It is residents who will pay the cost of government ‘intervention’ if Commissioners move in at Fisher’s Folly next month, just as they have been paying for a panel of Whitehall-appointed ‘experts’ since 2021.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Official figures show that in the four years that there has been an improvement and assurance panel in Croydon to oversee the council’s recovery from its serial bankruptcies (try not to laugh!), payments to the panel members have cost residents in this borough more than £700,000.
The only problem is that… well… Croydon Council’s figures for payments made to improvement panel chair Tony McArdle and his now five-strong panel don’t stack up.
In fact, based on numbers provided by the council in a Freedom of Information response in April 2024, the bill for the “help” of these half-dozen “experts” may in reality have topped £1million. All paid for, as usual, by the borough’s tax-payers.
Last week, Jim McMahon, the local government minister, announced to the House of Commons that he is “minded” to send in Commissioners to Croydon, after giving up on Mayor Jason Perry and his chief exec, Katherine Kerswell, to salvage something – anything – from the wreckage of Croydon’s overdrawn account with the government.
Commissioner call: local government minister Jim McMahon
In his written statement to Parliament last week, McMahon had described Croydon as “one of the most financially distressed councils in the country”, mentioning its debts of £1.4billion and his concern that Mayor Perry and Kerswell were seriously planning to increase that borrowing to around £2billion by 2029.
McMahon had made his decision based on the latest report from the improvement panel, which described Perry and Kerswell’s additional borrowing scheme as “impossible”, saying that it would lead to Croydon Council’s complete “collapse”.
Totting up all the Emergency Financial Support given to Croydon since March 2021 at £553million, McMahon said: “This is simply not sustainable.”
All of that borrowing, and the interest those loans accrue, has to be paid for. And Croydon residents now have the second highest Council Tax in London.
Croydon’s residents have been paying in other ways, too, such as the £900 to £1,000 per day fees to McArdle and the members of the improvement panel.
Busy man: Tony ‘Four Jobs’ McArdle
All the panel members were originally appointed by Tory government ministers Robert Jenrick and Michael Gove, when the Whitehall office was known as the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
Croydon’s panel consists of:
- McArdle, who was council CEO in Lincolnshire for 13 years
- Phil Brookes, overseeing commercial and asset disposals
- Jon Wilson, the panel’s adult social care expert, fitting in between his day job at Leicestershire County Council
- Brian Roberts, a former president of CIPFA, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy
- Pamela Leonce, a housing association chair, and
- Eleanor Brazil, an education, children’s services and safeguarding specialist.
Long-term panelist: Phil Brookes
Brookes had worked alongside McArdle in a similar capacity for two years previously, when they were appointed to oversee Northamptonshire County Council, the first English local authority this century to go bust. Things in Northamptonshire have not gone well since…
Brazil is the most recent appointee, and should be familiar to many in Croydon.
In 2017, she was brought in after the shocking findings of an Ofsted inspection of the council’s children’s services, which reported “widespread and serious failures”, which “leave some children at risk of significant harm”.
Brazil’s work helped Croydon’s children’s services gain a “Good” Ofsted rating by 2020, but only after £30million had been chucked at the problem in the space of 18 months on a round of social worker recruitment and other measures either recommended or approved by Brazil.
Back for more: Eleanor Brazil
Council insiders now regard this sudden hike in expenditure on Children’s Services as a significant step towards Croydon’s financial collapse in November 2020. There is no mention of Brazil’s previous role at Croydon Council in her biography profile on the Croydon Council website…
Last year’s FoI response stated, “In July 2023, the role of the Improvement and Assurance Panel was formally strengthened, and membership revised.”
After Mayor Jason Perry had presided over Croydon’s third Section 114 Notice in November 2022, Gove gave McArdle’s panel more statutory powers, taking some decision-making responsibilities away from the Mayor and the borough’s elected councillors, and handing it all over to McArdle’s panel.
Hence the significant increase in McArdle’s and his team’s payments since.
The figures are helpfully laid out on the council website (if you know where to look).
“Costs here reflect fees and expenses paid to panel members (exclusive of on-costs) and do not reflect costs associated with council officer time supporting or responding to panel requests,” the council states.
According to Croydon Council, from January 2021 to December 2024, they have paid the members of the improvement and assurance panel a total of:
£692,895.10
“Exclusive of on-costs” (that may be important, and we’ll be coming back to that).
Jan to Mar 2021
Apr 2021 to Mar 2022
Apr 2022 to Mar 2023
*Jason Perry was elected Croydon Mayor in May 2022, issued a Section 114 Notice that November and hiked Council Tax by 15% in 2023
Apr 2023 to Mar 2024
*Note: when the council says “seven members”, they mean six.
Apr 2024 to Dec 2024
These tables helpfully identify the amounts paid to individual panel members, something that council CEO Katherine Kerswell strenuously avoids doing when it comes to identifying the amounts paid to her executive directors at Fisher’s Folly.
According to the council’s figures, since 2021 McArdle has been paid £211,272.59 for his part-time, semi-retirement role in Croydon. His mate, Phil Brookes, has received £141,224.11. Jon Wilson has managed to be paid £59,994.02.
But all the payment amounts currently listed by the council are less than the figures provided by the council in its FoI response as recently as April 2024.
The figures provided previously came to £100,000 more than the amounts listed on the council website today for the period January 2021 to April 2024.
For comparison, here are the figures that the council supplied previously:
- Jan 2021-Mar 2021: £19,607.96 (3 panel members)
- Apr 2021-Mar 2022: £169,128.83 (4 panel members)
- Apr 2022-Mar 2023: £139,483.91 (4 panel members)
- Apr 2023-Mar 2024: £274,771.05 (6 panel members)
Can these discrepancies all be explained as “on costs”? But then, Croydon Council has acquired a bit of a reputation for not having a “grasp” of its costs.
But if you add in that extra £100,000, plus the costs of the panel over the final four months of the 2024-2025 financial year and the first three months of 2025-2026, then the final cost for McArdle and his team could be fast approaching £1million.
McArdle once said, “The reason I do this is because I want to continue working and it’s a way for me to put something back.”
There are some around Croydon, including Mayor Jason Perry, “livid” over last week’s announcement, who might question quite how much McArdle and his well-rewarded panel members have “put back” over the course of the past four years.
From having to deliver four update reports to Whitehall each year when they arrived in 2021, McArdle and his team were reduced to having to draft just two such reports a year. Same money, natch.
No delusions: how the Local Government Chronicle reported Gove’s additional powers for the ‘improvement’ panel in 2023
But hey, what do you expect for a mere 1,000 quid per day?
McArdle appears to have done very well from the arrangement, and similar appointments elsewhere.
As well as Croydon, McArdle was given a gig overseeing troubled Nottingham City Council.
And he was also paid as an independent scrutineer at Barnsley council.
The Department for Education had McArdle as their “chief safety valve negotiator” (who dreams up these titles?) for 38 councils and an expert on SEND – “expert” in the sense of McArdle’s role being to throttle down council spending on special educational needs and disabilities.
“Many commissioners also face criticism, often in local media…”, Wot? Us guv? “… about how much they are paid,” McArdle simpered to the Local Government Chronicle a while back.
McArdle “says bringing in this kind of support from a consultancy would cost even more”.
He possibly knows this because, together with Santa McArdle, he owned a management consultancy called Priora Consulting Ltd.
‘Livid’: Croydon Mayor Jason Perry.
“If money was the only motivation,” £1,000-per-day Tony McArdle told the LGC, “these people could almost certainly work for more in the private sector in the consultancy firms.” Was that meant s some kind of veiled threat?
But what have been the achievements of the improvement panel in the years since they were appointed in Croydon?
Council Tax has been hiked by 27% in two years, while services are being cut, four libraries have been closed and bits of parks sold off, other significant council-owned property has been sold for less than it cost to acquire, and at least 400 frontline council jobs axed, while the borough’s primary school lollipop patrols will be withdrawn next month.
Meanwhile, the debt is still around £1.4billion. But we do have a “Stabilisation Plan”, which has been widely dismissed as “unsustainable”, and thousands of copies of Jason Perry’s Our Croydon vanity publication, which presumably Croydon’s lame-duck Mayor will be handing out to visitors to his Lloyd Park mansion for many years into his retirement.
Tony McArdle and his improvement panel were supposedly getting ready to pack up and leave Croydon in July, bidding farewell to their handsome per diems. But their latest, their last, report to the Secretary of State kiboshed all that.
The government Commissioners, if they are appointed, will also be paid a handsome daily rate, by order of the Minister, and paid for by Croydon residents.
How many of those Commissioners might be former members of Croydon’s non-improvement improvement panel?
Read more: Business as usual for Kerswell – but remember to bring a pen!
Read more: Panicked Perry admitted to Rayner: I can’t balance the budget
Read more: Kerswell’s ‘Stabilisation Plan’ has failed before it is approved
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
We voted for the people who got us into this mess, so I suppose we’ve only got ourselves to blame.
These commissioners who are about to take over are the same ppl who have been giving Croydon Council useless paid advice since 2021. You couldn’t make this shit up.
That’s not been announced yet.
But it is possible.
“…there has been an improvement and assurance panel in Croydon to oversee the council’s recovery from its serial bankruptcies (try not to laugh!)…….” Who is laughing? Crying would be more appropriate ?!
Irony has been dead since Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. But once in a while, you gotta try
Obama got a NobelPeace Prize too. After he’d been in office eignt months! He had no idea why
For not being George Bush Chris. Can you get one for not being a Wally?
He was joking when he said that Chris.
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. In particular, the promotion of nuclear non-proliferation and a “new climate” in international relations, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world.
That was before he expanded the hypocritical “war on terror” and fostered the notion of “a just war”.
Fast forward to today, and we have the USA and the UK backing Naziyahoo’s nuclear-armed Israel, as he moves from expelling Palestinians from their land in Israel, committing genocide in Gaza and bombing Lebanon to starting a war with Iran
Oh this is is too funny, ironic etc. Thanks
I offer huge thanks to Steven Downes of IC for obtaining, presenting and explaining these ‘Improvement Panel’ costs.
As to what could be done differently to ‘save Croydon Council’ I also found interesting your previous comment on the Commissioners / Govt possibly implementing ‘the Argentinian Treatment’.
https://insidecroydon.com/2025/06/16/ministry-planning-one-year-stay-in-croydon-for-commissioners/
This was an IMF scheme for failing countries originally, but applied to Croydon Council, is possibly extending the time to pay the loans (and the rest of the £1.4bn indebtedness?) and possibly reducing the interest rate.
To think of an extreme characterisation, that could be say £1.4bn paid back over 500 years in capital, with interest reduced to something near zero.
That would, of course, be a form of subsidy from the Govt (ie the Country and many generations of people, business etc) but perhaps not as blatant, costly and precedent setting as forgiving or paying off Croydon Council’s £14bn debt.
Of course other indebted councils would seek the same treatment. There would also be poor example to all councils to not manage their affairs well, as they could all look forward to being forgiven and bailed out.
Council’s are meant to set a balanced budget annually.
From what I have heard in my awareness over the last 35 years (and maybe longer) is that many Councils feel under-supported in Revenue Support Grant by a variety of governments.
My information is way out of date, but around the year 2000, Govt RSG provided around 75% of Council income (the rest being council tax and services income).
Occasionally listening to a Chancellor’s budget speech, it was interesting to identify what sums or percentages were forwarded to Local Govt, or which ‘new burdens’ were given to it, possibly without the funding needed.
I wonder if they advised the government on how absolutely useless Perry is. Either way, the government should be paying for anyone they impose upon Croydon.
They are in effect by providing the bailouts after Kersewell Reid/Perry’s never ending issues of Section 114 notices. They managed to spot that declaring yourself bankrupt every year is not a sustainable way to manage finances.
The reason piss-poor wears those coach driver shirts is that he’s too lazy to roll up his sleeves