Blitzed: Mayor Perry’s grass-cutting programme has destroyed half a wildflower conservation meadow at Thornton Heath Rec
Hard-working community volunteers were left devastated this week when grass-cutting contractors hired by Croydon Council visited Thornton Heath Rec and proceeded to destroy a large part of a carefully nurtured wildflower meadow.
A council official has quickly issued an apology to the community group which does so much work to maintain Thornton Heath Recreation Ground. The official said that the grass-cutting team’s performance was “wholly unacceptable” and “will not be tolerated again”.
But in mid-summer, when wildflowers are coming into bloom, with the prospect of them self-seeding the area for future seasons, the damage has been done.
“Words fail me sometimes,” said one local.
“This is awful and a mockery of public members who volunteer and give up their time,” they said. “The council don’t make anything better, in my view. In an age where we need more nature, too.”
The grass-cutting “blitz” – some of it conducted indiscriminately through what’s supposed to be “No-Mow May” – has been a high-profile aspect of Croydon Mayor Jason Perry’s re-election campaign, as he tries to convince locals he can manage to get anything done right.
Articles on the council’s website have boasted of how the cash-strapped council had splashed £1.5million on new tractors, ride-on-mowers and specialist bank mowers.
Blitz on wildlife: Mayor Perry, right, and his cabinet member, absentee councillor Scott Roche, with one of their new mowing machines (the driver is not thought to be involved in the Thornton Heath shambles)
But with the council’s dedicated parks and gardens team obliterated through spending cuts, Perry’s council now has to hire-in contractors, often from outside the borough, with less affinity with the local parks and communities.
Graham Mitchell was the volunteer from Friends of Thornton Heath Rec who first noticed the contractors’ gung-ho approach in the public open space.
“Normally, I’m pleased to see the grass being cut in The Rec, but not today as the contractors decimated one half of the wildflower meadow before I got there,” he posted on social media.
Had Mitchell not acted promptly on his own initiative, the contractors may well have destroyed the whole of the wildflower meadow, which has been maintained under an agreement with council officials, who have mapped the areas of the recreation ground accordingly.
“I stopped them cutting the other half,” Mitchell wrote, and asked why they weren’t following the map.
“I was told that they weren’t given the map and had been told to ‘cut everything’!”
The incident illustrates vividly how the work of the borough’s many voluntary ecology grounds can be undone simply because council services have been outsourced for “efficiency”, seeing services performed instead by workers who have little, if any, affinity for the areas they are serving.
“Our volunteers do so much around The Rec and this is a real case of disrespect,” Mitchell said.
“So much for the lip-service mantra from our council that they value the work of friends’ groups.”
Mitchell described the situation as “shambolic”.
Mitchell’s formal complaint to the council received a speedy reply, which contradicted what the contractors had told the volunteer just a day earlier. “The contractors were telling me porkies about not having a map,” Mitchell said.
The council official’s response said, “The team were not instructed to ‘cut everything’, as the area supervisor is fully aware of the conservation meadow area within the park and has spoken with the team about this meadow area on several occasions.”
The official maintained that the grass-cutting team had indeed been issued with a map of where, and where not, to cut the grass.
“I personally met with the team responsible for the cutting of this meadow this morning and made it very clear that their failure to complete this site correctly was wholly unacceptable and that this should not have happened and will not be tolerated again.”
The official said that the work in Thornton Heath Rec will next time be under the supervision of a member of council staff “to ensure the site is mown correctly”.
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So they were told to cut everything. Perry must have issued the order directly.
On 7 April I made the following Freedom of Information request to Croydon council:
“Further to the Mayor’s press release https://news.croydon.gov.uk/croydon-to-benefit-from-investment-in-grass-cutting-service/ please let me have the following information:
– details of “selected environmental areas within parks” that are to be left uncut throughout the year, such as the name of the park, each specific area’s exact location, the size of the area, their cutting schedule and information on how it has been clearly designated to the public and the contractor
– details of grass verges, “such as where the rare Lizard Orchid flowered last year”, including each specific area’s exact location, size of the area their cutting schedule and information on how it has been clearly designated to the public and the contractor
– details, including each specific area’s exact location and size of the area, of the 73 places included in 2024’s No Mow May initiative and those covered by the “conservation cut”, as mentioned in https://news.croydon.gov.uk/croydon-council-supporting-no-mow-may/
– a copy of any reports on the outcome of the trials mentioned in https://www.croydon.gov.uk/libraries-leisure-and-culture/parks-and-open-spaces/grounds-maintenance/wildflower-verge-trials ”
I didn’t get a reply within 20 working days, so on 9 May, I asked for an internal review and answers to my questions.
It’s now 14 June, and there’s still been no response. I have therefore just asked the Council one more time to respond before this time next week, failing which I will refer them and my request to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
If the council won’t share this information with the public, it’s no surprise that their cowboy contractors cut everything in sight.
Croydon have come up with the wheeze that they won’t allow an internal review until they’ve answered the FOI request. Which isn’t exactly an incentive for them is it?
Enough is Enough Mayor Perry please stop
Destroying beautiful Croydon. Reduce your wages to stop cutting vital services in Croydon
Instead of mowing wildlife, the Cabinet Member for Streets & Environment, Councillor Scott Roche (one of our laziest and most expensive councillors) should mow that moustache and beard off.
If he smartened himself up a bit and stopped following the bad example set by Jason Perry (putting in the minimum hours while taking all the cash on offer), somebody might just give him a proper job, despite this latest balls-up.
The Council contractors also managed to strim a large part of the Selsdon Community Garden recently. One wonders whether to bother trying to make the community a more pleasant and green environment when our voluntary work is destroyed.
But Cllr Robert Ward told us that the new IT system for…er.. grass cutting… was going to make everything wonderful!
I hope the first act of the Minister’s commissioners is to sack Perry and Kerswell. Heartily sick of the spin and the lies and the naked disregard of the people they’re supposed to serve.
If anyone is interested in helping save green spaces in Croydon we need to group together. Individual reports and complaints don’t go anywhere.
There is a wildlife crime ongoing in Thornton heath that both the council and the wildlife police are ignoring. This entire place will be concrete and litter if we the community don’t band together to save it.
If it takes, say, one person a day to mow ten acres, the contractor is not going to send more people to mow twenty/thirty/one hundred acres for the same fee, or is the council suggesting that this is the first example in history of a contractor doing something for nothing?!?!
What do people think happens to real wildflower meadows . They just exist where nothing happens no they’re mostly mown for hay for horses just like here ,if you don’t cut them the smaller plants get overwhelmed . Just common sense
Not common sense. Nonsense.
With “real wildflower meadows”, they’re cut after the flowers have flowered and they and the grasses have set seed. The material is allowed to dry out naturally before being removed, which maximises the benefits to wildlife.
Sending in mowers and strimmers destroys all that ecological potential in an instant. And for what? As you can see from the photo, rubbish and dead grass is invariably left behind by the wreckers. They’re not trained horticulturalists, just vandals with power tools.
Perry is wasting our taxes on sending in these wrecking crews while getting rid of services people really want and need, to try and “fix the finances”. If he really wanted to save money, he’d never have funded this ecocidal vandalism to begin with