CROYDON IN CRISIS: After complaints that staff could not trust that their messages to the government-appointed Commissioners would be secure from their council bosses, a MHCLG official has set up an independent channel. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
New email: lead Commissioner Ged Curran
Three months after moving in to supervise the running of Croydon’s cash-strapped council, government-appointed Commissioners have switched to a non-council email address to provide better confidentiality and peace of mind for those working at Fisher’s Folly.
The move by a senior official from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government follows an approach from Inside Croydon, after we were told by a number of past and present council staff, as well as elected councillors, that they had no confidence in providing information to the Commissioners or raising concerns about the management of the authority as long as their only way of approaching the four local government experts was via the council’s own email server.
Croydon Council has a long and well-deserved reputation for persecuting whistle-blowers, whether through ostracising them inside the organisation, unlawfully withholding their pay, or simply dismissing them on the flimsiest of excuses.
Legal threats: ex-CEO Jo Negrini
A succession of chief executives from Nathan Elvery, to Jo Negrini, and including the recently departed CEO, Katherine Kerswell, have been described as either “vindictive”, “defensive” and even “downright obsessive”, in their own or their council’s responses to questions about how it was being managed.
And former council staff who tried to challenge their dismissals through the Employment Tribunal have always come up against a formidable defence from council bosses, who have been able to use significant amounts of tax-payers’ cash to hire teams of legal advisers and barristers.
It was Kerswell who personally ordered the council IT department to place a block on council computers being able to access this news website. “As long as anything I might wish to raise with the Commissioners is going through the council’s own server, I won’t be contacting them at all,” one council middle manager told Inside Croydon.
The predecessors of the Commissioners, the “improvement” and assurance panel, who worked alongside Kerswell at Croydon from 2021 until this summer, never provided any means for council staff or the public to contact them, either directly or discreetly.
Reluctant: council officials have published the independent email address for the Commissioners, perhaps with gritted teeth
The Commissioners – Ged Curran, the former CEO at Merton; Debbie Warren (CEO at Greenwich); Jackie Belton (former chief exec at Bexley); and Abi Brown (a councillor at Stoke On Trent City Council) – arrived in Croydon in July, and were swiftly allocated a Croydon Council email address.
Kerswell quit Croydon in October, leaving her £204,000 per year job with a £50,000 pay-off to avoid her having to work her three-month notice period.
And now the Commissioners, and their chief of staff, MHCLG official Lindsey Lewis, have started to use a non-council server for their own independent email address:
croydonintervention@communities.gov.uk
This has been placed on the council website, though there’s more than a sense that senior staff still loyal to Kerswell, such as her former assistant CEO, Elaine Jackson, or Carol Squires, the council’s director of policy, programmes and performance, may have only done so most reluctantly.
News blackout: Katherine Kerswell
“There’s real issues around trust between most council staff and those at director-level, who have bungled their way from one crisis to the next, never take responsibility for their actions, and respond to every overspend by just making more staff redundant,” one council source told Inside Croydon.
“We might have significant and serious observations to make about the way the council has been run and is being run, but few would be brave enough to stick their heads above the parapet if the likes of Kerswell or Squires might intercept our emails.”
In October, Lindsey Lewis contacted Inside Croydon and said, “I have been investigating alternative, more independent and more confidential ways to pass information to the Commissioners.”
And last week, Lewis wrote again to say, “I can confirm that this email address can be used for correspondence with the Commissioners independently of Croydon Council.
“We have also included this in the Commissioners’ contact details on the council’s website.”
Read more: CEO Negrini threatened legal action to protect The Godfather
Read more: Kerswell’s 100-page tribunal defence against racism charges
Read more: Council ordered to give £15,000 back-pay to ex-boss Simmonds
Read more: Former health director suing council for constructive dismissal
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So there is nothing to hide from the Commissioners, unless its Perry’s cakes
£50k payoff for getting Croydon in even more debt ? Everyone in London has to slave a whole year to earn that kind of money. Disgusting
Perry’s choice was to pay her £50k to do nothing but leave or pay her £50k to do nothing, then leave. He chose the former
Well clearly not everyone – So many are moved on, so many are paid off, so many are in court for wrongful dismissal discrimination or whistleblowing not just in the Council but all public services and we are paying for it all both perpetrators and victims.
Is it not time we as a society had a different way of dealing with those perpetrators and victims?
I am beginning to wonder if that payment in lieu was so those Commissioners would be unable to speak to Ms Kerswell or if there was a gagging clause to it?
There are good people working at Croydon Council who can help explain why things have gone so wrong and have good ideas about how to improve things. If we want to turn Croydon around and get the Council working again then we need those people to be able to speak freely.
Next May we not only need a change in political leadership, we need a fundamental change in the culture at Croydon Council.
I for one am glad the commissioners are engaging with IC and the staff directly, and not living in the director echo chamber so many have over the last 10 years. Both the political parties and the executive team forgot a long long time ago that the council is supposed to be a public service first and foremost.
I wouldn’t have confidence in being a whistleblower at the council unless it was to a completely independent body, run by non-civil service/government/political party people.