Two months since the government sent in Commissioners to run Croydon’s cash-strapped and chaotic council, a round-robin message to staff today suggests that the team has already ‘gone native’.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Staff working in Fisher’s Folly, cash-strapped Croydon Council’s palatial offices, were startled this morning when they received a round-robin email from Ged Curran, the £1,200 per day lead Commissioner appointed by the government to try to drag the local authority out of the mire of its own making.
What surprised some council workers was that the email was signed jointly by Curran and the very people he is supposed to be supervising and overseeing: Katherine Kerswell, the council chief executive of the last five years and three Section 114 notices, and Jason Perry, the fourth-rate politician who was elected as Mayor on a promise to “fix the finances” but ended up busting his budgets and asking government for the biggest bail-out yet.
And the Commissioner’s message suggested that Curran and his three government-appointed colleagues – Debbie Warren, Abi Brown and Jackie Belton – have arrived in Croydon but without any agreed financial package from the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to resolve the issue of the council’s £1.4billion toxic debt.
Residents in the borough are having to pay around £70million per year just to meet the interest on the council’s debt and loan repayments – on loans which have mostly come from central government.
Commissioner: Ged Curran
And some experienced staffers who have struggled on, working through the council’s series of (usually) self-inflicted crises have told Inside Croydon that the messaging in this morning’s email was all too familiar.
“When Tony McArdle and the improvement panel arrived in 2021, it was a few months before they began to issue congratulatory messages about what a great job Kerswell and her top team were doing,” said one Fisher’s Folly source.
“With this email, it looks like the Commissioners have ‘gone native’ in a matter of weeks.”
They point to the language used in the email, with prime examples of “councilspeak” and jargon, as well as some of Kerswell’s favourite phrases.
“Does anyone outside Kerswell’s little bubble really believe that we are on ‘an improvement journey‘?” the staffer said, the disdain undisguised.
“The council has spent five years demonstrating weekly that it is incapable of solving its own problems, and the improvement panel specifically highlighted leadership issues in their final report, so why would anyone trust the same council leaders to ‘lead on its own recovery’?
“It’s bonkers. And it’s worrying that it has taken so little time for Curran and his Commissioners to have become dominated by the council’s leadership.”
The Commissioners’ position has been altered in the past 10 days, too, by another crisis, that within Keir Starmer’s government.
New job: Steve Reed looks far too pleased with himself on arrival at MHCLG
The Secretary of State at MHCLG who made the decision to send in Commissioners was Angela Rayner, who resigned over her mortgage miscalculations. The local government minister who led on the hard tacks of the arrangements was Jim McMahon. He has been sacked from his government job.
In their place have come the oleagenous Steve Reed OBE, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North, if he can be arsed), as Secretary of State and Alison McGovern. Might they have already had a word in Curran’s ear to warn that there will be no multi-million-pound bail-out for Croydon after all? Reed and Curran had previously worked together when both were at Lambeth Council.
And, after five years of Kerswell’s self-regarding leadership, there is undoubtedly another crisis in Croydon, one of low morale among staff. A full-page feature in Friday’s Daily Wail decrying the borough as the “Biggest Dump in Britain” will not have helped.
Newspaper headlines: how the Daily Wail portrayed Croydon at the weekend
Council staff heard the clunk of the email from Curran, Kerswell and Perry dropping into their inboxes just before 10 this morning.
The email said it was written “to explain how the council and the Commissioners are planning to work together”.
“Our aim is to ensure that a strong and effective relationship is developed so that together we can assist the authority to meet the needs of the borough’s residents,” the email continued.
“At the heart of this will be a good collaborative working relationship.
“The Commissioners are here because the council is on an improvement journey, and the route to a financially sustainable situation still needs to be resolved.
“In reaching the decision, the Minister of State accepted that there have been improvements, but there is more to do to meet the best value duty. The Minister also stated that Croydon should lead its own recovery.”
Our council sources suggest that those two sentences, about Croydon making improvements and leading its own recovery, may have been included in the messaging at the insistence of Kerswell, the £204,000 per year CEO.
When the government decision was announced in July, both Kerswell and failed Mayor Perry had expressed strong opposition to the imposition of Commissioners, preferring instead a “recovery” plan they had cooked up with their costly consultants which could see Croydon’s borrowing spiral upwards to close to £2billion.
New role: Alison McGovern MP
Today’s email to staff continued: “The Commissioners have been given powers to take action if necessary. The Minister of State [now meaning McGovern] hopes that with the support of the Commissioners, the council will be open to and able to develop and quickly embed necessary changes. If we can deliver on our aspiration to do this, in partnership, then it should be a rare occasion when the Commissioners have to use their formal powers.
“The council will continue to operate through the normal governance arrangements set out in its constitution. The Commissioners will support elected members [meaning councillors] and officers [council staff] as they make decisions.
“In these first few weeks the Commissioners will review what has been done to date and what the current position is in the authority. This will allow them to form their own opinion and will inform their guidance and actions thereafter.”
The email continued with a line in which the Commissioners said that “all requests for information” from Croydon’s notoriously secretive and opaque leadership “had been responded to” – which is not the same as saying that any answers have been provided.
“The aspiration to work collaboratively has been much in evidence,” the email said. Which is nice.
And it concluded, with understatement: “Residents, staff, the council and its partners have all endured much in the recent past.”
The email’s final sentence was drafted in a manner which suggested it came straight off the desk of Kerswell, and not from Curran’s MHCLG-issued laptop.
It read: “Together, with the support of the Commissioners, we hope this will help bring this phase of the authority’s improvement journey to an end, so it can go on to thrive and excel.”
Katharine Street sources expressed their suspicions about the intention of the email.
Demanding: did £204,000 pa CEO Katherine Kerswell insist on the ‘vote of confidence’
“That reads like some kind of ‘vote of confidence’ in Kerswell,” said one experienced Town Hall figure. “The kind of thing she may have demanded to avoid her quitting – though we all know Kerswell’s going nowhere unless she is handed a massive ‘golden handshake’. And that’s not something Mayor Perry will sanction this side of the local elections next year.
“But in one email, it appears that the Commissioners have been rendered impotent, just a few weeks since they were sent in because the council was judged to be incapable of managing its own finances.”
Council sources have also expressed significant concerns about the remoteness of the Commissioners, and how difficult they are to contact. Potential whistleblowers have said that emails to the Commissioners, to open a dialogue about significant concerns, have not been replied to, and not even acknowledged. The Commissioners’ email address goes through Croydon Council’s own email server.
“Croydon Council Tax-payers paid about £1million for an ‘improvement panel’ that delivered little real improvement,” said the Katharine Street source.
“How much more are they going to be expected to pay for government Commissioners who do little more than prop up Kerswell with her inflated salary and inflated ego?”
Read more: Agency spend scandal: Perry blasted for ‘ridiculous shambles’
Read more: Meet the Commissioners: council experts sent to save Croydon
Read more: Croydon residents pick up the £1m tab for ‘improvement’ panel
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Biggest dump in L̶o̶n̶d̶o̶n̶ Britain thanks to the Town Centre and West Croydon innit.
No, Croydon is the biggest dump in Britain thanks to the inadequacies of the past and present people running Croydon Council
Terrible Council leadership for a couple of decades, URW, awful Tory Government for 14 years, unfair funding, there’s so many factors for the current decline of Croydon.
It all sounds like Groundhog Day again. With the political upheaval in Central Govt. it seems a vacuum has been filled by Kerswell-Reid taking over the narrative. When will this never ending drift finally come to some conclusion. It seems even further away now that perhaps the biggest blow has now occurred. That is the Mandelsonian operator Reed becoming the ultimate Arbiter of this now. Gawd only knows what unsatisfactory outcome will arise with him now in the mix.
Have the Commissioners spoken to any of the Borough’s Council Tax payers, or to any of the Council staff? It is looking like they have only heard Kerswell’s opinion. Still, as most of them were Council officers before being elevated to Commissioners, maybe they and she have too much in common, and the only way we’ll get rid of her is to recommend she becomes a Commissioner within another bankrupt Council.
Wait a minute, is that how the Commissioners got their jobs? Are their former employers and staff heaving sighs of relief that they are no longer around? What a mess local government is in!
Kerswell should know that there will be public outcry if she gets a second massive payoff. She should do the right thing and resign before she’s pushed and then she can get her 1k or more per day as an interim. If she’s paid off twice, she’ll be considered a twice-failed CEO and it will be harder for her to find work. She’ll be even less credible than she is now.
The commissioners may have ‘gone native’, as you say, but as the Council has imposed a total news blackout, we may never know. Croydon hasn’t communicated in any meaningful way for years and things got worse when Kerswell was appointed. I can understand her reluctance to talk to Inside Croydon, but she doesn’t talk to anyone outside her limited circle.
Instead, all we get is politics and bluster from the mayor. There has to be a balance – we can get the facts from the CEO and the politics from the mayor. That way we have a chance of making up our own minds. The only thing that passes for honest communications that I get from the Town Hall is my refuse and recycling chart. That’s it.