It’s Inside Croydon’s annual round-up of official figures which show which of our 70 elected councillors have been asking the most questions.
And which councillors need to be seriously questioned, after they’ve effectively given a grand ‘up yours’ to the borough’s tax-payers.
We are handing out our Toss-cars to those councillors who couldn’t give a toss, as we sift the workers from the work-shy, and discover which councillors from across the four political parties represented at Croydon Town Hall have been taking us all for a ride
Cash-strapped Croydon Council, the only local authority in the country to have gone effectively bankrupt three times, is clearly wedded to the notion of rewards for failure.
After Tory Richard Chatterjee won our 2023 Toss-car for being the laziest of the borough’s 70 councillors, the Town Hall veteran has risen without trace… ultimately being made Croydon’s civic Mayor for 2025-2026, donning the silly ermine robes and chains while he was handed more than £20,000 per year for doing little more than cutting a few ceremonial ribbons.
The council which nominated itself for “most improved of the year” after it had just begged for another record bail-out seems to lack the necessary qualities among its elected representatives to find any real solutions to its dilemma – with a cadre of councillors many of whom appear to do as little work on behalf of residents as they can get away with.
Several familiar names for our previous Toss-cars in 2023 and 2024 are there, or thereabouts, perhaps proving that the two larger political parties, Conservative and Labour, don’t appear to care much about the work rate of their councillors.
Given the Tories and Labour are currently selecting their local election candidates for May 2026’s elections, perhaps they should give some weighting to work rate when handing out places on the ballot paper for the borough’s “safe seats”.
No 1
Deselected: Sherwan Chowdhury managed to get back on the council in 2022
Because topping the charts of the least hard-working for 2025 is Labour’s Sherwan Chowdhury with a grand total of THREE member enquiries in the period from January 2024 to March 2025.
Chowdhury, who was first elected to the Town Hall more than 30 years ago and has been clinging on to the council gravy train since 2006, is councillor for Broad Green, one of the borough’s more deprived wards. So you’d imagine there’s been plenty of casework to get done. Rather more than three enquiries to council officials in 15 months.
Chowdhury was civic mayor in 2021-2022, around the time he had to scramble to get selected for that May’s elections after Labour members in Norbury Park deselected him (for being useless?). Luckily for Chowdhury, a late vacancy opened up in Broad Green after Inside Croydon exposed one selected Labour candidate for having a very dodgy record as a charity trustee and was subject of a High Court ruling.
Chowdhury receives only the basic councillor’s allowance, of £11,984.04, as he holds no special positions at the Town Hall.
He has finally grabbed top spot this year after placing fourth in 2024 (when he did even less casework than in the latest period) and joint second in 2023.
No 2
This year’s runner-up is another Labour councillor, Brigitte Graham (Woodside ward; £11,984.04), who managed just four pieces of casework over the period.
Being a councillor is clearly not the job that Graham must have imagined when she got herself on the ballot paper for Labour in 2022: as iC has already reported, Graham has decided not to even bother seeking reselection for 2026.
Will the residents of Woodside even notice?
No 3
Fatima Zaman (“Who?” we hear you ask) makes it into the Top 10 of lazy councillors for 2025 after submitting just eight members’ enquiries in 15 months.
Perry’s pick: the Mayor of Croydon welcomed Fatima Zaman’s by-election win in late 2022
Tory Zaman was elected on to the council at a by-election in November 2022 held in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale, when Green candidate Peter Underwood was runner-up.
Oh, how the 26% of voters in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale must be ruing their choice that day – and the 74% of voters who didn’t bother turning up should look at this and see how their failure to vote has led to their Council Tax being wasted (albeit the basic allowance of £11,984.04).
The rest of the Top 10 of less-than-busy councillors looks like this:
Councillors handling the least casework
1, Sherwan Chowdhury (Lab) 3
2, Brigitte Graham (Lab) 4
3, Fatima Zaman (Con) 8
4=, Tony Pearson (Con) 15
4=, Tamar Nwafor (Lab) 15
4=, Callton Young (Lab) 15
7, Jason Cummings (Con) 16
8, Clive ‘Thirsty’ Fraser (Lab) 17
9=, Richard Chatterjee (Con) 18
9=, Leila Ben-Hassel (Lab) 18
The figures expose the self-proclaimed “Mr New Addington”, Tony Pearson, for the self-important, far-right grifter that he is (averaging just one piece of casework per month), and represent Clive “Thirsty” Fraser’s third successive year in the Top 10 – what a way for him to bow out of Croydon Council!
Councillors Cummings and Young both have senior positions within the council cabinet and shadow cabinet respectively, which may force them to focus on other council work (and Cummings in any case has said that he does not use the members’ enquiries system). Councillor Ben-Hassel, having taken over in the past year as chair of the scrutiny committee, potentially has a similar excuse of alternative workload.
Bubbling just outside the Top 10 are a few familiar faces, including Manju Shahul-Hameed, the sometime Newman Numpty who seriously put herself forward to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor in 2026 (31 pieces of casework in 15 months) and last year’s No1, Alisa Flemming, who pulled her finger out this time round and managed a whopping 29 pieces of casework – or less than two per month.
Tory cabinet member, Scott Roche, managed just three pieces of casework in the whole of 2024, yet escaped the drop zone.
Gone missing: Tory cabinet member Scott Roche is paid £40,000 a year. For what?
Roche is councillor for Shirley South, and banks £40,175.04 in allowances, though what he does remains a mystery.
Ostensibly the cabinet member for streets and environment, he’s supposedly in charge of handing a juicy contract to Veolia just two years after the rubbish contractors were sacked, as well as the state of our streets, over-flowing bins and ecocide in our parks.
Our FoI seeking the casework figures was submitted in late February, after which Roche’s “workrate”, if you can call it that, suddenly soared. He managed to submit 16 member enquiries in March, dragging him out of the relegation zone (he ended up 13th).
Did someone tip him off?
We’ve omitted from our rogues’ gallery Andrew Price and Jess Hammersley-Rich, on the grounds that they were elected midway through the period for which figures were made available.
But mystery surrounds Adele Benson, another Tory councillor in New Addington, who is just not listed on the council’s data at all. Not even with a zero. Benson had ranked fifth from bottom in the 2024 Toss-cars, after logging just five pieces of casework all year.
According to the official figures, between January 2024 and the end of March 2025, Croydon’s 70 councillors collectively submitted 4,543 pieces of casework – an average of 65 each.
But our figures show that only 23 councillors achieved that benchmark figure or better. Which also suggests that 47 of our councillors are worse than bang average.
It also shows how a disproportionate volume of casework queries are being raised by a handful of councillors – and we will share their identities in a future report.
In the meantime, though, unlike other, more transparent local authorities, Croydon Council still refuses to publish this casework data. Making the Inside Croydon Toss-cars necessary.
Read more: Measure the effectiveness of councillors, not just the casework
Read more: Making the case for councillors’ casework to be made public
Read more: The Toss-cars 2024
Read more: The Toss-cars 2023
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Sherwan Chowdhury by a mile. He let the worst part of Croydon become even more worse and as a result ppl think every part of Croydon is like that!
Thank you for this article, I have just emailed my councillor…on the list… to ask confirmation of having received my email sent weeks ago.
C’mon Peter: name names!
We need some epithets to join Thirsty Fraser. Sleepy Chowdhury, Flagging Brigitte and Failing Fatima are mine for the top three. Part time wouldn’t have to fight for the Ceremonial Robes if any of these become the Ceremonial Mayor.