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 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
- Croydon Commentary provides a platform for any of our readers to offer their personal views and experiences about what matters to them in and around our corner of south London. To submit an article for consideration for publication, email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention
Recent Croydon Commentary columns:
- Shock and inaction is numbing communities to these killings
- You can be confident that the council’s targets will not be met
- We’re South London and very, very proud of our FA Cup team
- Building on precious green spaces won’t fix the housing crisis
- Our four MPs are doing nothing to try to stop carnage in Gaza
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
