Our Town Hall reporter KEN LEE on the increasing inequalities in pay at the cash-strapped council
Condescending: Katherine Kerswell
Everyone can relax: Katherine Kerswell’s back!
Croydon Council’s chief executive announced her return from holiday with her regular, condescending “Weekly Waffle” internal email to staff on Friday.
There, she told council employees that summer holiday childcare “can be an expensive and pressured time for people” (as if they didn’t already know) and then proceeded to offer patronising tips on “free things to do in Croydon to keep the little ones entertained”.
Not that any of that will be much of a concern to Kerswell on her £204,000 salary, while presiding over an organisation where many staff have to cope with wages of little more than one-tenth of that figure.
Kerswell’s already generous rate of pay was increased by just over 5% earlier this year, so staff at the cash-strapped council reading her Weekly Waffle may have had mixed feelings when she confirmed that they are to receive wage rises of a more modest 3.2%.
“I hope you will have all seen the news from Dean Shoesmith, our chief people officer, on the intranet that an agreement has now been reached on the 2025-2026 local government award. The National Joint Council and the unions have agreed a 3.2% increase,” Kerswell wrote.
For a typical, hard-working Croydon Council employee on a salary of £27,000, that works out to an extra £864 per year, barely covering price increases for food, fuel or transport, never mind all the costs of summer childcare. And the Shoesmith making the pay rise announcement? Yes, the same head of HR who spends £726 PER HOUR for a consultant to assist him in “transformation” – which is councilspeak for job cuts.
Cut off: Kerswell’s council can’t even get its phone system to work properly
Croydon’s staff pay rise will be made in September, Kerswell advised, including back-dated pay to April 1.
Not that any of that will make the new phone system, installed on Kerswell’s watch, work any better, after being out-of-service for the best part of a week earlier this month.
Residents might get a better level of service over the weekend of August 22 to August 25, though. Fisher’s Folly is to be completely closed from 6pm on the Friday, through until Sunday night.
Referring to “BWH”, meaning the council offices, they say the building “will need to be closed for a full power-down from 6pm Friday August 22”. And in bold letters, they emphasise, “No one will be able to enter the building at this time.
“This is a legal requirement to complete servicing and maintenance work on high voltage equipment,” the notice says.
“If no one’s in Fisher’s Folly,” a council insider said, “will anyone notice?”
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