Simultaneously, two of the borough’s mayoral candidates have decided to demand better government grants for the council.
By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor
Something very strange happened in Croydon yesterday.
The leader of one of the larger political groups said: “For far too long Croydon has been short-changed by an outdated system that simply didn’t recognise the pressures we face.”
And a senior figure from the other half of Croydon’s political duopoly said: “We need fair funding that reflects the real needs of our residents. For too long our schools, social care and local services have been stretched .”
This rare, almost unprecedented, common cause from Croydon’s Labour and Tory parties comes with Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget just a couple of weeks away and the annual settlement for local government due just before Christmas.
The first quote above is from Jason Perry, the Croydon Mayor since 2022 who failed to “fix the finances” as he promised, and who is now just six months away from local elections which will determine whether he keeps his £84,000 council salary. Perry has been rendered a lame duck mayor since the summer, when the Labour government sent in Commissioners to get a grip with “leadership issues” and “runaway” finances which saw them provide Perry’s borough a record £136million emergency bail-out earlier this year.
Inequities: Rowenna Davis says Croydon needs a fair deal on government funding
The second quote is from Rowenna Davis, Labour’s candidate for mayor in the 2026 local elections, whose hardest task is to overcome residents’ significant reservations about her party’s performance, not only in Croydon but, more recently, at Westminster under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Both Perry and Davis’s messaging came accompanied by petitions: blatant data-scraping exercises ahead of next May’s elections, giving them names, addresses and permissions to use the valuable data in the forthcoming campaign.
And both Perry and Davis are addressing their messages for fairer funding for Croydon to Steve Reed, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North if he can be asked), who is the Secretary of State for local government.
When Reed was given the top job at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government in the summer, he inherited a public consultation over the funding formula for local government.
“An overhaul of the outdated and complex council system will bring fairer funding, more stability and improve lives of people across the country,” the MHCLG said when laying out its objectives.
They would devise new formulas “to target money to places most in need, replacing decade-old data and outdated funding system”, they said, promising “streamlined funding and multi-year settlements… in drive for council efficiency and improved public services”.
Mapping deprivation: official figures released last week show Croydon as a borough with its own north-south divide
The consultation was due to take eight weeks, so MHCLG had finished taking representations a month before Perry and Davis started distributing their petitions.
But last week the government did release an updated Index of Multiple Deprivation, which provides an insight into living conditions across all parts of the country.
The figures confirmed what most Croydon residents already knew, that it is a borough of huge contrasts in standards of living, including some of the most deprived areas in the country. According to the figures, 4% of Croydon neighbourhoods are classified as “highly deprived”.
It is on the disparity between Croydon’s funding and the central government grants received by other, neighbouring London boroughs, that Davis makes her case “to end the postcode lottery in public services”, she says.
Based on funding allocations from December last year, Croydon receives £4,650 for every resident. Lambeth, meanwhile, gets £5,077 per person. And just the other side of a borough boundary, Southwark council receives £5,378 for every resident.
“Croydon deserves justice. We need fair funding that reflects the real needs of our residents. For too long our schools, social care and local services have been stretched whilst our better-funded neighbours get disproportionately more per head,” Davis said.
Davis’s petition calls on the government to recognise Croydon’s needs and deliver fair, transparent funding now.
Perry’s latest efforts along these lines should be recognised as the borough-wide gas-lighting that they are.
In 2023, residents’ associations, trades unions, charities and other community groups banded together under the banner of Fund Croydon Fairly, in protest against Perry hiking their Council Tax by 15%. The usual cap on Council Tax increases is 5% per year.
But Croydon’s Tory Mayor had sought permission from the Tory Minister at that time, Michael Gove, for the special increase in Council Tax being inflicted on the borough’s residents. There was no mention by Perry or the Tories then of fairer funding from the Conservative government.
By next April, Perry will have increased Council Tax by 33% since he took office in 2022.
Indeed, when announcing its funding consultation in June, the MHCLG might have had Tory-run Croydon in mind when in a ministerial statement it said: “For too long, many residents have seen Council Tax hikes despite declining local services.”
And the MHCLG suggested that by reforming the funding system, “left behind places will on balance see larger increases in available income”. Could they mean Croydon?
Piss-poor Perry could not even get the address right when sending his public letter to Steve Reed, instead using a Boris Johnson era ministry name, “Levelling Up”, which has not been used since the Tories lost the General Election more than a year ago.
Wrong address: Mayor Perry can’t even get the basics right
Perry’s plea also appears to be delusional.
“We’ve stabilised the council’s finances,” wrote the Mayor who needed a £136million bail-out just a few months ago, and who last month was issued with a statutory warning by the council’s auditors because “arrangements to achieve financial sustainability have deteriorated”.
The out-dated system and under-funding of Croydon has come after 14 years of Tory-imposed austerity. And such austerity is something which Starmer and Reeves have shown no great urgency in wanting to bring to an end.
“Government must… deliver a settlement that truly reflects need and deprivation,” Perry wrote in his mis-addressed plea, having spent two years in power with a Conservative government that failed Croydon and, in fairness, failed the Tory Mayor, too.
Waddon ward councillor Davis, who is known to be well-connected with Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee and with friends in No10 and No11 Downing Street, might have better luck in seeking fairer funding, and also some means of reducing the burden of the council’s £1.4billion debt – half of which had been accrued by Perry and his chums in their eight years in office upto 2014.
“We have huge levels of deprivation, local services are struggling and we desperately need the fair funding we deserve,” Davis said.
“The Conservatives were in government for 14 years and never got to grips with this injustice. I’m pleased that the Labour government is finally looking into this – and I want them to hear Croydon’s position loud and clear.”
Seems that Steve Reed might be hearing that message in stereo…
- Read Andrew Fisher’s open letter to the Secretary of State – sent 15 months before Perry managed to get round to writing to Reed: Dear Angela: It’s time for you to act and fund Croydon fairly
Read more: Auditors issue Perry with warning over ‘unsustainable’ finances
Read more: When’s a pay-off not a pay-off? When it’s 50 grand in Croydon
Read more: Council accused of cover-up over multi-million agency spend
Read more: Borrowing plan would lead to council’s ‘collapse’ says report
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If there is any sort of local government ‘karma’, Croydon, with its record under both Labour and the Tories of squandering money and repeatedly going bankrupt, will get a minimal LG settlement and money will be prioritised to more deserving and better managed authorities ?!
That’s not how the LGS works. It’s data driven and formula based and both are made public.
When it’s provisionally announced council officials will be checking it carefully to make sure the data is correct whether that’s total population, number of school pupils, number of homes, length of roads, acreage of green space or any of the other factors included.
If the data and associated formulae say Croydon should get £ x then that’s what it’ll get.
Reed can’t just bung Croydon a few extra million (or tens of million) because he feels like it without other councils demanding the same sort of payments and funding.
Nor can there be any sort of punishment due to other councils supposedly being better managed or more deserving.
Labour and Conservatives representations on Croydon funding to Mr Reed will fall on deaf ears. Reed did not care or get involved in Croydons Housing crisis not even Regina Road slums. He also has been identified as being part of Croydon’s dark arts within Labour. The only accolade he has had in his political career was being the Leader of Lambeth Council identified as the worst council in England on his watch. We won’t hold our breath!
In March 2023, when Perry proposed his 15% tax rise, Green Councillors wrote to the then Conservative Minister Michael Gove asking him to review the funding formula so that Croydon would be funded fairly.
In June this year, when the Government appointed the Commissioners to oversee Croydon Council, Green Councillors wrote to the Labour Minister Jim McMahon to again demand that he review the way that Croydon is funded as the current system is clearly not working and is unfair to Croydon residents.
It’s nice that both Conservatives and Labour at Croydon Council have now joined the Greens in the campaign to fund Croydon fairly.
A fairer funding system based on real needs would be a major step forward in getting Croydon moving back in the right direction.
Your growing influence has resulted in Councillor Davis abandoning her usual Labour red for Green, er, green, as shown in the picture above
Farage has previously stated that any constituency that hasn’t voted Reform in the majority are at a major disadvantage if Reform are in power. Reform are the bookmakers favorites to win the next General Elections implying a 60% probability of winning. I can’t imagine Croydon with a diverse amount of ethnicities voting for Reform. …so that’s Croydon screwed then!
I believe you have made that up. Either back it up with proof or admit you’re wrong