of the service cuts and Council Tax increases that Commissioners would inevitably introduce. But, really, could anything be worse than the husk that successive Tory and Labour regimes have left us with? LAs continue to suffer a seemingly never-ending austerity which successive governments have failed to address.
While I have little hope of anyone succeeding in challenging LA funding iniquities, I would welcome a mayor who did more than spin and fleece the public purse.