EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Rowenna Davis, the Labour Party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor, has described the cash-strapped council’s “runaway” spending on agency staff as “disgusting” and “unforgivable”.
“It’s a ridiculous shambles,” Davis said.
Davis, a councillor for Waddon ward and, until late last year the chair of the council’s scrutiny committee, was responding to Inside Croydon’s exclusive report this week that exposed the council spending £53.4million this year on agency staff, mostly with one firm, Adecco.
Our investigation showed how the council has been paying a “transformation” consultant £726 per hour to assist the head of HR.
Davis claims that when she and her Labour colleagues wanted to submit a budget amendment to reduce spending on agency staff, senior council finance officials rejected it “for nonsensical reasons like it is hard to price costs”, according to the councillor.
Inside Croydon has uncovered how council records show that an Adecco employee has been allowed to sign off council payments, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money, to her own employers.
The council has also been trying to disguise its ballooning agency staff costs by labelling them as “Project Funding Control” – when in fact they are payments to private company Adecco.
‘Unforgivable’: Cllr Rowenna Davis has been strongly critical of her Tory election candidate
Inside Croydon is also aware of an Employment Tribunal case that has been dragging on for seven years. The case has been brought by a former Fisher’s Folly insider who was sacked from the council when they tried to blow the whistle on spiralling payments being made to Adecco in 2018.
That was when the council was in the middle of another crisis of its own making, following its children’s services department being placed in special measures after a highly critical Ofsted report. The panicked council, then under Labour control, used Adecco to recruit social workers in a rushed effort to resolve the issue.
Croydon Council is defending itself at the Employment Tribunal in the case brought by the former worker who has brought a number of charges, including wrongful dismissal and breach of whistleblower protocols. The council’s co-defendent is Adecco.
Croydon’s spending on agency workers has almost quadrupled since Tory Perry was elected Croydon Mayor in 2022.
“Perry clearly has no grip on these budgets,” Davis told Inside Croydon.
“Is it any surprise Commissioners have to come in?”
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.
Soaring spending: how Croydon Council’s expenditure on agency staff has increased under Tory Mayor Jason Perry
Croydon has accumulated debts of £1.4billion, and struggles to meet its repayments and interest payments on those (mostly) government loans. 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”.
The rapidly ballooning spend on agency staff 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.
Agency staff tend to be temporary workers, brought in to fill gaps in staffing due to recruitment issues. Adecco provides staff for the council across a range of different departments, often at higher levels of pay than council staff.
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.
Shambles: Tory Mayor Jason Perry has lost control of the council’s finances
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 current, 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!
Councillor Davis said: “It’s disgusting.
“Croydon residents are still suffering from a 27% rise in Council Tax under this Mayor in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. The fact that their money is being wasted on grossly expensive agency workers is unforgivable.
“Mayor Perry is clearly addicted to spending money on agency workers. If I’m elected next year, I’ll make sure the council trains and employs home-grown talent right here in Croydon, giving local people stable, permanent jobs to do the important work like looking after our vulnerable children and elderly.
“That saves money and offers residents a better service. Other councils have done it, there’s no reason we can’t, too.”
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant
Read more: Council accused of cover-up over multi-million agency spend
Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
Read more: Damning verdict on Croydon’s ‘inadequate’ children’s service
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The question has to be asked: How is it that Inside Croydon was able to unearth the scandal of excessive spending on agency staff when Cllr Rowenna Davis, who was Chair of the Council’s Scrutiny Committee until recently, and who had the backing of 33 fellow Labour councillors, was unable to do so?
Ouch!
The council’s paid senior officials, who are supposed to be accountable to our councillors, are notorious for withholding information, delaying responses or just simply misleading our elected representatives.
It’s a matter of continuing astonishment, to us at least, that political leaders tolerate this conduct without overt, public criticism of the chief exec and her coterie of execs.
It’s also proof that a Labour Mayor would be little different from the Conservative currently nominally in charge. Worse still, she’d be under the thumb of Starmer’s Stasi. Anyone protesting outside the Town Hall wouldn’t be ignored, they’d be arrested by the thought police
Remember this is just spending classified as agency on the system, this doesn’t include consultants, specialists or “interims”, going to be millions more there.
But there are strict rules on what expenditure gets allocated who which heading.
So agency staff covers a number of staff groups including interims and consultant.
Those in charge should be asking all council employees where savings can be made and listening to everyone, managers don’t always know best.
Rowenna speaks very well and seems more educated than Jason Perry. However , nothing in her past suggests she has the ability to balance the books and attract any big business to lift Croydon out of this debt hole. We have all seen this before, haven’t we?
Croydon Council is such a mess. How many millions are being given to an agency which could have gone elsewhere. What kind of a culture and dysfunction does it create when you fill the council with short term, temp staff? Rowenna is right, why aren’t we training our own? It’s not just in councils where there has been a shift away from in-house training and can anyone claim that services have improved during that. It’s the blind leading the blind with Kerswell leading Perry. So many things need to change.