EXCLUSIVE: The six-figure-salaried council director ultimately responsible for hiring and firing staff arrived at Fisher’s Folly only after his own run-in over a disciplinary matter with another local authority, where he walked away with a pay-off of at least £90,000. By STEVEN DOWNES
A detailed investigation by this website has confirmed that Dean Shoesmith, Croydon Council’s head of human resources, spent a period on suspension while under investigation for misconduct when he held a similar top job at Sutton Council.
The formal investigation involved the handling of a staff appraisal for a junior member of staff with whom Shoesmith was at the time having an affair.
Shoesmith left Sutton Council soon after, but only after some serious negotiations involving lawyers saw their client leave his job with a pay-off of more than £90,000.
This week, Croydon Mayor Jason Perry and CEO Katherine Kerswell both refused to answer questions about whether their choice of appointee had ever declared the full circumstances surrounding his departure from Sutton Council in 2015.
Sutton exit: Dean Shoesmith
Since Shoesmith took charge of Croydon’s staffing matters, initially on an interim basis in late 2021, Croydon’s cash-strapped borough has seen its spending on agency staff soar from £14million to £54million in the latest financial year.
This includes hundreds of thousands of pounds paid at a rate of £726 PER HOUR to agency Adecco for the services of a “transformation specialist” to assist… Croydon’s head of HR, Dean Shoesmith.
At the time of Shoesmith’s permanent appointment as Croydon’s head of HR in February 2022, Kerswell described his recruitment as “fabulous news”.
“He is an impressive addition to our senior leadership team,” Kerswell said then. Perhaps she is easily impressed.
In his first months at Croydon, Shoesmith updated the council’s staff code of conduct “to embed public sector principles”, adding the Nolan Principles of Public Life.
Unmentioned in Croydon’s official announcement of his appointment three years ago was that Shoesmith had direct, close personal experience of the application of codes of conduct with one of his previous employers.
An Inside Croydon investigation, which has spoken to former Sutton colleagues of Shoesmith, some of whom worked at the highest level at the neighbouring authority, has confirmed that he was suspended in October 2015 while under investigation.
A suspension of any council employee, however senior, is, of course, a “neutral” act, taken to remove them from the workplace when a complaint has been made. Suspension should never automatically suggest guilt.
When Shoesmith arrived in Croydon, the council made much of his “notable past work… creating the first cross-borough HR department for Sutton and Merton”. The truth of the matter was somewhat different, with Merton giving notice that they were to pull out of the failed arrangement not long before Shoesmith left Sutton.
In 2009, when Shoesmith was placed in charge of the Sutton-led joint HR service, the merger was projected to save the two councils £500,000 a year. Under Shoesmith, Sutton and Merton got nowhere near those kind of cost savings.
Over the first five years, Sutton and Merton between them saved just £787,000 – almost £2million under what they had been promised to expect. In the last couple of years of the arrangement, the savings from the merger were down to as little as £120,000 a year – barely as much as Shoesmith himself was being paid.
In May 2015, Merton put Sutton on notice that it was withdrawing from the arrangement. The Sutton management style, headed by Shoesmith, was cited by some as a factor in the split. This “divorce” led to Sutton proposing an HR merger with Kingston instead, a move that put Shoesmith’s own job on the line, as Kingston was proposed to lead the service.
Matters took a dramatic turn in the autumn of 2015, when Shoesmith was subject to misconduct allegations.
£726 per hour: how Inside Croydon broke the story of the pay rates for Barbara Giles, a former colleague of Shoesmith at Lambeth
Shoesmith had, properly, declared to his senior colleagues that he was in a relationship with a junior employee.
But one of the council’s worst-kept secrets was that Shoesmith was accused of signing off his partner’s performance appraisal, while claiming another manager had completed it. “He was a fucking devious snake,” according to someone who worked with Shoesmith at the time.
Eventually, after much legal negotiation, Shoesmith was allowed to leave Sutton with a reference and a pay-off worth almost a full year’s salary. The departure was made with all the appearance of being a redundancy caused by (yet another) council reorganisation.
Shoesmith subsequently joined Lambeth Council. It was there that he worked alongside Barbara Giles, the woman hired at astronomical hourly rates by Croydon to help Shoesmith with “transformation” – the axing of other council employees’ jobs to… errr… save the council money.
Sixty-four-year-old Shoesmith’s track record at Croydon is looking a good deal less glowing lately.
The over-reliance on costly agency staff from Adecco is seen as a clear failure in recruitment for a range of roles, from social workers to exec directors.
Soaring spending: how Croydon Council’s expenditure on agency staff has increased since Dean Shoesmith became head of HR
As well as the near-quadrupling of the council’s spend on agency staff, which contributed to last year’s budget overspend, Shoesmith’s department has been responsible for bringing in several £1,000-a-day “consultants”, such as the unmissed Huw Rhys Lewis BSc, BArch, MSc, MRIBA, MAPM, MRICS.
Shoesmith’s department, and the council’s recruitment agency, also failed to conduct adequate checks over “Interim Adam” Wilkinson, who quit Croydon just 48 hours after this website had exposed how his personal consultancy company had been forced to close by HMRC over unpaid taxes. Wilkinson’s abrupt departure as interim head of planning landed Council Tax-payers with the costs of another recruitment round.
Under the code of conduct which Shoesmith had such an important part in updating, council staff are expected to “Act in a way which means that residents have confidence in your honesty and integrity”.
So Inside Croydon wanted to know about the honesty and integrity surrounding Shoesmith’s application for the job in Croydon, and whether he had been completely up-front and forthcoming about his departure from Sutton.
We submitted a series of questions to the council propaganda department, to Mayor Perry, to Kerswell, the council’s £204,000 per year CEO, and also to Councillor Stuart King.
King, the leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall, was deputy leader of the council at the time Shoesmith was appointed, when the council was under a Labour administration. King, like Perry, was also a member of the appointments committee in 2021-2022.
No answers: Jason Perry was a member of the council committee that approved Shoesmith’s appointment. The Tory Mayor has refused to answer questions on the matter
We asked whether, in the course of the recruitment of Shoesmith by Croydon Council, did he make a full and frank declaration of the reasons that he left his job with Sutton?
We also asked whether , in the event that any such declaration was made, who was it that decided Shoesmith, with his previous history, was a suitable person to employ in a senior HR role in this borough?
We asked whether, if no such declaration was made by Shoesmith when he was being recruited, should the council’s chief executive and elected Mayor reconsider Shoesmith’s position with Croydon Council?
And should Mayor Perry and Kerswell consider their own positions, for allowing this situation to occur?
No response had been received from Mayor Perry, Kerswell, the council press office or Councillor King by the time of publication.
Perhaps they will provide some answers when the matter of the HR director who has overseen the “runaway” spending of tens of millions of pounds on agency staff is raised by the government-appointed Commissioners?
Read more: Council chief made mates’ rates payments at £726 per hour
Read more: Council accused of cover-up over multi-million agency spend
Read more: Agency spend scandal: Perry blasted for ‘ridiculous shambles’
Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
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Silence sometimes speaks volumes.
There’s a clip in the Steve Martin film, “The Jerk”, where his father shows him the difference between shit and Shinola (a brand of boot polish). Somebody in Fisher’s Folly should teach the CEO and members of the Appointments Committee the same lesson
What a surprise. Yet another overpaid, underperforming, local council employee rewarded for failure, incompetence or misconduct. There are people without homes, skipping meals, or unable to heat their homes and we are paying for this? The payouts for Kerswell, Negrini and Shoesmith alone could have built several homes. And who knows how much disgraced planner Heather Cheesbrough got. Nolan Principles? What a joke.
The legal intricacies of council finances prevent what you ask for, Sally.
Housing is a separate account mainly funded from the rents and other fees and is totally separate from the day to day (revenue) budget funded by government grants and Council Tax.
Not making pay-outs to the people you list would not mean any extra houses being built or refurbished.
As suggested elsewhere, £1million in ex gratia payments to three senior members of Croydon’s council staff during their careers.
Sally’s point might have been a little imaginative in considering other, better uses for that public money. But her point holds good.
Only a clusterfuck building firm run by an incompetent like Colm Lacey would not be able to manage to build some – at least five? – homes with a £1million budget.
Pretty much certain that there was never any ex gratia payment made to Cheesbrough on her “retirement” from Croydon Council earlier this year. Given the controversy surrounding Negreedy’s £437,973 in 2020, no politician at Croydon Council would be stupid enough, not even Piss Poor Perry, to sanction another Golden Goodbye.
Which is why we are still saddled with Kerswell.
Taken together, the settlements made by local authorities to Negrini (Croydon), Kerswell (Kent CC) and Shoesmith (Sutton) come to close to £1million of public money, to ease them out of their jobs and mask their incompetencies or dodgy behaviour.
Congratulations on this expose. Please keep them coming. I personally worked with this man and the expense that public bodies have gone to to keep his indiscretions confidential – for the benefit of their own reputations – are outrageous.