CROYDON IN CRISIS: At public expense (again), Mayor Perry deploys the council’s top lawyer to try to shut down reporting of his £50,000 pay-off to departing chief executive Katherine Kerswell. By STEVEN DOWNES
Delusional: Mayor Jason Perry’s £50,000 pay-off to departing CEO Katherine Kerswell brings her to close half-a-million in exit settlements in her career
“When’s a pay-off not a pay-off?” a more than slightly peeved Katharine Street source told Inside Croydon last night, as the news that Katherine Kerswell had resigned her job as the borough’s chief executive began to be fully absorbed.
“When it’s 50 grand of Council Tax-payers’ money,” they said.
After heaping crisis upon crisis on the people of Croydon in a disastrous three-and-a-half years in charge as the borough’s first elected Mayor, Tory Jason Perry’s only priority yesterday was a belated attempt at news management, and to save his own political career.
As Inside Croydon was again first to break the big news coming out of Fisher’s Folly, the push-back was repeated and obvious: “It’s not a pay-off,” more than one Conservative source tried to claim, unconvincingly.
Late on Friday, Perry (and probably Kerswell, too, in one last act of cover-up and duplicity paid for by the public), deployed the Borough Solicitor, the hapless Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense, who sent a sniffy email to Inside Croydon Towers.
“The suggestions that the chief executive Katherine Kerswell is receiving a substantial pay-off, comparable to the payments to Jo Negrini, is simply false and misleading,” Lawrence-Orumwense wrote.
Croydon’s director of legal services and monitoring officer, himself a Kerswell appointee, wanted Inside Croydon to remove or amend our reports of Kerswell’s scrambled exit, helped on her way by what we now understand to be around £50,000 of public cash.
High Court injunction: Kerswell’s council challenged Inside Croydon’s reporting in 2022, and lost, badly
Lawrence-Orumwense has attempted before, no doubt at Kerswell’s knowledge if not actual urging, to get Inside Croydon to remove our entirely well-founded and detailed reports from public view.
That occasion, in 2022, was after we republished confidential legal correspondence that the council had itself already published on its own website, in one of those magnificent clusterfucks of incompetence which occurred so often during Kerswell’s five years as council CEO.
That episode did not end well for the council or its most senior legal official, as he had his arse handed to him on a plate by a High Court judge, who dismissed the council’s ludicrous attempt to take out an injunction against this website. “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” Mr Justice Nicklin said to a junior barrister hired by the council.
That case cost our cash-strapped council an estimated £20,000, all to try to cover up a council blunder and salvage some reputational damage.
The material we published, after it had been on the council’s own website for six weeks, were legal reports about the possibility of the council clawing back some of the £437,000 golden handshake pocketed by Jo Negrini, Kerswell’s predecessor.
Gone, but not forgotten: ex-CEO Jo Negrini
Three years on, and Lawrence-Orumwense is banging on again, this time about Kerswell’s reputation, asserting that reporting that the council CEO is to receive a pay-off of tens of thousands of pounds of public money is “highly damaging to reputation”. Which is arguable, of course. As is the matter of Kerswell’s reputation. But that’s something we can come to later…
Kerswell does have some notoriety in local government circles for cashing in on her departures from senior jobs: in 2011, she scored a Negrini-esque £420,000 pay-out after 16 months at Kent County Council. In April 2019, it is understood that Newham secured her departure as interim head of service with a more modest pay-off after barely nine months in the role.
One useful thing did emerge from Lawrence-Orumwense’s latest little billet-doux, however.
“For the avoidance of any doubt, the chief executive contract notice period is three months,” the Monitoring Officer advised.
So, at last, we have squeezed out of a council official a straight answer to an important matter of public interest.
Doing Mayor Perry’s dirty work: Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense
Three months’ salary for someone on £204,000 per year amounts to a handy £51,000. There will be pension top-ups, too. Which means that over the course of her career in public service, Kerswell will have received a cool half-a-million quid in settlement pay-offs from at least three local authorities.
The point, as various employment experts have emphasised in the past 24 hours or so, is that, “If Kerswell resigned, as everyone seems to agree that she did, then the council didn’t have to pay her a penny. She could, perhaps should, have worked her notice,” one sage counsel said. “Now, all they are doing is paying her not to work.”
They pointed to Jane West, the council’s finance director, who gave eight months’ notice of her intention to leave the council, and is working through that period, without ever a hint of any pay-off.
“Public bodies only make payments in lieu of notice if they want someone gone quickly, like when they’ve been sacked.”
But we are told that Kerswell resigned. So the council, and Mayor Jason Perry, never needed to make any kind of payment to Kerswell.
And that’s where we arrive at the matter of the reputational damage that Lawrence-Orumwense has really been deployed to try to protect: that of Croydon’s part-time Mayor, Perry.
“Given historic governance concerns at Croydon around payments to senior leaders, I know Katherine would want me to reassure you that there will be no payments to her other than her contractual notice period,” Perry wrote to the borough’s 70 councillors yesterday, failing to mention the small matter of the 50 grand.
Having promised, and failed, to recover some of the excessive pay-out to Negrini, Perry is now little more than six months from local elections and has made a pay-out to another departing CEO. That won’t go down well with potential Reform UK voters in Shirley, New Addington and Coulsdon, as the Conservatives fear electoral meltdown in May.
A day after Kerswell’s resignation went public, there’s still nothing on the council’s own website about the exit of its most senior official. Kerswell didn’t even rate a mention in Perry’s weekly wallow in self-congratulation, which is posted online each Friday.
It’s almost as if Perry and his council are trying to pretend nothing has happened.
But, as we all now know, it has. Trying to shutdown reporting of Kerswell’s inglorious departure will do nothing to help to repair her council’s well-deserved reputation for cover-ups, secrecy and deceit.
Read more: ‘Better than evens’ chance of winning Negrini legal case
Read more: Council threatens injunction over reports it published itself
Read more: Kerswell takes another pay-off as she quits as council’s CEO
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
