EXCLUSIVE: One of the cash-strapped council’s £1,000 per day ‘temporary’ directors left Fisher’s Folly in a bit of a rush last week – getting out before the Commissioners arrive. By STEVEN DOWNES
Huw Rhys Lewis BSc, BArch, MSc, MRIBA, MAPM, MRICS has left the building. And taken his string of qualifications with him…
Council insiders related how they were “shocked” on Friday to be summoned to a meeting at Fisher’s Folly where they were advised that the council’s interim director of commercial investment and capital – the man ultimately responsible for flogging off the borough’s assets – had left his position with immediate effect.
After five years of empire-building, Katherine Kerswell, the council’s chief executive, suddenly finds herself with a power vacuum on the executive floor at Fisher’s Folly, with three senior positions vacant just before the government’s Commissioners are expected to arrive in south London.
Kerswell confirmed in her weekly waffle issued on Friday to all staff that Karen Agbabiaka, her head of highways and parking, had also opted to bail-out of the troubled council.
At a Town Hall meeting on Wednesday, we were led to believe that “aside from the finances, we are performing well” (© deputy mayor Lynne Hale, July 2025). That would not be a view any reasonable person would take when looking at the vacancies on the council’s carefully collated corporate leadership charts.
Gone: Huw Rhys Lewis BSc BArch MSc MRIBA MRICS MAPM
Agbabiaka and Lewis join Nick Hibberd, who Kerswell appointed as her £150,000 per year corporate director for “sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery”, and the unlamented planning chief Heather Cheesbrough, are among those to have left top jobs at Croydon this year.
That, of itself, could be an aspect of the serious concerns on “aspects of leadership” mentioned by Jim McMahon, the local government minister, when he announced last month that his department is “minded” to send in Commissioners to take over the running of the debt-ridden council that cannot balance its budgets.
A decision on who the Commissioner might be, and whether there will be a team taking over the running of Croydon Council from Kerswell and Mayor Jason Perry, is expected soon.
In the case of Hibberd, Cheesbrough and now Agbabiaka, their departures in the past six months potentially leave a gaping hole in a department supposedly looking after the council’s regeneration and economic recovery schtick – three of the top four positions – just when Croydon is supposedly revising its Local Plan and awaiting the latest Westfield planning application.
“Many of the Mayor’s Business Plan priorities rest in this directorate,” Kerswell has said in the past.
Already replaced: CEO Kerswell announced Karen Agbabiaka’s exit on Friday
Council sources suggest that Agbabiaka opted to leave due to “a clash of management styles” with Nazeya Hussain, who joined late last year as the interim (yes, another one) replacement for Hibberd.
Hussain is a board member of Solace, the local government senior executives’ union, for whom she appears to spend a large amount of time recording promotional podcasts. Which is nice.
In Kerswell’s weekly waffle on Friday, the £204,000 per year CEO wrote, “Karen Agbabiaka, director of streets and environment, has formally announced her decision to leave the council to embark on a new professional opportunity.” Agbabiaka’s departure had been expected for some weeks.
“We wish Karen well and thank her for all her hard work her in Croydon.”
Agbabiaka had been in the £127,684 per year director of streets and environment post only since early 2024, overseeing an £80million annual budget and with responsibility for more than 450 staff.
Clash of styles: Nazeya Hussain started earlier this year
Agbabiaka has already been replaced by an interim director of streets and environment, someone called Tony Ralph, although the council has made no formal announcement of that appointment.
The departure of the notoriously abrasive Huw Rhys Lewis had not been as widely predicted as Agbabiaka’s. although perhaps it ought to have been.
An internal staff email, seen by Inside Croydon, says that “Huw is no longer with London Borough of Croydon”, written in bold, presumably for emphasis, “due to a snap decision to save costs engaging with interim personnel”.
Staff spoke of their “shock at the decision”.
As another of the many interims occupying senior positions, Lewis was closing in on completing his second full year at Croydon, which will have entitled him, if he wanted, to the advantages of being taken on as a confirmed member of staff. Said to be on, or close to, £1,000 per day as an interim director, perhaps Lewis couldn’t afford the drop in pay.
Or perhaps he did not fancy being in the building when the Commissioners arrive, asking awkward questions about those council-owned properties he had not managed to flog off.
Lewis quickly established a public reputation for pomposity (just look at all those letters after his name on official council correspondence!) and for rubbing people up the wrong way.
He kicked the Croydon Credit Union out of their small corner of Fisher’s Folly office space before clashing head-on with charity Croydon Nightwatch, threatening legal action over their use of Queen’s Gardens to feed the poor and homeless. Despite a public backing from Tory Mayor Perry, Lewis’s threatened injunction never materialised.
It was also Lewis who managed to outrage residents in the south of the borough over his bungled efforts to auction off listed building Heathfield House, with a reserve price of a fraction of the property’s true worth. Heathfield was only pulled from auction after the outcry once Inside Croydon had reported the sale plan.
For sale: Savills particulars for Heathfield House, ahead of the abortive auction. Jason Perry’s council tried to claim it was all a mistake
Lewis had, however, won allies on the improvement panel, particularly Phil Brookes, the asset disposal expert.
It was just that Lewis really didn’t manage to sell as much of the council’s assets as needed, and when he did, he rarely managed to achieve top dollar.
In a report to the council cabinet last December, the excuse was made that sales of properties had previously been “easy wins” and that sites in the third tranche of sales were “more complex”, requiring “decants and some relocation of tenants and council staff and teams”. It was also the case that the council had sold off all its Brick by Brick sites.
When all added up, it meant that, when compared against “Estimated Dispoals” (sic) from 2022, only 65% of sales had been achieved to date. According to Mayor Perry, that adds up to £232million in asset sales, with another £68million of sales in this financial year – a long way short of balancing his unbalanced budgets.
Read more: Ministry planning one-year stay in Croydon for Commissioners
Read more: £1,000 per day ‘Interim Adam’ was Kerswell’s personal pick
Read more: From tantrum to grovel, Perry shifts posture for Commissioners
Read more: Agency spend scandal: Perry blasted for ‘ridiculous shambles’
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No wonder the Council went bankrupt. Imagine each of the directors going home with £1000 a day from the public funds
Thing is, Ridwan, not all directors are paid £1,000 per day.
In or around that figure is what is offered to interims at director level, temporary appointees who are usually confirmed by the CEO with little, if any, reference to our elected representatives.
And then there’s the £726 per hour invoices submitted by Adecco for one consultant helping the head of HR.
Did someone say that Croydon’s finances are “runaway”?
Kerswell will do one of two things: barricade herself in her office like the governor of Shawshank prison, or leg it with a skip full of our cash, before the commissioners arrive. Surely, SURELY, she can hear the sound of lifeboats being lowered into the water. If not, she is deaf as well as stupid, lazy, complacent and, according to her pay-to-work ratio, a little cow who does not and never has put Croydon before herself. If this text appears in full without edit, my hat is removed to the editor for his keen vision of transparancy of truth as well as opinion castings from others.
I was going to delete the word “little”. And “thieving” just had to go, otherwise our lawyers Sue, Grabbitt and Runne will have been displeased.
I quite understand. Thank you.
There is no job in the world that justifies £1000 a day, especially one within a local authority. I’d like to know if other local authorities are full of all these pricey consultants.
Ultimately what have these people achieved? They’ve sold off assets but debt has gone up. The salaries they’ve “earned” could have gone towards those debts. And as for the Director of Streets and Environment, what’s their role other than to remove bins and make the streets and environment worse? And now they’re running away because the proverbial has hit the fan… can’t make it up.
Are Kerswell and Perry trying to impress the commissioners all of a sudden making useless staff in head positions resign instead of getting fired before d-day? What tf was the “Director of Streets and Environment” doing on £128k a year in the first place cos all i see is countless potholes and trash everywhere in around the Town Centre.
A bit of perspective, if someone works 45 x 5 day weeks a year, that’s 225 days. So £225k a year @ £1k a day. About what KK gets by the time employer’s NI and pension contributions are accounted for. Par for the course for local authority CEOs or university VCs or NHS trust senior managers.
That’s not to say many of them are worth even half that.
While nobody should be cheering the arrival of the commissioner(s), because we don’t yet know if they will actually manage to fix Croydon Council’s finances (Piss-Poor Perry and the Kerswell certainly didn’t), we could at least applaud the departure of that afore-mentioned pair, if we can discover when/how they are being “run out of town”….?!
So Croydon Council is starting to finally to make substantial savings by relieving itself of much of it’s top heavy management. Or rather the rats are leaving the sinking ship and don’t want to be tarnished by being sacked by Commissioners. The substantial saving of the order of the boot applied to Kerswell-Reid doesn’t seem that far away now.
I do hope that those who have resigned are not being also paid ‘golden goodbyes’ to add to the Croydon Council debt mountain.
Unlikely.