Town Hall protest: in March 2023, Tory Mayor Jason Perry ignored hundreds of protesters on the Town Hall steps and a petition with thousands of signatures, and instead of seeking fair funding for Croydon, he chose to hike Council Tax by 15%
Columnist ANDREW FISHER, and this website, have been lobbying government to #FundCroydonFairly since early 2023. So why did it take Mayor Jason Perry so long to catch on?
In 2023, this website helped to launch a campaign for fair funding for Croydon, after Mayor Jason Perry announced that he would hike residents’ Council Tax by 15%.
Perry had been elected as Mayor in 2022 on a pledge to “fix the finances”. Instead, he has hiked our Council Tax, cut our services and ignored the campaign. Croydon’s finances have not been fixed, and Mayor Perry has squatted in the council offices like a spare part while an “improvement and assurance panel”, recently replaced by government-appointed Commissioners, have taken charge of running the council.
Perry is up for election again in six months’ time. And this week he has suddenly decided, now that there is a Labour government in Westminster, that Croydon’s funding isn’t fair after all.
This week, Perry posted on Twitter: “I’ve written to Steve Reed calling on government to deliver the Fair Funding Review in full – so Croydon finally gets its fair share.”
Years late: Croydon’s £84,000 per year Mayor is a bit slow to catch on
But Perry had more than two years, when Michael Gove was the Conservative government’s minister in charge of council funding, to have led a campaign to get fairer funding for Croydon.
Perry certainly went to Gove for multi-million-pound bailouts, and for permission for his 15% Council Tax hike. But Perry never lobbied Gove publicly to fix the fundamentals by boosting Croydon’s core funding settlement.
Considering Perry now says “Croydon has been short-changed for too long”, it seems a strange omission for him never to have publicly pestered his Tory Party colleague Gove on the matter.
Perry’s personal website states, “Mayor Perry has invited councillors, MPs and Mayoral candidates of all parties to join his call for a fair deal for Croydon and ensure the borough’s voice is heard as government finalises the new funding system.”
In February 2023, I wrote for Inside Croydon that Perry’s “first move should have been to invite all Croydon’s MPs and councillors (Conservative, Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrat) together and build a unified campaign for fair funding for Croydon. It’s still not too late to do that.”
Perry’s response was a stubborn silence.
Ahead of our time: Andrew Fisher was recommending a cross-party consensus in February 2023. Only now has Mayor Perry taken our advice…
More than 10,000 people also signed a parliamentary petition against Perry’s 15% Council Tax hike. Perry ignored them, too.
This week, on November 2, Rowenna Davis – Labour’s candidate for Croydon Mayor – launched a petition of her own, demanding “Fair funding for Croydon”.
This is a welcome change from the Croydon Labour group, which back in 2023 promised to oppose Mayor Perry’s 15% Council Tax hike, then sat on their hands and allowed the tax increase to sail through the council chamber. They could have used their numbers in the council chamber – Labour has 34 councillors to the Tories’ 33 – to pressure Perry to change course and the Conservative government to take action. But they melted quicker than a chocolate fireguard.
So in the course of almost three years, we’ve gone from being snubbed by all the parties, to there now being a cross-party consensus to fund Croydon fairly. You wait for one politician to back you, and then two come along at once.
It’s a bit like Tony Benn said, “It’s the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause, and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you.”
Your future in his hands: Steve Reed will decide on Croydon’s funding formula
Well, we still don’t know whether Steve Reed agrees that he should fund Croydon fairly.
As Secretary of State for local government, it will be the Streatham and Croydon North MP who will ultimately decide the new formula for local government funding, and whether Croydon does get fair funding.
Davis is certainly putting the pressure on Reed, her petition asking voters to “join me in telling the government: it’s time Croydon got its fair share”.
Cynics may wonder why both mayoral candidates posted about funding Croydon fairly on the same day. Well, here’s a bit of sleuthing that may explain the coincidence …
Last week, Davis sent out an embargoed press release announcing her “Fair funding for Croydon” campaign. Two days later, Mayor Perry published a blog on exactly this issue. Had he been tipped off?
Davis brought forward her campaign launch by a day, posting her petition online. Perry’s acolytes then accused Davis of imitating him. But Davis has printed campaign materials ready to go already, proving she got there first …
But what matters now for all of us is whether the Secretary of State Steve Reed actually delivers fair funding for Croydon.
Neither Perry, Davis nor any other prospective mayor can fix the finances without it.
- 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
A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Croydon comedy hero Mark Steel to record an episode of his popular podcast What the F*** is Going On?
As well as some analysis of the current state of British politics, we had a bit of a chat about Croydon and some reminiscing about the Corbyn years in Labour, from 2015 to 2019.
Did we figure out what the f*** is going on?
Well, you be the judge. You can listen to part one of the interview on Spotify here.
Perhaps soon we’ll reverse roles and and Mark will be one of the Andrew Fisher Interviews podcast series for Inside Croydon?
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
As well as his column, Andrew is also conducting podcast interviews, in-depth and informed, with specialists and national figures, sharing their expertise with Croydon. They include an exclusive with Paul Holden, the author of the explosive new investigative book, The Fraud. It’s well worth a listen.- It’s available now on Inside Croydon’s Spotify channel
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- We have been betrayed by broken promises, deceit and scandal
- MP Reed caps off his high-profile week with a flood of protest
- Labour’s scandals and dramas reflected in Croydon politics
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Mayor Perry doesn’t have time for ordinary citizens of Croydon
So I don’t wish to say anything else about him and over £85000
he’s get as a part times Mayor.
Anyone thinks about voting for him need to go see Doctor asap
Thank you
The campaign to fund Croydon fairly wasn’t “snubbed by all the parties” – I was at those protests outside the Council in 2023.
Green Councillors voted against Perry’s budget and wrote to the Conservative Minister Michael Gove asking him to review the funding formula so that Croydon would be funded fairly. Earlier this year 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.
Croydon residents deserve an honest picture of Croydon politics and not this silly obsession with only talking about Labour and the Conservatives. We all know we need a change from the old parties and the Greens would be a change for the better.
It may be a “silly obsession” to a rival candidate for Mayor, Peter.
For most people, it’s what is recognised as a harsh reality.
The latest YouGov voting intention poll shows that in London the Green Party are in second, only 2% behind Labour and 7% ahead of the Conservatives. If you look across all of the recent polls, they show that votes are now split across four, five, or more parties. The public appears to have moved on from the old two-party system and so to only talk about those two parties does feel like a silly obsession.
Find the last time YouGov published a poll that accurately reflected how people in Croydon will vote in Croydon.
Because for the last six years, national, even London-wide, polling has never reflected Croydon voting patterns.
You know that, Peter. So to try to peddle second-hand opinion polls as being a reflection of what is happening in Croydon is disingenuous, and self-serving.
Politicians what a breed. Labour was found with its nose in the trough. Yippy we got rid of them(mostly). Then what, we got a group who were paid vast amounts to sort the finances out. Never happened. Now what Labour are trying to get their noses back in for a free feed. Conservatives did very little to reverse what labour had done. Who next. We need people who can fix the boroughs finances not professional politicians who can talk the talk but not walk the walk. Six month to find the people who can do the job.
The real cause behind Croydon’s, and all local councils financial problems, started in 2010. Because we are now programmed by both the MSM and social media we are only now able to focus on what is happening now. The real cause of local council funding goes back 15 years. From that moment local councils did not stand a chance. Local councils had to look for ways to raise extra funding, be it through building property or local energy supply for example, and failed: as happened in Croydon making matters a lot worse.
Unless proper government funding is reinstated this situation will go on and on.
From localgov.co.uk:
“During the 2010 Spending Review that ushered in the austerity era, then Chancellor George Osborne announced that ‘today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink, when we confront the bills from a decade of debt. It is a hard road, but it leads to a better future.’ Now 14 years later, I’m sure many in local government would question what better future he had in mind. This spending review announced a 7.1% fall in funding for local authorities, which became the first of many consecutive funding cuts resulting in an over 60% cumulative fall in funding between 2010 and 2019. Taking into account other sources of funding like council tax, overall spending power fell by 25% on average over the same period.”
“This week, Perry posted on Twitter: “I’ve written to Steve Reed calling on government to deliver the Fair Funding Review in full – so Croydon finally gets its fair share.””
Bit late. The government has been consulting for months on a new local government funding model and will publish the results later this month or early next when the provisional 2026/27 settlement is announced.
The initial consultation closed last February. 24 London Boroughs responded. What’s the betting Croydon wasn’t one of them?
A second, more details, consultation ran between 20th June and 15th August.
So Mayor Perry behind the curve (again)
It’s a bit late to be writing to ministers about fair funding after a consultation on fair funding ends.
You’re quite correct, Chris. As we reported earlier in the week about the two, simultaneous petition launches, Mayor Perry’s act is nothing more than cynical gaslighting of the entire borough by a third-rate politician who has got an election coming up in six months’ time.
https://insidecroydon.com/2025/11/03/labours-davis-tells-minister-reed-to-fund-croydon-fairly/
A funding review is pointless. The government funding has dropped so much since 2010 means that little bail outs are pointless. Funding from the government needs to set at the rate that makes up the 60% cumulative reduction of the last 15 years for local councils to get back on an even keel. This is not going to happen; so one has to accept that local government is dead as there is not the funding to sustain it
Labour are intent on killing off local government, forcing through mergers which people don’t want and creating super authorities which will drain resources for years to come as staff try and cope with the reorganisation