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Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant

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EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

A careful and detailed investigation of official council financial accounts conducted on behalf of this website by qualified and experienced accountants has confirmed that the serious concerns raised over Croydon’s “runaway” expenditure are very well-founded, with spending on agency staff last year reaching a staggering

£53.4million.

That’s almost four times the £14million spent on agency staff by Croydon Council in 2021 – the year before Conservative Jason Perry was elected as the borough’s first executive Mayor on a manifesto commitment to “fix the finances”.

Last month, local government minister Jim McMahon announced that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is “minded” to send in Commissioners to take over the running of Croydon’s cash-strapped council, following a highly critical report from the improvement and assurance panel which had been overseeing the council’s management for five years.

Croydon has accumulated debts of £1.4billion, and struggles to pay the debt repayments and interests. Earlier this year, the government agreed to provide another bail-out loan to Croydon, this time £136million, more than anything granted to the borough before.

The massive overspend in 2024 and council officials’ plans to borrow their way out of trouble over the next four years would, according to the improvement panel’s report, lead to Croydon Council’s complete “collapse”.

Soaring spending: how Croydon Council’s expenditure on agency staff has increased under Tory Mayor Jason Perry

The rapidly ballooning spend on agency staff – high-rate temporary workers, brought in to fill gaps in staffing due to recruitment issues – may prove to be one of the first areas for close attention by any Commissioner, as the council’s own records suggest a complete failure of financial controls and governance.

According to the council’s own records, almost £1.4million of payments from Croydon Council to one agency, Adecco, were approved by a member of Adecco’s own staff.

And in another example of the cash-strapped council spending money like it is going out of fashion, the council’s head of HR, Dean Shoesmith, has been allocated the help of an “HR consultant” who is paid £726 – per hour.

Like many local authorities, since 2020 Croydon has been slow to publish its annual accounts. Although it is a legal requirement that councils open their books for public scrutiny, a backlog in work by auditors such as Grant Thornton has seen years of financial records delayed from release. 

Backlog: Croydon has not been very quick to make its accounts available

Croydon Council only last month released its accounts for 2023-2024 – though the public is given little leeway in accessing and reviewing the books, which remain open for inspection and commentary until July 11.

But what Inside Croydon’s team of professional number-crunchers have found from official documents obtained by this website seems to suggest that little has changed at Fisher’s Folly since the bad old days when Jo “Negreedy” Negrini was in charge.

In some respects, things have just got worse. Much worse.

Mayor Perry and his £204,000 per year chief executive, Katherine Kerswell, have placed much faith in “transformation” plans, after spending £6million last year on hiring in four firms of consultants, some of whom are still attending council meetings and briefings.

“The only thing ever ‘transformed’ at Croydon Council is Council Tax-payers’ money into private companies’ dividends,” one Katharine Street source said today.

Adecco has benefited hugely before from Croydon Council’s troubles. Between 2017 and 2020, the council spent £30million on extra social workers and new equipment in a desperate effort to drag its children’s services department out of special measures following a highly critical Ofsted report.

But Adecco now provides staff for the council across a range of different departments.

In 2021-2022, the financial year before Mayor Perry was elected, total council spend on agency staff was £14million.

In the following year, 2022-2023, with Perry in charge at the Town Hall, agency staff spend almost doubled, to £27.8million.

So while Kerswell and Perry were making public claims about “savings” and cutting costs, while laying off hundreds of council staff, they were splashing evermore council cash on temporary agency staff.

In 2023-2024, Croydon Council spent £38.5million on agency staff, mostly with Adecco.

In the latest financial year, 2024-2025, that spend had reached £53.4million – almost four times what was spent in 2021, and probably one of the areas which the improvement panel says the council’s spending has become “runaway”.

For the 2025-2026 financial year, there is just one month’s agency spend figure available: £8.8million for April. If that rate of spend were to continue over the full 12 months, spending on agency staff would be more than £100million!

There are other worrying trends found when our accountancy experts drilled down into the granular detail of the council’s documents.

Such as the case of Barbara Giles.

Not a member of Croydon staff, as such, nor a member of Kerswell’s “executive leadership team”, Giles does have her own Croydon Council email address.

And Giles does get mentioned in the minutes of council meetings, such as the audit and governance committee on March 3 this year, where she is described as “HR consultant”, who was introducing a report to councillors on “people and cultural transformation”.

In need of support: Dean Shoesmith, Croydon’s ‘chief people officer’, who needs a consultant’s help at £726 per hour

In her own online profiles, Giles describes herself as “A passionate leader, who focuses on the challenges within business and works to realise practical solutions to support business goals through HR interventions”.

And she self-describes as “Skilled in Transformation and HR Service redesign; Employee Relations, HR Consulting, Coaching, Executive Coaching, HR Policies, and Training Delivery, supporting start-up organisations in HR development as well as project management and delivery”.

Giles must be good. Very, very good. Because council documents show that she has been paid at a rate of £726 per hour to assist Dean Shoesmith, who since 2021 has been the head of HR – or “chief people officer” – at Kerswell’s council. Although you’d be entitled to wonder what Shoesmith is being paid for if he needs an assistant on 700 sovs per hour.

Our accountants have also managed to piece together a list of the senior council officials who between them have signed off on tens of millions of pounds of agency staff spending.

Only one of those Croydon official has approved more than the £1,394,335.37 signed off by Kimberley Ryan.

But Inside Croydon can find no record of a Kimberley Ryan as an employee of Croydon Council.

Not a council employee: someone called Kimberley Ryan has signed off £1.4m in council payments to Adecco

There is, though, someone called Kimberley Ryan who has a LinkedIn profile in which she describes herself as a contract manager with… Adecco.

According to our experts, almost all of the spending approved in the council documents by Kimberley Ryan appear under a heading of “adjustments” – often when there has been no timesheet code provided (listed in the council data as “null”). All the spending was done at suspiciously high hourly rates.

Now it would all be highly irregular for an employee of a contractor company to be approving payments worth millions of pounds of public money to her own employers. But that is what appears to be happening at Fisher’s Folly under Dean Shoesmith, Katherine Kerswell and Mayor Jason Perry.

Of course, Inside Croydon asked Mayor Perry and Katherine Kerswell about the huge increases in their spending on agency staff, and why someone called Kimberley Ryan was signing approvals on the council’s agency spend, or why any council exec director needs to spend £726 per hour on getting the help of a consultant.

And of course, Mayor Perry and his chief executive, nor the council’s costly press office, never bothered to respond.

Perhaps they will provide some answers to the government-appointed Commissioners when they are expected to arrive later this month?

Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
Read more: Borrowing plan would lead to council’s ‘collapse’ says report
Read more: Children’s services passes Ofsted inspection despite 5 deaths
Read more: Mayor coming under pressure to sack council CEO Kerswell

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