‘Once again, the people of Croydon are paying the price for the failure of politicians who don’t have our community’s interests at heart’, according to 2026 Mayoral candidate Rowenna Davis
Labour’s candidate for Mayor of Croydon, Rowenna Davis, has accused her political opponent, Tory Mayor Jason Perry, of making the wrong choices at every stage.
Davis and two of Croydon’s three Labour MPs all weighed in on Perry, after the Labour government yesterday effectively torpedoed his failing administration, leaving the borough with a lame duck Mayor for the next 11 months. Albeit with an £84,000 salary by way of compensation.
Davis, a councillor for Waddon ward, had crossed swords with Mayor Perry several times in the 18months she was chair of the council’s scrutiny committee. Now, she took the increasingly desperate-seeming Perry to task for his wastefulness with public money, spending millions on consultants and council lap-tops, while cutting services such as the Youth Engagement Team and the lollipop road safety patrols at primary schools across the borough.
“This is a sad day for Croydon and a damning indictment of the Conservatives’ mismanagement of the Council’s budget,” Davis said following the announcement that Commissioners are to be imposed on Croydon, possibly until 2027.
“Jason Perry came to power on a promise to fix Croydon Council’s finances. But despite a £136million bailout and Council Tax hiked by 27% on his watch, the council’s budgetary position is now so serious that the government has been forced to step in.
People first: Labour councillor Rowenna Davis is unimprssed by Perry’s performance
“Once again, the people of Croydon are paying the price for the failure of politicians who don’t have our community’s interests at heart,” Davis said, creating a potential hostage to fortune for her Town Hall colleagues who are former Newman Numpties – part of the Labour council administration which first bankrupted the borough in 2020.
Last night, Davis said: “At every stage, Croydon Council’s Mayor Jason Perry has made the wrong choices. An administration that wastes over £6million on consultants while cutting lollipop school crossing patrols is not an administration that puts people first.
“Croydon needs a fresh start with a mayor who will go through our finances line-by-line, root out waste, and engage fully with central government to get a grip on our budget once and for all.”
Desperate to cling to power, Perry has been issuing frantic emails in which he tries to blame publicly the same Labour government which had just bailed him out with £136million exceptional funding.
Less publicly, piss-poor Perry also admitted to the government that he will not be able to balance the council’s budget next year.
That admission, and his and council chief exec Katherine Kerswell’s “plan” which would see the borough’s debts increase to £2.2billion by late 2027, probably left minister Jim McMahon and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government with no other option.
That was certainly the view of McMahon’s parliamentary colleague, Sarah Jones.
Critical: Sarah Jones MP
“The decision by the government to appoint Commissioners at Croydon Council will not have been taken lightly,” Jones, the MP for Croydon West, said, adding that the move “is indicative of serious incompetence” which had left the government “no choice but to intervene”.
Referring to the latest, and record, amount of government bail-out, Jones said, “The seeming inability to use this money to improve the financial position of the council is an intolerable failure.”
Croydon’s other Labour MP, Steve Reed OBE, now he’s all important in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, seems to have forgotten that part of his constituency is in Croydon. More than 24 hours since his government announced the Commissioner intervention, Reed has failed to comment on the crisis at Croydon Town Hall. Much like he kept schtum for much of the period when his chums, Tony Newman and Jo “Negreedy” Negrini, were crashing the council finances.
And in any case, Croydon’s not Streatham, is it?
But Croydon East MP Natasha Irons had this to say: “We all want to see Croydon thrive and on [a] stable financial footing, so while this intervention is necessary, it’s a sad day for Croydon.”
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
- 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
As featured on Google News Showcase
- 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
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
Well with Croydon’s Ruling Class, it does take one to know one.
Rowenna should be getting her shadow team ready. Instead we have Cllr King and the other relics of the ‘class of 20’ hanging around. Lame duck Mayor is one thing. Lame duck opposition is quite another.
What the public hates is to see Labour and Tories throwing brickbats at each other, when they both have a record of failure and there’s virtually no difference in their policies anyway.
Pipe down Soundbyte Sarah. You were Silent Sarah when Labour were bankrupting the Croydon.
The people of Croydon voted to have a Mayor in no small part off the back of all the dodgy and disastrous planning decisions. Where were you? Did you ever speak up about what was going on? Did you ever challenge Heather Cheesbrough or Paul Scott or Chris Clark?
We’re paying the price for your silence as well as their incompetence.
Yeah because that’s an important issue in comparison to this Council failing on homelessness, child protection, cleanliness and just about every other service it can’t deliver. Demolishing oversized houses in exchange for overpriced flats isn’t the scandal you think it is. Not least given the Council has failed on affordable housing too.
Hello? Had the Council and the planning department focused on building affordable housing instead of demolishing family homes for overpriced 9-flat developments things might have been different.
But they wasted millions – millions – on disastrous, overpriced and inadequate developments and property speculation. It’s exactly the scandal we know it is. How may affordable homes could have been built for those millions? How many millions could have been spent on child protection? How much money did developers, consultants and contractor make? Where did the Fairfield money go? Wake up.
thats rich coming from a party that bankrupted the Borough