CROYDON IN CRISIS: With no prospect of a business taking over the long-vacant Wandle Park café during the busy summer period, the council is spending thousands of pounds on ‘private security’
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Still closed: despite repeated broken promises by Mayor Perry, no business has taken the lease on the Wandle Park café
Despite repeated promises by Croydon’s failed Mayor, Jason Perry, the Wandle Park café today remains vacant and unused, five years after it closed, and more than two months since the council called in the police to effect an eviction of squatters.
Inside Croydon can reveal that the cash-strapped council has spent almost £8,000 in just six weeks on private security to “patrol” outside the café to deter further incursions, still with no prospect of a business ready to take up a lease on the property. The “security” appears to consist of a bloke, looking very bored, sitting in a beaten-up estate car parked yards from the unused council-owned building.
The council’s spending figure was only made available after a legal complaint over their initial refusal to answer a Freedom of Information request.
Perry’s council stumbles from one omnishambles to the next. At the weekend, the Tory Mayor was forced to issue an apology after council-hired contractors trashed hundreds of library books, dumping them in the street outside another closed public building, Broad Green Library.
Under cover: this is what Croydon Council has spent almost £8,000 in little more than a month for ‘security’
Wandle Park café was also subject to a break-in by squatters, after the council again failed to keep that property secure, too. When the Reclaim Croydon squatters moved in, they fixed the café’s leaking roof, and for the first time in five years, served teas, coffees and snacks to the public from the building – more than Croydon’s £84,000 per year part-time Mayor has managed to do.
Council efforts to lease the café and get it back into use appear to have faltered on an unrealistic annual rent demand.
Tender documents obtained from the council show that they want a minimum payment of £10,000 a year: “Rent – Offers in excess of £10,000 per annum taking into account projected income and expediture on the café.
“A stepped rent over the five-year term will be considered taking into account the tenants’ fit-out proposals and tenant break on the third aniversary of the term.”
Given Wandle Park’s reputation for anti-social behaviour and drug-dealing, operating the café would be doing the council, and Croydon, a big favour. Especially as any new tenant is to be expected to foot the bill for fitting out the premises, as well as open, operate and clean the park’s public lavatories, which has been closed since 2020.
The fact that the building is still empty, and is now costing us money to keep it that way, shows how poor the council’s procurement process has been. Yet again.
Send in the clown: squatters provided free teas and coffees and a clown workshop in Wandle Park. Shame for Mayor Perry that he missed it. He might have learned something useful
The café, and the park’s public conveniences inside, have been closed since the first covid lockdown five years ago.
As Inside Croydon has reported previously, piss-poor Perry had first promised to have the café re-opened by 2023. But that year came and went, as did 2024, without a can of fizzy pop or a single ice cream being sold from the park’s caff.
Earlier this year, Perry made yet another promise, saying that he would re-open the purpose-built café by May. May has come and gone, and still the café remains closed, missing most of the money-spinning summer season and school holidays.
With the council’s mismanagement again a cause of severe embarrassment for Mayor Perry and his bungling chief executive, Katherine Kerswell, officials in Fisher’s Folly have tried, and failed, to cover up how much public money they are using to keep the building “secure”.
It was soon after the eviction of the Wandle Park squatters that Inside Croydon, acting on information provided by local citizen journalists, submitted an FoI request to Croydon Council in which we asked them to provide the monthly amount spent on security services provided by third-party contractors to patrol and secure parts of Wandle Park, including the Wandle Park café, since June 2024.
The council began by breaking the law, taking longer than the 20 working days to provide a response as they are legally required. And then they obfuscated.
Perry’s increasingly secretive council refused to answer a straightforward question about operational security costs, using an obscure piece of FoI legislation as their excuse.
“While we recognise the public interest in understanding how local resources are deployed, we are unable to disclose the amount spent on security services relating to Wandle Park and the Wandle Park café,” the response from a nameless council bureaucrat said.
“This information is exempt from disclosure under Section 31(1)(a) and (b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which relates to law enforcement, specifically the prevention and detection of crime, and the apprehension or prosecution of offenders.”
The council actually said this: “Disclosing detailed financial data regarding specific security arrangements could prejudice the effectiveness of those measures and compromise the safety of public spaces and personnel.”
This was clearly a question that the incompetent powers-that-be in Fisher’s Folly did not want to answer.
Spending spree: within weeks, the council had spent almost £8,000 on a bored bloke sitting in a battered estate car. Thanks to a concerned reader for supplying the photographs
Inside Croydon sought an urgent internal review of the council’s decision, the last step available before referring the negligent council to the Information Commissioner’s Office. We quoted back at the council’s lawyers the ICO’s own advice in respect of S31(1)(a) and (b) of the Freedom of Information Act.
“Your interpretation of the law is, at best, self-serving. At worst, it is perverse,” we wrote.
“The Information Commissioner’s Office, in its advice for organisations, such as Croydon Council, states, ‘In broad terms, the [Section 31] exemption will apply where disclosing information would harm either your ability, or the ability of another body, to enforce the law’.
“The council has failed to demonstrate how the release of its spending figures for the hiring of private security firms in Wandle Park could ever possibly ‘harm your ability… to enforce the law’.
“That’s probably because such information would not prejudice the security operation, as you well know. Nor would the spending on third-party security prejudice the prevention or detection of crime or the apprehension or prosecution of offenders, or the administration of justice.
“And there is a strong public interest argument in favour of disclosure of the amounts the council is spending on a venue for which it has failed to find a tenant for five years.”
Finally, last Friday, almost two months after the council had been asked a simple question, they replied with all the figures we had requested in the first place. They had ruled that their own reason for withholding the figures was invalid.
The council response shows that there was no security hired before the squatters moved in at Wandle Park café earlier this year, with “no recorded spend for Wandle Park security services between April 2024 and March 2025”.
Between April and July 2025, the total spend was
£7,772
Since the council only called in private security in mid-June, after the squatters’ eviction, that suggests the council is paying close to £4,000 per month, maybe a tad more, for a geezer sitting in a battered estate car.
Croydon’s failed Mayor, Jason Perry, has spent the past month claiming that his council is well-run, and that there is no need for the government to send in Commissioners to take a look at his “runaway” spending.
With no tenant for the Wandle Park café in sight, and “Perry’s Pile” of books at nearby Broad Green Library attracting national attention, it seems that CEO Kerswell and Perry are making a very strong case for urgent intervention by the Commissioners.
Read more: Booked! Mayor Perry deceives over destruction of library stock
Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
Read more: Agency spend scandal: Perry blasted for ‘ridiculous shambles’
Read more: Reclaim Croydon’s free bookshop and café closed by bailiffs
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Perry’s justification for booting out Reclaim Croydon was that they were holding up an imminent deal with an official provider. That was at the beginning of June. It’s now mid-August and still no reopening in sight.
There is one use that empty building can be put to – storing all those library books that were chucked out of Broad Green Library. Piss-poor can get a council employee to film him and Scott Roche making themselves useful
Piss-Poor Perry doesn’t do work. The only bit of being Mayor he has got the hang of is constantly going out for business lunches, official dinners and banquets. If his plastic drainpipe family business hasn’t folded, it must the efforts of the employees or others in the Perry family, rather than Piss-Poor himself.
Does the battered old estate car still have wheels, or is it up on bricks now ?!
Pity the poor bloke with that job, getting paid to bake in the heat to protect an empty building that’s lain empty for years, apart from a brief interlude when some enterprising youngsters opened it up for public use. Hope he has keys to the loos inside
It would have been better, and cheaper, to have given a responsible cafe owner the premises rent free. £10k a year in rent vs £8k costs for 6 weeks … This council is stupid.
Many commercial property owners also have this mindset – ‘I think my property is worth X rental and X is what I will get’
Ignoring the fact that some revenue is better than none and the longer the place is empty the less income they are getting for the place.
And if the property is vacant for more than 3 months then the property owner becomes liable for the rates bill (which if let out the occupier will pay for) further adding to their losses.
The Wandle Park Café Particulars, the council’s brochure from 2024 to let that property, said under Rent, “Offers in excess of £10,000 per annum taking into account projected income
and expediture on the café. A stepped rent over the 5 year term will be considered taking into account the tenants fit out proposals and tenant break on the 3rd aniversary of the term.”
If you ignore the spelling mistakes, it looks like Mayor Perry and former Council property meister Huw Rhys Lewis BSc BArch MSc MRIBA MRICS MAPM MD AD DDS FLD FFF und F didn’t do a great job in finding someone willing and able to take on this community asset
The full time security team wasn’t able to stop the Council removing the gear of the Pickleball team that uses a lock up behind the cafe despite giving no warning to the group or the parks Friends group and denying all responsibility and risking the groups future.