EXCLUSIVE: Croydon’s £204,000 CEO is facing another crisis of her own creation, as her appointee as corporate director in charge of planning joins the growing exodus from the council. By STEVEN DOWNES
Nazyeya Hussain, the council official responsible for planning and ultimately for the regeneration of the town centre, has become the sixth senior director at Fisher’s Folly to quit the council in the past few months – many of them coinciding with the arrival of government-appointed Commissioners at the cash-strapped council.
Hussain has only been working in Croydon since last November, having been appointed as interim director of sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery by the council’s chief exec, Katherine Kerswell. Kerswell has used her delegated powers to make a series of high-paid interim appointments, without the need to refer to the cross-party council committee of elected councillors for approval. Few of Kerswell’s picks have proved to be successful.
Many interim directors are paid close to £1,000 per day, often through their private consultancy companies.
Distracted: Nazeya Hussain
Hussain joins the queue for the exits at Fisher’s Folly behind Elaine Jackson, Kerswell’s much depended-upon deputy CEO, Jane West, Croydon’s chief finance official, and “Interim Adam” Wilkinson, who lasted just a couple of months as the council’s top planning official until exposed by this website as having a less-than-optimal relationship with the tax man.
Then there was Huw Rhys Lewis BSc, BArch, MSc, MRIBA, MAPM, MRICS, who failed in his mission to dispose of much of the council’s property portfolio, and Karen Agbabiaka, the council’s head of highways and parking since November 2023.
Wilkinson and Agbabiaka had both worked in the directorate under Hussain’s control, and in the case of Agbabiaka, her exit was described by insiders as due to “a clash of personalities” with her immediate boss.
The news of Hussain’s imminent departure was shared with council staff in Kerswell’s weekly waffle on Friday.
Unlike the fond and warm farewell messages for the likes of Jackson and West, Kerswell’s note about Hussain, while including a few of the expected platitudes, was a little more brusque.
“A staffing update to let you all know that our interim corporate director of sustainable communities, regeneration and economic recovery, Nazyeya Hussain, will sadly be leaving toward the end of November,” Kerswell wrote.
“Naz has been a fantastic addition to Croydon, driving forward our growth plan and town centre regeneration.” That’ll be the six kiosks in Allders…
Droning: Croydon’s £204,000 per year CEO Katherine Kerswell
And Kerswell droned on: “Thanks to her for everything she has delivered…”, the CEO wasn’t able to actually identify anything that Hussain had “delivered”, but hey, “… and we wish her all the best in her new role as executive director of place and growth at Richmond and Wandsworth council.”
Hussain had long been suspected of being “distracted” while at Croydon, preoccupied with her non-executive director role at Solace, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers. And now it becomes apparent that for much of her time at Fisher’s Folly, Hussain has also been eyeing up better prospects elsewhere.
Council employees expressed “shock” at Hussain’s rapid departure, although she had failed to impress hard-working staff. One described Hussain as “nothing more than a saleswoman… I don’t think she was well-liked generally”.
The churn on the 7th floor at Fisher’s Folly represents something of a crisis for Kerswell, especially in Hussain’s directorate. Whoever replaces Hussain will be the third person in that role in less than a year (her predecessor, Nick Hibberd, left in January), and Croydon is already on to its third planning chief in barely six months, following the exit of the universally loathed Heather Cheesbrough (on an indefinite “career break”, apparently) and the bungled appointment of Wilkinson.
All this is happening as Croydon is still working on finalising a revised Local Plan, is waiting on a decision from the GLA over the massive Purley retirement home scheme, and is supposed to be getting the third (or is it fourth?) planning application from Westfield for regeneration of the Whitgift Centre.
“When it comes to looking out for the interests of the borough as a whole,” one Katharine Street source said today, “you can see why developers look at the council and say ‘the lights are on, but no one’s at home’.”
Read more: Now Kerswell’s deputy CEO joins the rush for council exits
Read more: Go West! Cash-strapped council’s finance chief is set to quit
Read more: £1,000 per day ‘Interim Adam’ was Kerswell’s personal pick
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant
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Do these people actually need replacing? How about saving some money…
At risk of labouring the point, according to official figures from the council, obtained through a Freedom of Information request for this website, by 2023-2024, Kerswell had 15 executives working at the council on salaries of £135,000.
That’s more than double the number of council executives on those pay scales when Kerswell took over in 2020.
Kerswell is paid £204,000 per year, and is one of six council employees now on £170,000 or more.
In 2020, there were just three on such stellar local government salaries.
The council’s services and functions need to be managed, of course. But does the council need Kerswell and a £84,000 “executive” Mayor?
Do what? “.. we wish her all the best in her new role as executive director of place and growth at Richmond and Wandsworth council.” So these roles are so exhausting that they can manage two councils simultaneously? I think it about time Kerswell-Reid goes part time too. She is only doing half a job and half of that as half as well as can be expected.
Richmond and Wandsworth have merged a lot of their departments presumably to make efficiency savings. I have recently received an email from a department titled “Housing and Regeneration Serving Richmond and Wandsworth Councils”. I do wonder how Croydon would fare if it adopted a similar approach but, given the potential for a conflict of interests, I hope that Croydon does not contemplate merging its Regeneration team with Bromley or Sutton Councils. So saying, it would be good for Croydon’s Regeneration Team to engage with Inside Croydon and Croydon generally on its work. It might find such engagement constructive on all sides. I was disappointed to find on Friday that the Croydon Urban Room in the Whitgift Centre is temporarily closed.
Wandsworth and Richmond have shared a council CEO for several years. The appointee is paid more than La Kerswell.
Sutton already shares several of its service departments with other boroughs. They shared their HR department for a while, until they, and their partner borough, decided they needed to move on the HR director, Dean Shoesmith, who was sleeping with a junior employee while also overseeing her annual reviews. Shoesmith, of course, was given a warm welcome and a six-figure salary by Croydon.
Sutton and Croydon, together with Merton and Kingston, are all members of the SLWP, the South London Waste Partnership, an organisation which shovels millions of quid at Veolia each year, however bad the service gets, and conspires to pollute the air across south London on a regular basis. And, of course, the arm’s length nature of SLWP means that it is outside any proper public scrutiny.
Kensington and Chelsea share departments with Westminster to save money. These are: Adults’ and Children’s Services, Legal Services: and Libraries. For ‘back office’ functions and admin this makes sense.
Not good enough so she quit or was made to . Better than getting a £400k payoff too. Better than hanging on to her job and achieving fuck all or hanging on to yr job doing dodgy deals like Ross Gentry.
Richmond and Wandsworth pay their Executive Directors up to £214k. The most likely reason Nazyeya Hussain left was for a better job and a better salary at a council that isn’t stuck in bankruptcy limbo whose political leader is part-time and half-witted
Re-organise these words: rat, sunk, ship, leaving
It’s the people who can swim that leave the sinking / sunken ship
Having experienced first hand Ross Gentry twice misleading a planning committee and, along with Cheesbrough, making statements that were blatantly untrue, planning officers unlawfully withholding documents, waiving law and policy and so on, I completely agree. Let’s hope the Public Office (Accountability) Bill 2025 will change things – if they continue as they have been they could be liable for criminal sanctions.
I do hope too, that similar sanctions will (at some point) be applied to MEMBERS of planning committees who fail to challenge (i.e. ACCEPT) officers’ untrue statements (both written and verbal), having previously been supplied with DIRECT evidence of the untruths.
As we know, Chris Clark and Paul Scott pushed through planning approval for a development that failed even mandatory policy and relied on Ross Gentry misleading the Committee (twice). One can only speculate as to why….
If anything untoward does emerge they will not be able to hide behind bureaucracy. Kerswell and Perry will have some explaining to do.
Yes we do … we also know that Cllr Michael Neal acted similarly when considering another (i.e. at least one other) application.
In that case, Cllr Neal (as Chairman) recommended the application for approval when he was aware of DIRECT evidence that showed that the UNCORROBORATED claims made by Nicola Townsend that ‘Highways’ considered the proposed access arrangements as ‘viable options’, were grossly misleading. One can only speculate as to why …
Thankfully (for all concerned), it appears that the proposals that had IN FACT been described by Highways Development as ‘unacceptable and UNSAFE’, will not now be implemented.
I hope Dodgy Gentry and Thirsy Clark are having sleepless nights waiting for a knock at the door. Time the pair of them moved on.
Nicola Townsend and Cheesbrough lost public trust and destroyed the credibility of the planning system in Croydon a long time ago. The one positive is that the patterns of her conduct (along with Ross Gentry) have created a trail of evidence that can be scrutinised. Now they can be properly held to account.
I’m afraid the list of miscreants is far longer than that, and includes councillors as well as officers.
It will/would be some job to compile that trail of evidence, and who would it be to scrutinise it, properly? I’m out of ideas.
No need to mourn for the departure of one of Croydon Council’s many overpaid clods that nobody has ever heard of. As Ian Bridge suggested, can we reduce the Kerswell’s attempts at empire-building and not bother recruiting another waste-of-space for a worthless post.