Based on official Ombudsman figures, our council remains among the most complained about in England. But might there be a glimmer of improvement in the figures, or has our borough just been overtaken for rotteness by others?
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Here is the news: Croydon Council is not quite as bad as it was last year for complaints to the Local Government Ombudsman.
According to official figures released by the Ombudsman’s office, for 2024-2025, Croydon has dropped out of the 10 most-complained about local authorities in England.
This year, Croydon is just 11th!
No doubt Mayor Jason Perry and his £204,000 chief exec Katherine Kerswell will be ordering a borough-wide celebration of that statistical quirk, with bunting being run out from Fisher’s Folly almost all the way across Mint Walk. As far as they are concerned, this will be validation, if any more was needed, that there’s really no need for Commissioners to oversee our council.
But that would not be a fair nor objective reading of the figures.
As ever, the annual figures from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman are a number-cruncher’s delight, with stats for “total complaints”, “upheld complaints” and “upheld complaints per 100,000 residents”, each offering different perspectives of the formal process by which the public try to hold their local authorities accountable.
Under the statistically approved numbers which average out the number of complaints by population, which the LGO prefers, the residents of Haringey ought to be very concerned, as they are table-toppers for a second year. This year, Lambeth are in second place in a table of shame which has nine London boroughs in the top 11 – Croydon’s neighbours Bromley are 11th, so officially worse than Croydon!
On this population-adjusted measure, Croydon has dropped out of the top 10 for 2024-2025, to 31st. Sutton does marginally better, at 53rd. Sarf London neighbours Southwark and Lewisham are both in the top 10 of rottenest boroughs.
Perhaps the Ombudsman is going soft on Croydon?
For 2024-2025, the Ombudsman received a total of 234 complaints from Croydon’s long-suffering residents. That’s up 20% on 2023-2024, when there were 186 public complaints about our council.
But in the latest year, the Ombudsman upheld only 32 complaints against Croydon Council, 13% of the complaints received, down from the 43 upheld complaints (23% of all complaints) in 2023-2024.
And Croydon’s drift down the table of offenders is less because of any improvement at Fisher’s Folly, and more down to soaring increases in complaints about other councils.
The raw figures for total complaints received inevitably have Birmingham City Council, with all those uncollected bins, at the top once again, just ahead of the capital’s vast transport authority, TfL. But neither Birmingham nor TfL feature among the worst councils when the numbers are averaged out for population.
It is the case, however, that the serial offenders at the top of the table for most complaints – including Lambeth (316 in 2024-2025), Kent and Essex (426) have all seen increases in the numbers of formal objections raised about them: Birmingham’s 632 is 28% up on the previous year, while Essex is more than 50% higher in number of complaints.
The Ombudsman’s numbers for 2024-2025 suggest that Croydon’s elected Mayor, Jason Perry, has made little difference to satisfaction levels – what probably ought to be dissatisfaction levels – among the borough’s long-suffering residents.
The Local Government Ombudsman’s annual report for 2024-2025 “highlights a continued increase in our caseload, with a record number of complaints received exceeding 20,000 for the first time”, the LGO said this week.
The total is in fact 20,773 – up by more than one-third in just two years.
And this increase in complaints comes despite how almost impossibly difficult the whole process can be for many residents.
Lodging a complaint with the LGO usually requires a resident to have some knowledge of how to navigate through a maze of red tape and civic procedures. In all cases, a resident must first lodge a complaint with the body they want to complain about. Yes, that’s right: ask the council to mark its own homework. This can often take several weeks.
Then, if the council fails to resolve the issue satisfactorily, residents are expected to lodge a second complaint… again with the council. They get to mark their own homework for a second time. This process often takes even longer than a Stage One complaint.
Only if the “Stage Two complaint” fails to deliver a resolution can a member of the public escalate the matter to the Ombudsman – and they have to do that within 12 months of the issue arising.
So any numbers reported by the Ombudsman represent the tip of a complaints iceberg.
The LGO has gradually revised the way that they have presented their data, to the point where they now provide figures for the total number of complaints received and the total number of complaints upheld, and then for the upheld number calculated per 100,000 population in the local authority.
Education and Children’s Services made up 27% of the LGO’s caseload and 47% of all upheld investigations in 2024-2025, once again the most-complained about category that the Ombudsman deals with.
Of the total 234 complaints the LGO received about Croydon:
- 33 were about Adult Social Care;
- 30 were about Benefits and Tax;
- 5 were about “corporate and other services”;
- 35 were on Education and Children’s Services;
- 19 were Environmental Services, Public Protection and Regulation;
- 18 for Highways and Transport;
- 76 were on housing (up from 48 in 2023-2024);
- 13 were on planning and development;
- 5 “others”.
Surrey County Council has lost its top spot for most upheld complaints, as Essex has taken that mantle by almost tripling the number of upheld complaints against it, from 66 to 183 this year.
There is more than a suggestion that both of these Tory-controlled county councils have earned this unwanted reputation through trying to game the system around SEND provision, with many instances of complaints not upheld by the Ombudsman because the authority has stepped in with a settlement at the last-minute. Given what lies at the crux of so many of the SEND complaints raised, it is cynical to the point of sinister by the two councils.
In the top-10 of most upheld complaints, Essex, Surrey, Lancashire, Suffolk, West Sussex and Kent were all Conservative-controlled councils. Since May this year, Lancashire and Kent are under control of Reform UK.
Labour-run Birmingham City Council, Europe’s biggest local authority and under supervision of government-appointed Commissioners for the past two years, is in third place on the upheld complaints table.
Bromley did slightly worse than Croydon in the number of upheld complaints, with 38 (up from 30 in 2022-2024), ranking the Tory-controlled outer London borough 23rd worst in England.
Sutton had just 13 complaints upheld by the Ombudsman in the whole of 2024-2025.
North London Labour council Haringey retains the unwanted title of England’s rottenest borough, averaging 20.2 upheld complaints per 100,000 population, on a table dominated by London boroughs.
Lambeth is second this year on 18.4 (up from 10.1 the previous year), Southwark fourth, Lewisham ninth and Bromley – yes! Bromley! – 11th.
Twelve of the 20 worst councils under the population-adjusted figures are London boroughs.
Astonishingly, for Croydon residents, their council is not among them, down to a not-quite-respectable 31st, with 8.0 upheld complaints per 100,000 residents. Oh joy!
Bellwether for problem councils: Amerdeep Somal, the Local Government Ombudsman
And extraordinarily, neither Mayor Perry nor Kerswell has ordered the staff in the propaganda bunker at Fisher’s Folly to churn out a back-slapping, self-congratulatory press release on this “success” story at our council. Perhaps the newly arrived Commissioners have put the kibosh on such blatant self-promoting nonsense already?
“The complaints we receive – and the faults we find – can act as a bellwether for the state of local services across the country,” said Amerdeep Somal, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.
“We are receiving a higher number of complaints year-on-year and upholding those complaints in greater numbers. This reflects how systemic some of the issues across local government are.
“I appreciate national pressures in the key areas of Special Educational Needs, availability of housing and adult care are putting enormous strain on local authorities, but we still hold them accountable to the law and guidance and the high standards people expect from their local services.”
Read more: IT’S OFFICIAL: Croydon still among country’s worst councils
Read more: Mayor coming under pressure to sack council CEO Kerswell
Read more: Council chief Kerswell has doubled up on £140,000+ executives
Read more: Criticism of Kerswell’s election count ‘justified’ says report
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Perhaps complaints against Croydon Council have just dropped because the council have made it more difficult to contact them to make complaints, so you now have to have an appointment to go to the council bunker in Fisher’s Folly, and they have cut so many services and have so few remaining staff that the beleagured residents don’t bother to complain when left in the lurch by the ending of a former service. Maybe Croydon is suffering from “local government poverty” (new phrase)?
Complaints about Croydon Council are UP, year-on-year.
It’s just that the Ombudsman has upheld a much smaller proportion of them than previously.
At this point, we know that Croydon Council is so bad that there is no point in pursuing complaints through the Ombudsman. Lost cause. Our only hope is the Commissioners.
Any news on Kerswell’s leaving drinks?
Exactly my point. Nothing works. The council doesn’t respond to queries. Council tax is sky high for rock bottom services..
We have just given up!
Whole of UK is turning to shit not just Croydon. Everyone is running off to Dubai and Thailand to live
Join them. Make Croydon great again
Dubai? Intolerant. Thailand corrupt peasant economy.
I suppose we could emulate Dubai and reintroduce debtors’ prisons!
At least here you don’t get arrested for possessing just one forged bank note.
Dan, with Perry, Kerswell and the new commissioners at the helm, I believe Croydon will eventually become the Dubai of the United Kingdom
That is complete nonsense, because Croydon don’t acknowledge any of their complaints and the ombudsman won’t do anything about it because they say Croydon has acknowledged the complaint before they will do anything about it…
So the Ombudsman is feeding everyone totally lies.
Croydon has broken over 30 safeguarding laws with me alone and the Ombudsman wouldn’t even bother reading anything about it as they say Croydon needs to acknowledge the complaint first.
To be fair, Marcus, it is meant as a sort of bit of light nonsense, but it is as close as might be likely to get in having some kind of comparison in the performance of local authorities (that, and the Housing Ombudsman’s annual complaint figures, which also do not make particularly happy reading, either).
We tried to convey within the article how difficult it can be just to get a complaint to the stage where the Ombudsman might even consider it. And from what you say here, you appear to be a case that illustrates that point.
Have you taken your case to your local councillors, Marcus? It is part of their role to ensure that council does servie residents, such as yourself, properly and with respect, something that many senior executives at the council appear to have forgotten is actually what they are paid to do.
If you want to email iC with details of your address/ward, we can help put you in touch with your councillors, if that will help.
‘Have you taken your case to your local councillors’ – seriously???! Have you tried contacting the useless and uncaring liberal dumbs of the Sutton council? barry pass the buck lewis? ‘Get legal advice’ – too stupid not to know that the courts demand cases are sorted out, outside of court; court is a last resort.
There’s many caring, considerate and hard-working councillors in Croydon, Ralph, and several in Sutton, too. As well as the careerists, political chancers and idiots.
There. You read it here first.
In addition to the figures being skewed by certain councils making it almost impossible to make a registered complaint, these stats also include county councils. You can’t compare the amount of complaints in a single Borough to that of a whole county (for example the population of the Borough of Croydon is roughly 397,000, the County of Surrey whilst not as densely populated is somewhere around 1,228,000 in the last census. That’s more than 4 times as many people).
Except you can. That’s why there’s a “Upheld complaints per 100k residents” table. As explained early in the report
In my experience, the lgo has gone to the dogs – this is not a reflection on the bosses, but their incompetent employee(s) – it’s not what it used to be, too much siding with the councils.