EXCLUSIVE: Correspondence released following this week’s announcement from Whitehall that Commissioners are likely to be sent in to run the council included a letter from the Mayor that admitted his failure to ‘fix the finances’. By STEVEN DOWNES
The government announced its decision to appoint Commissioners to run Croydon’s affairs after the borough’s Conservative Mayor had admitted that he would not be able to balance the council’s budget next year.
Under Mayor Jason Perry, the cash-strapped council has voted through unbalanced budgets in 2023, 2024 and in February this year, only keeping itself afloat with increasing additional borrowing from the government. In March this year, the government agreed to £136million in exceptional financial support for Perry’s basket-case council, the biggest settlement yet.
A report to government, dated April 25, from the improvement and assurance panel which has been overseeing the council’s conduct since 2021, advised that under Perry and his chief executive Katherine Kerswell, the council’s finances had become “runaway”.
Perry and Kerswell’s “plan” for recovery was to borrow tens of millions of pounds more, something the panel repport described as “an impossible position”.
Panicked Perry responded to the panel’s damning verdict in a letter to Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for housing, communities and local government. The barely coherent note was written some time after the Mayor had sight of the panel’s report. But we cannot be sure exactly when: Perry failed to date his own letter.
Failure: small businessman and part-time Mayor Jason Perry has admitted he cannot ‘fix the finances’ at Croydon Council
The three-page document, which was accompanied by another self-serving seven pages of “briefing notes”, represents a desperate plea from Perry to be allowed to complete his four-year term in office.
But it includes a devastating admission.
“It is beholden upon me to state that without a solution to the council’s structural financial imbalance, the council will not be able to set a legal budget next year,” Perry wrote.
Such an admission of failure probably ought to have been accompanied by his resignation letter, as well as the resignation letter of his chief executive, Kerswell, who has already overseen three previous Section 114 Notices issued by Croydon when unable to balance its budget.
Perry’s grovelling letter is in marked contrast to his public statements in the past 48 hours since the MHCLG announcement about Commissioners for Croydon.
Perry must have hoped that his letter to Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister would do the trick. But none of his previous letters to government had worked, either.
Perry had spent the first two years of his Mayoral term negotiating with a Conservative government and an improvement panel which had been hand-picked and installed by the Tories. He needed to reduce Croydon’s £1.4billion debt.
It will cost Croydon £71million this financial year to service that debt, through repayments and interest. By Perry’s own reckoning, and under his own financial proposals, that debt bill could rise to £110million per annum by 2029.
Perry had wanted a debt write-off, unprecedented in the history of local authorities in this country. Tory governments, under Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and even under Perry’s own favourite, “Lettuce” Lizzie Truss, all refused Perry.
Unimpressed: Angela Rayner was not swayed by Mayor Perry’s appeal. If anything, she was given no alternative to act by his admission of failure
Perry’s latest rambling letter to Rayner has an increasingly desperate tone.
The Mayor claims to have delivered “three years of balanced budgets”, before adding the important rider that that was only possible “with the use of exceptional financial support”.
On top of the £167million of “savings” (he means cuts) already made, Perry offered up the jam tomorrow prospect of “a sector-leading Transformation Programme which will deliver over £56million in savings”. Meaning yet more cuts to services.
In his letter, Perry clutches at straws. “All external commentary on the council’s capability and consistency in delivering change has been positive,” he claimed, falsely.
Among his examples of “external” praise was Croydon “being shortlisted as the [Local Government Chronicle] ‘Most Improved Council’.” This represents a deliberate attempt at deceit by porkie-pie Perry.
Unmentioned by Mayor Perry in his letter to the minister was that Croydon Council had recommended itself for the award. Kerswell, the council’s £204,000 chief exec, actually attended the piss-up in a Mayfair hotel on Wednesday night in the knowledge that the announcement of government Commissioners being sent in would be made the following day.
Self-praise: Katherine Kerswell was at a glitzy awards event this week – as the government was preparing to send in Commissioners at Croydon Council
In Perry’s list of his own accomplishments was the piss-poor year as London’s Borough of Culture, which started late and saw the council frittering away grants of tens of thousands of pounds to business organisations (including one of which Perry is a director), while ignoring long-established arts groups.
Yet even Perry is forced to admit that he and the council’s execs had failed to meet the financial conditions of the “exit strategy” for the improvement panel, which was due to end its time in Croydon this July.
“We have delivered or remain on course to deliver 95% of the Exit Strategy by July 2025, with the council only unable to achieve the objective which sets the ‘council’s finances on a sustainable footing’,” Perry wrote.
“The fact remains, that without addressing our underlying financial imbalance, the council cannot achieve the firm base for reset ‘within its own means’.”
It is almost as if Perry was seeking to shrug this off as unimportant. “This is the only element of the Department’s Best Value statutory guidance that Croydon Council is unable to meet currently.”
Admission of failure: Mayor Perry’s letter to Angela Rayner left Whitehall officials with no alternative but to step in
After three years in post and with “runaway” spending and borrowing out of control at the council, Perry thought he’d suggest some new ideas to save his own arse.
“I am commissioning an independent review by an industry-leading consultancy,” Perry told the minister, committing to yet more spending of residents’ money on private consultants. The Mayor does not seem to understand that, by virtue of him making the appointment and paying the consultant, they could never be “independent”, nor objective. Or maybe he does…
He also suggested the establishment of “an external assurance board”. Which sounds very much like the improvement and assurance panel that has been in place, with no appreciable improvements, since 2021, “with a new cohort of individuals to support Croydon’s continuing improvement”. So same old shit, just with a different bunch of local government grandees getting up to £1,000 per day for their “expertise”.
“I would welcome the opportunity to pilot this new approach post-July,” Perry wrote. You can almost imagine Rayner or her Whitehall mandarins muttering, “I bet you would” as they read that particular offer.
And Perry’s third “Big Idea”? To be allowed to go it alone, submitting spending and borrowing reports to the MHCLG and the Treasury. “The independent assurance your department will still need could be fulfilled by a new appointed person to act as a ‘non-statutory improvement adviser’.” As we said, increasingly desperate.
Perry’s pleadings included his usual “as a proud Croydonian” line, though he stopped short of offering Rayner use of his season ticket at Selhurst Park.
He did warn us: Mayor Perry’s warning soon after taking office is just about the truest thing he has said
Desperate to cling to power, in the two days since the MHCLG announcement of Commissioners being sent in to sort things out, Perry has been issuing frantic emails and social media posts in which he tries to blame the Labour government which had just bailed him out with £136million exceptional funding.
But in truth, through Perry’s own admission of failure, local government minister Jim McMahon was left with no other option, as Perry stands accused by one local MP of “serious incompetence” and of being “an intolerable failure”.
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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He doth protest too much.
When Perry Belly Aches we all know it is going to go on for a long time, but it is clear with the drift and real inaction in tackling the underlying debt that it is all bad wind from over consuming on the entitlement to receive a perpetual blank cheque from the taxpayer.
He and the delusional Kerswell Reid in her alternate reality believing by cutting back lollipop services made Croydon the most improved Council in the country have had enough time to make the really hard decisions such as selling Shirley Park Golf Club for property development.
The tokenistic nonsense of saving a few tens of thousand on Volunteer Care Services while wasting the same amount recruiting Senior Officers who run bankrupt companies and plead poverty to avoid paying the tax they owed demonstrated that Perry’s term was the same old same old. The protection of vested interests and providing pals with a gravy train.
Lets hope the Minister isn’t minded to appoint Commissioners, but gets on with it as soon as possible. Finally we can move on from the omnishambles of the last two decades and put the characters like Perry who have been intrinsic to it all into the dustbin of history where they belong.
Kevin Hollinrake and Perry go large
Part-time Perry soon became Piss-Poor Perry, then Powerless Parry, and now Panicked Perry. What’s next? Suggestions, please……..
Mine is Pathetic Perry by the end of next week (20th June) !
‘Put away’ Perry if there’s any justice…
We been paying these extra council taxes of the mistakes of others to barely service debt interest. What’s next? A 2x increase this year? Even that probably won’t even cover it.
Sack Katherine Kerswell.
She was parachuted in temporarily by HM Gov when Croydon last went bankrupt.
She awarded herself the job full time (nice easy ride up to retirement)
She has fucked up continually since arriving. (policy, recruitment, elections, you name it).
And we’ve now turned full circle again -.we are bankrupt once more and Kerswell is still here like a bad smell.
Sack Katherine Kerswell
And vote utterly useless Perry out.
Is it worth voting in local elections at all? Labour holed the Titanic and the Tory Mayor is little more than a one man band playing as the ship sinks. The only solution is debt forgiveness and for Councils to be banned from the kind of dodgy PPP Brick by Brick deals that allow ruthless “businessmen” to fill their boots with public cash whilst the details of the deals are hidden from public scrutiny… No there’s never been debt forgiveness before, but then there were proper guardrails before the previous Tory governments removed them in what amounted to a Spiv’s Charter. And not one penny of the effectively half inched money has ever been returned. Where did the Fairfield Halls grand piano go? Surely you don’t need to be Poirot to solve that one? No local administration is ever going to be able to pay back what Croydon Council owes … It’s stuck in a doom loop. I thought you told us having a Mayor would be a “a bit less shit”? Actually he’s clearly far easier to override than the old Leadership system would have been and there are serious ethical issues with the government replacing the elected Mayor with even more mandarins. This is in effect a Constitutional crisis as a democratically elected leader is put on pause by the very party that bankrupted the Council in the first place. Once central government starts switching off democratic institutions for an “emergency” it’ll be easier and easier for them to find an excuse whenever they fancy… The Council’s been in one kind of special measure or another for so long now I don’t know how anyone has the enthusiasm to either stand or vote for the emasculated Councillors or Mayor anymore. Yet still they email me like nothing’s gone on. “Would I like to be a Councillor?”. They must be truly desperate for people to pilot the ghost ship…. We are in banana republic territory…
In justification, our #ABitLessShit hashtag back in those halcyon days of 2021 reflected our complete lack of conviction that a mayoral system was any different from “the strong leader model”, coupled with the notion that there could not possibly be a worse leader for Croydon Council than Tony Newman.
Hands up. We got that last bit wrong.
I’ve seen first hand how the Council wastes money on diversity initiatives and senior non-jobs. Also paying management consultants millions to come to obvious conclusions. At the same time competent middle managers are scrapped for questioning constant restructures undertaken by highly paid “managers” who go from Council to Council making disastrous decisions and are never there when the s*** hits the fan. At the same time they recruit inexperienced and incompetent people just because they toe the line and don’t know how much better things were run before the disastrous restructures.
In what way are diversity initiatives a waste of money? And as you say you saw them first-hand, what do you have to say about them?
Every single interaction I have ever had with Croydon Council, they have been ten levels below pathetic.
I’ve said it before on here. Cut expenditure to the bone inc. crazy generous public sector pensions. Shut down every library…no one reads books in Croydon anyway. Council taxes are already off the scale high but put them up another 10%. Stick the business rates up by the same amount to kill off retail in the borough. Fill the gap with central government money. A bit like Scotland’s Barnett formula, Croydon needs a Perry formula. Or call it the Rayner formula if that’s what it takes. Simple innit.
You’re lying. You’ve never said any such thing. We’ve checked.
The last comment you posted was, “I’m tired of your biased leftist blog. Goodbye.”
Goodbye.
David, you posted that polemic on the Sabbath when you should have been in bed. Heed the good book: “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5). And no, not the kind that Myers tanks up with
Public sector pensions aren’t “crazy generous”. It would also mean tearing up staff contracts.
Libraries are a statutory function and the council in breach of its legal duties if they just closed them all.
Council has no say over business rates.
The budget gap is already been filled up with central government money via loans.
He can’t manage the budget but he can find the money in Croydon’s kitty to treat himself for a drink and Wetherspoons breakfast with associates on a Saturday.
Most of the rest of us have to work Saturdays and Sundays to keep a roof over our heads because of the financial hole that he, Katherine Kerswell and their team have put us in.
You would think that they would spend every waking hour convening meetings in town hall to address the issues and sorting them out rather than being seen treating himself to a breakfast and having a good time when people in his borough are suffering and can’t even afford the basics like – Eggs, Bread Milk etc.
I wouldn’t be able to show my face in the public if I was in his shoes and allowed what is happening to happen – but I guess that shows you how guilty and responsible he feels.