CROYDON IN CRISIS: First, they failed to hold a public consultation over the ending of school street patrols. Then, they failed to inform the affected schools. Now, following an investigation by this website, it is confirmed that the council deliberately misled parents, teachers, councillors and the BBC over important safety reports. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Safer crossings: parents reckon more than 2,000 Croydon children’s journeys to school are less safe this term after lollipop patrols were axed by Jason Perry’s council
Mayor Jason Perry’s council lied to the parents and guardians of around 2,000 small children in June when a Town Hall spokesperson was quoted by the BBC saying that risk assessments had been conducted at each of the six schools where their road safety patrols were being axed.
An investigation by Inside Croydon has discovered that no such road safety assessments had been conducted near any of the schools until July this year – nine months after Perry and his cabinet member for roads, Scott Roche, ordered that the lollipop patrols should be axed.
The lollipop safety patrols had helped hundreds of small children and their parents to cross often busy roads near each of the six schools – Cypress Infants and Juniors (Upper Norwood and Crystal Palace), Norbury Manor Primary, Orchard Way Primary (Shirley), Monks Orchard (Shirley), Oasis Academy Ryelands (Woodside) and Greenvale Primary (Selsdon).
The price of children’s safety: Jason Perry pockets £84,000 per year as Croydon Mayor
The lollipop cuts were undertaken to save £58,000 per year at a cash-strapped council which pays its elected Mayor, Jason Perry, £84,000 per year and its chief executive, Katherine Kerswell, £204,000 per annum.
Between them, last year Croydon’s failed Mayor and catastrophic CEO Kerswell presided over a £30million budget overspend.
More than 2,000 children aged from two to 10 attend the six schools affected by the road safety cuts brought in by Perry and Kerswell. When they returned to their primaries earlier this month for the start of the new academic term, they did so without the helpful reassurance of their lollipop lady or lollipop man to help them along the way.
“Our children’s well-being, even their lives, are being put at risk by Mayor Perry’s decision to remove our school’s road safety patrol,” one concerned mum from one of the schools told Inside Croydon this week.
“And to find out now that the council never did carry out the safety assessments that they suggested they had done is a scandal. They should all be ashamed.”
Despite Perry’s propaganda department parroting platitudes about “road safety remains a priority for the council”, parents and school staff say that they have genuine fears that their morning and afternoon journeys to and from school are now less safe without the lollipop patrols.
Inside Croydon broke the news of Perry and Roche’s proposed lollipop cuts in May this year. The council claimed that it informed the schools in March, but some dispute this.
Regurgitated quote: how BBC London quoted a council spokesperson on June 2. No risk assessments were conducted at any of the affected schools until July. BBC London’s reporter failed to ask for sight of the risk assessment reports
And now, this website has obtained copies of the road safety assessment reports, through a response to a Freedom of Information request which the council deliberately, and unlawfully, delayed.
The consultants’ reports make a series of safety recommendations to Croydon Council – most of which the council has ignored or refused to implement.
Parents at one of the schools, Cypress, say that they have been raising concerns about speeding motorists and a lack of enforcement on the area’s roads for two years. But they, too, have been ignored.
Ignored: there was no public consultation, poor communication and, until July, no road safety assessments by Croydon Council
Road crossing safety is a non-statutory service, meaning the council is under no legal obligation to provide it. But the council does have an obligation to ensure that the streets and roads over which it has control are maintained to optimal safety standards and to reduce the risk of death or injuries through collisions.
Croydon Council conducted no public consultation over the lollipop patrol cuts. Most of the schools affected, their parents and staff, did not find out about Perry’s cuts until they read the reports on this website.
The cuts to the service were subject to review by the council’s scrutiny committee in December 2022, a time when Councillor Rowenna Davis was the committee chair. Davis is now Labour’s candidate for Croydon Mayor at next year’s local elections. Labour only began raising a petition opposing the cuts after Inside Croydon’s reports.
“Road safety remains a priority for me and for the council,” Perry parroted again last month.
Yet the reports which Perry’s own council commissioned in July this year contradict the Croydon Mayor on almost every page.
The six surveys were all conducted by a firm called Citisense, which describes itself as “enablers of change”. They probably came up with that slogan before they were hired by Croydon Council.
The price of safety: cabinet member Scott Roche, who approved the lollipop cuts, this year voted to give himself a pay rise to £40,000
Their survey around Greenvale Primary on Sandpiper Road was conducted on July 8 – one month after Inside Croydon submitted the FoI requesting copies of the reports that the council had told the BBC it had already done.
Citisense’s site visit on July 8 was conducted between 5.30pm to 6pm.
So they will not have seen any parents or children on their journeys from school – a bit of a fundamental oversight for a survey of road safety around a school most might think.
In items 4 and 5 of Citisense’s report, they refer to a range of information that was not provided by their clients, Croydon Council. This included collision data, traffic counts and pedestrian surveys. Basic, fundamental stuff needed by the consultants to be able to do their job. It is not known whether this information was withheld due to council incompetence, or done deliberately.
Denied the data, the report concluded, “there were no issues identified during the Stage 1 Road Safety Audit”. Hardly reassuring.
Cypress Infants and Juniors survey was conducted on July 7, but again at a time long after all the children had gone home for the day (4.45pm to 5.15pm; these Citisense inspectors don’t hang around for very long).
The council had failed to provide the requested road safety reports here, too.
The council claims that crossing the road for schoolchildren attending Cypress has been made safer because of the introduction a couple of years ago of a zebra crossing on Cypress Road.
Highlighting discrepancy: the inspectors’ report shows where Cypress pupils cross the road, and where the council has positioned a zebra crossing, 400m away
The only trouble with that is that the zebra is more than a quarter of a mile away from the potentially dangerous junction of Sylvan Road and Auckland Road, where the majority of children cross the road and where, until Mayor Perry wielded his axe, their journey was assisted by the supervision of a lollipop patrol.
Citisense made a series of recommendations in this report, including that a dropped kerb at a pedestrian island at the busier crossing point should be doubled in length from one metre to two metres.
The council rejected this recommendation.
“Rather than put in a better crossing facility where people want it, they want to tell people to use one 400 metres away,” according to one concerned resident. “Instead of putting pedestrians, and children, at the top of the transport hierarchy, they’re being treated as second-class citizens, whose safety and convenience just isn’t worth the money.”
The Oval Primary survey was conducted on July 8, between 8.30pm and 8.45pm – so the sort of time pub-goers might be going to the nearby Oval Tavern, but hardly a time to get a realistic feel for how the school run might look on a busy weekday morning.
Citisense use a number of standard sentences and phrases in their reports, as they did here: “Traffic flows were busy, with a higher number of pedestrian and cyclist movements observed during the visit.” They fail to say higher than what.
And they take a dim view of people crossing the road at the “wrong place”, at the school’s main entrance, as they have done for years with the help of a lollipop patrol.
Safety check: the report says that these road islands on Auckland Road are half the width they need to be. Croydon Council has ignored the recommendation
The report’s main safety recommendation for Oval Primary is that children and parents should be told to use a zebra crossing 30 yards away.
At Ryelands primary, now an Oasis Academy on Oakley Road, the survey was also conducted on July 8.
Citisense inspectors must have been whizzing around Croydon’s primary schools that evening. This site visit was between 8.30pm and 8.45pm.
The report notes a low number of pedestrians and cyclists, for a survey conducted at least 12 hours after the morning school run. According to the report, there were no problems found. Oakley Road has a school street scheme, and is one-way with car parking on both sides and, if you’re feeling adventurous, permits cycling in the opposite direction.
Any suggestion that these reports were done in a bit of a rush will be fully denied by Croydon Council, of course. But the survey of Stanford Road, for Norbury Manor Primary, was also done on July 8. Citisense squeezed this visit in between 7pm and 7.45pm – so a longer stay than most.
The report provides a standard sentence about traffic flows, for a survey conducted outside normal school travel times. No issues were found, even despite the road being known locally for a cluster of road traffic collisions. But remember that failed Mayor Perry said, “road safety remains a priority for me and the council”. Croydon Council has failed to conduct a traffic count on Stanford Road for 17 years…
Rush job: five of the six school road safety assessments were dashed off in one summer evening
The road safety assessment inspection for Monks Orchard Primary was also conducted on July 8, in less than 15 minutes, from 8pm. The inspectors concluded that the council could make the road safer for small children going to school by making the zig-zag lines on the zebra crossing longer. Croydon Council, where “road safety remains a priority”, has failed to respond.
And, of course, the council will deny that their contractors were given a rush job with a clear brief to find nothing to be a risk or that might suggest that removing road safety patrols in September could potentially jeopardise the well-being, and lives, of thousands of small children.
But five of the six surveys all dashed off in one summer evening, long after the kids had gone home from school?
Much of Croydon’s road traffic data is publicly available. So why didn’t council officials provide it, as requested, to their contractors?
And why didn’t the consultants dig it out?
Paint job: Croydon Council has failed to respond to a recommendation to extend the zig-zag lines by the crossing outside Monk Orchard primary
The conclusions in the Greenvale, Norbury Manor and Oasis reports that “there were no issues identified” is at odds with the Stage 1 audits.
These audits should identify potential safety problems, especially when a safety measure like a school crossing patrol is being considered for removal. It’s difficult to justify a “no issues” finding without any data to support such a conclusion regarding the impact of the removal.
None of these hastily cobbled-together Stage 1 Road Safety Audits ever really address the topic of removing the six lollipop patrols.
The “no issues identified” findings is based on missing data or wrong data (time of visit) and did not quantify the change in risk specifically due to the removal of the patrols: how many more children will be exposed to what level of traffic without the lollipop patrol’s direct intervention.
So not only did the council lie to the public when asked if they had done due diligence and conducted a road safety assessment, when they belatedly did get round to doing the preparatory work to justify their penny-pinching decision, they cooked up reports to geared to give the results the council wanted.
Councillor Claire Bonham, who represents parents of children attending Cypress primary, says that the council’s approach has been “incredibly disappointing”.
“I was assured in April that a risk assessment of the site had been undertaken, but the council failed to provide me with a copy. It turns out that that was because the risk assessment was not carried out until July.
“This feels like a deliberate attempt to mislead me and concerned parents about the robustness of the process.”
Having now seen the report, obtained by Inside Croydon, Bonham says, “The report highlights serious safety concerns at the informal crossing, which the council have decided not to address but instead to offer to ‘educate’ parents and children about using the zebra crossing near the school.
“This begs the question of why Mayor Perry is prepared to cut the lollipop service, at so little cost, when his own risk audit states that this is putting children’s safety at risk. This is not a price worth paying for our children’s safety.”
Read more: Council failed to tell affected schools about their lollipop cuts
Read more: They voted to raise your Council Tax, then to increase their pay
Read more: Council’s healthy school streets have no ANPR protections
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Well what can you say about this latest double dealing by Perry. Remember how he got the Melville Road school traffic scheme abandoned by the amazing survey of a local resident who was able to identify where all the cars using the road were residing and so Castlemaine Avenue would avoid being used as a school route. This time he is so poor as to even not have done a cursory piece of consultation to justify his latest service to downgrading the quality of life in Croydon. He is simply useless even at lying, let alone holding Political Office.
The lollypop lady or man hold up the green cross code for our younger children. The council has a very mean streak thorough its veins, wages are more important then lives young or old.
Croydon Council has this helpful guide on their website:
1. The Seven Principles of Public Life
The Seven Principles of Public Life (also known as the Nolan Principles) apply to
anyone who works as a public office-holder. This includes all those who are elected
or appointed to public office, nationally and locally, and all people appointed to work
in the Civil Service, local government, the police, courts and probation services, nondepartmental public bodies (NDPBs), and in the health, education, social and care
services. All public office-holders are both servants of the public and stewards of
public resources. The principles also apply to all those in other sectors delivering
public services.
1.1 Selflessness – Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.
1.2 Integrity – Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.
1.3 Objectivity – Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.
1.4 Accountability – Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.
1.5 Openness – Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.
1.6 Honesty – Holders of public office should be truthful.
1.7 Leadership – Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour and treat others with respect. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.
***
Scott “Mumbler” Roche has failed on 1.6, and his boss, Mayor Jason Perry, falls on 1.7
Informative article. When you say 1.6 do you mean just 1.6 or the first 6, likewise with 1.7? I would argue that it would be the latter.
I meant one point six: Honesty – Holders of public office should be truthful. Same with the other, one point seven, although thinking about it, Perry also fails on 1.3 and both him and Roche don’t meet 1.5.
They probably think the Nolan Principles are a tribute act singing pop songs at the Fairfield Halls. Altogether now, “I’m in the mood for dancing…”
Excellent work again iC!
I’ve been involved in a professional capacity in commissioning surveys and this one is the most embarrassing I’ve seen: pure tick box exercise caring nothing about the safety of school children.
I think it also helpful to point out that a decision to cut school crossing patrols was made by the Labour council for the 2023/24 budget (as evidenced in the proposals put to the Scrutiny committee chaired by Rowenna Davis on 6 December 2022).
https://democracy.croydon.gov.uk/documents/s41736/Appendix%201B%20-%20Savings%2030112022%20Cabinet.pdf
Thank you Brian
I just happened to be scrolling through this article and caught sight of two pictures in the same frame. The lollipop lady on the top left and Perry on the bottom right. Quote symbolic really:
* one who cares for others [the children]
* the other who cares for one [himself]
Shame really that we have somebody like that at the top of the council tree.
Thanks for your detailed and shaming expose.
The conduct of the after-decision, after-implementation surveys at irrelevant times of the evening, on a single evening, are unprofessional and I would say, worthless.
The phrase ‘no issues identified’ is not the required level of assessment of saying that the locations, without lollipop patrols, are safe, or unsafe. This is obfustication.
Omitting relevant reports is also unprofessional.
What a shambles and lying cretins in this council
Time for a honest council