CROYDON IN CRISIS: The £204,000 per year council chief exec who gave orders to block staff from reading Inside Croydon has been attracting adverse headlines for 30 years. By STEVEN DOWNES
Absent friends: Mayor Jason Perry goes into tonight’s council meeting without CEO Katherine Kerswell at his side
Katherine Kerswell’s 30-year career in local government will probably be remembered for the generous “rewards for failure”, amounting to more than half-a-million pounds of public money, that she trousered from at least three of the seven councils where she has worked as chief executive, including, of course, Croydon.
More consideration probably ought to be given to the three Section 114 notices that were issued during Kerswell’s time in charge of Croydon Council, which she left without much fanfare last Friday.
No other council leader has presided over more than one S114, so Kerswell’s “hat-trick” of admissions of financial failure in Croydon is an achievement unlikely to be matched. It is certainly nothing to take pride in.
Kerswell probably even has claim to a fourth S114 notice of effective bankruptcy, if you include her part in Nottingham City Council’s notice issued in December 2021, which followed her fleeting spell as interim CEO there in 2020, immediately before she was parachuted into Croydon.
And for three years she was also in charge of Northamptonshire County Council, an authority that later became notorious as the first in England to issue a S114 notice this century. In the case of Northants, that eventually led to the council being broken up altogether.
Kerswell just dodged further S114s last year and this, too, as under her leadership Croydon Council blew its budget by more than £30million in 2024-2025 and needed another annual bail-out, this time a record £136million. Someone in Whitehall, now under a Labour government, made the decision that setting off civic distress signals every so often, without taking effective action over the finances, really was not a way forward.
And so then they sent in the Commissioners to Croydon.
For Kerswell, it was all to end in tears, much as it had started, some 30 years ago.
Contemporaries at Leicester University from the early 1980s remember young Kathy Kerswell as being thrustingly ambitious, and very active in NOLS – the National Organisation of Labour Students. Beyond that, she was not particularly memorable, they say, other than the time she chose to share a detailed account to a group of students, male as well as female, about how to use yoghurt to treat vaginal thrush.
In 1995, by now in her mid-30s and working at Leicester City Council as a senior policy officer, Kerswell was unwittingly involved in the downfall of Stewart Foster, the Labour leader of the council. In a confidential council report, Foster, married with three children, was accused of breaking the councillors’ code of conduct over an affair he was having with council staffer Kerswell.
National headlines: how Kerswell was making news 30 years ago
The relationship, the council report stated, “posed a risk of maladministration”.
Kerswell was packed off for a 12-month sabbatical from her council job, doing an MBA at De Montfort University, although allegations that the course was paid for by the authority were denied.
Foster and Kerswell’s relationship continued for a time, though Foster lost his position as Labour leader in a vote of confidence.
None of this appears to have hampered Kerswell’s ambition, nor her pursuit of “top jobs” in the civic service.
By 2005, she was CEO at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council in the Midlands, before moving to take the Northants top job two years later.
It was during her time in Northampton that Kerswell was embraced into the upper echelons of the Establishment of local authority senior figures, being appointed president of SOLACE, effectively the trade union for council CEOs, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives.
That appointment drew the attention of the Local Government Association, an organisation with which she would have a long, and it appears, fruitful relationship.
The next stop on the Kerswell merry-go-round of top council jobs came in 2010, and her brief and headline-grabbing spell as managing director at Kent County Council, which saw her banking a Negrini-esque £420,000 pay-off after just 16 months. In that case, at least, the pay-off was for a redundancy, and not a resignation, unlike in Croydon.
Following those adverse pay-off headlines, from September 2012 Kerswell opted for a spell working in Whitehall, in the somewhat grandly titled role of “director general, Civil Service reform”, in the Cabinet Office in the early days of Tory government austerity.
Headline news: how Kerswell’s £420,000 pay-off angered residents in Kent
Kerswell lasted barely two years in that post, before embarking on the role of a highly-paid civic authority troubleshooter, taking interim positions at Newham and then, during the covid lockdown, at Nottingham City Council.
Kerswell would admit to local government’s trade magazine that she never actually visited Nottingham’s council during her brief time in charge.
Some of those who worked for Kerswell in Croydon were reminded of that interview last Friday, when it was announced that the chief executive would be making her self scarce and using up her annual leave to the end of this month.
Over the past couple of years in Croydon, Kerswell had become increasingly remote as well as patronising of staff. She would often work from her £1.5million home in Lewisham, when she was not absent on leave or for hospital treatment – first for an operation on one foot, then, a year later, on the other.
“I’m surprised she had any time left to take off,” one council insider told Inside Croydon. “After all, Katherine had a very long summer break, at least three weeks, while attending her son’s wedding in America.” Kerswell’s son, from her first marriage, Callum Kerswell-Reid, had been a “soccer scholar” in the United States.
Kerswell’s second big pay-off came in 2019, after six months as interim at Newham in east London.
Leave it out: in 2020, Katherine Kerswell was almost boastful when she spoke of her remote time at Nottingham City Council
Accounts vary as to exactly what happened on that occasion, with some reports suggesting that Kerswell was given a pay-off equivalent to six months’ money when she did not get appointed to the role on a permanent basis, as she had expected.
That money may have come in handy for Kerswell and her second husband, Barry Quirk, then the chief exec at Kensington and Chelsea, as they embarked on a legal challenge to stop their Lewisham neighbours from building an extension. Cue more adverse headlines for Kerswell.
Given her track record over the years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Kerswell might have known better than to believe she could block out the reporting of her actions.
Neighbours from hell: in 2019, Kerswell and Quirk were battling Lewisham’s planning system
Oh no. For Kerswell is the deluded council CEO who personally ordered her IT team to block staff computers from accessing Inside Croydon, so concerned was she about how this website was covering her council’s mismanagement and incompetence.
That, of course, has really worked a treat.
Kerswell was always on to a loser from the moment she arrived in Croydon. Her predecessor, Jo Negrini, had scarpered, encouraged by her own massive pay-off, after she and her political leader, Tony Newman, had fallen out.
Unbeknown to many, even those in the then council cabinet, Negrini had been sitting on a serious financial warning from the council’s auditors for six months, and no one had been told, nothing had been done. Being delusional is not uncommon among local authority leaders, it would seem.
It is very likely that Kerswell will have been unaware of quite how bad things in Croydon were when she accepted the position as interim CEO in September 2020. The first and second S114 notices, issued on her watch that November and December, were almost a cry for help. Fact is, it’s never been answered.
Kerswell’s third S114, in November 2022, is all down to her and her management of the council, and directly led to Croydon residents being saddled with a 15% Council Tax hike the following April. By April 2026, Croydon residents will have seen their Council Tax increase by 33% in four years under Kerswell and the Tory Mayor, Jason Perry.
Kerswell clearly wanted the Croydon job, though.
Old pals’ act: as recently as last week, just days before she resigned, Croydon CEO Katherine Kerswell was busy conducting a peer review in Hackney for her mates at the LGA
Her old mates at the Local Government Association helped to “identify” her for the role in 2020. For at least a year, they paid the salary for Elaine Jackson to be Kerswell’s assistant CEO, a job that had never previously existed. Kerswell has been a bit of an empire builder in Croydon, leaving behind more exec director posts than even Negrini ever managed to create.
And in 2021, when it came to being confirmed in the role, Kerswell drafted her own job description, and ended up being the only interviewee for the job.
It was how Kerswell conducted herself in the following months which was to characterise her time in Fisher’s Folly. She purged the council’s senior directors, in some cases without real cause, leading to two Employment Tribunal challenges, one that led to a lengthy and costly hearing.
She persecuted whistle-blowers, those in and around the Town Hall who tried to warn of the way the council was squandering money or being crassly mismanaged.
And Kerswell became ever more secretive, covering up the findings of the Penn Report – which she had herself commissioned – effectively delaying any possible action against those who had bankrupted the borough until it was too late to act.
In more recent times, with the £1.4billion council debt she inherited never getting any smaller, and appeals to central government for debt write-offs being ignored, Kerswell resorted to writing her own headlines.
Last year, Kerswell called in her old chums at the LGA to conduct something called a “corporate peer review”, ostensibly an objective report, drafted by senior officials from other local authorities, to pass judgement on what a jolly good job dear old Kathy Kerswell was doing at Croydon Council.
Just like a judicious dab of yoghurt, the corporate peer review may have provided some temporary relief for Kerswell, but it was hardly a lasting solution to her problems.
Not long before, the LGA had engaged Barry Quirk, Kerswell’s husband, as a “strategic adviser”, after he retired from his job at Kensington and Chelsea.
Was Barry also giving strategic advice to Kathy over the breakfast-time yoghurts in the Quirk-Kerswell mansion?
Jobs for the boys: Barry Quirk was hired by LGA for a spell
The resulting LGA peer review of Croydon was glowing in praise.
In their report, the LGA’s experts found that Croydon, “has an ambitious vision for the borough, with clear corporate priorities – namely ‘balancing the books, listening to residents and delivering good, sustainable services’… and is delivering steadily against them.” Seriously.
Three months later, Kerswell and Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, were going cap in hand to government for the latest, and biggest, bail-out yet: £136million. “Balancing the books”, eh?
Kerswell’s resignation actually came five years to the week since auditors Grant Thornton issued their first Report in the Public Interest into failures in Croydon’s finances and dodgy governance. “Arrangements to achieve financial sustainability have deteriorated” in the past year, Grant Thornton say in 2025, after five years with Kerswell as CEO.
Who to believe, eh? The auditors, or Kerswell’s chums at the LGA?
Croydon might count itself fortunate that Kerswell’s pay-off of £50,000 – paid to her for not working her three-month notice period – is much less than she got from Kent or Newham.
But it would still buy an awful lot of yoghurt, though…
Read more: Kerswell quits! But what happens next at crisis-hit council?
Read more: When’s a pay-off not a pay-off? When it’s 50 grand in Croydon
Read more: Auditors issue Perry with warning over ‘unsustainable’ finances
Read more: Kerswell takes another pay-off as she quits as council’s CEO
- 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
