ANDREW FISHER, in his final iC column of 2025, considers the past year in Croydon, and how that might affect next May’s Town Hall elections.
PLUS: How Your Party’s grassroots are being denied money and data to be able to campaign in the elections 

It’s been another dismal year at our Town Hall, as the long-running shambles that is Croydon Council hit a new low this year with Commissioners being sent in to run the ailing (mis)administration of Mayor Jason Perry.

The Mayor was elected in 2022 promising to “fix the finances”. He has now had the council finances taken off him and handed over to government appointees. The previous Conservative government had imposed an “improvement and assurance panel” to oversee our troubled council, but with no sign of improvement and no assurance things were improving, the Labour government made its move in July.

Looking for a new job: Jason Perry is already preparing for the outcome of next May’s local elections

The decision was strongly influenced by Mayor Perry seeking, and in February being granted, a record £136million of emergency loans.

It wasn’t long before Katherine Kerswell, the council’s chief executive, was gone, part of an exodus of director-level appointments that has been reported by this website. Under Mayor Perry, and despite the council’s financial difficulties, the council had expanded the number of directors getting six-figure salaries. Since Mayor Perry was elected in 2022, spending on agency staff had nearly quadrupled from £14million to £53.4million (some suggest even more), despite the council’s unsustainable debts.

On her way out: weeks after the Commissioners arrived at Croydon Council, Katherine Kerswell, the £204,000 pa CEO, was on her way out the exit

In February, Conservative councillors voted to hike Council Tax by the maximum allowed, 5%, while also voting to increase their own allowances and the salaries paid to Kerswell and to Mayor Perry. While Labour again abstained on the Council Tax vote, only the Greens and Liberal Democrats voted against both measures.

So, as we enter the festive season, we can all be cheered by the thought that we only have six months of the current misadministration left to go. And as mayoral flyers festoon our doormats alongside the Christmas cards, we can look forward to a new year with new hopes set to be dashed again.

The campaign is very much underway to be the new Mayor – but old certainties about the runners and riders may have to be ditched in the multi-party politics that is threatening to sweep away the old duopoly of the Conservatives and Labour.

Reports from local canvassers across the borough report an uptick in support for Reform – which reflects the growing “plague on both your houses” mood towards the major parties. What does it say about the standing of Croydon’s currently dominant parties that Reform is still making appearances on the doorstep – even though they picked a dead Yorkshirewoman to be their mayoral candidate? 

Green shoots: the election as party leader of Zack Polanski (right) has boosted campaigning by Peter Underwood and Croydon Greens

At the other end of the political spectrum, Peter Underwood of the Greens is running an active campaign (certainly more lively than Reform’s) and rumour has it that he will also be backed by the nascent, if stuttering, Your Party.

The Green Party got its first Croydon councillors elected in 2022, in Fairfield ward. The sharply rising support in the national polls since they elected Zack Polanski as their leader has seen their membership figures soar – which will come in handy as they try to reach new parts of the borough.

As Your Party struggles nationally, local activists have continued to hold organising meetings in Croydon (of which more below), and they are said to be considering throwing their weight behind Underwood for Mayor. It yet remains to be seen whether Your Party will stand council candidates in May.

The frontrunner for Mayor is probably Labour’s Rowenna Davis. Davis was overwhelmingly backed by Labour Party members in April to be their candidate, but how will the hollowing out of the local party and the unpopularity of the national party affect the effectiveness of her campaign overall? 

One anecdote that explains the collapse of Labour’s membership nationally and locally is that in February 2025, David White, the former Croydon Central CLP Secretary, had his expulsion from the party overturned after a three-year wait. When I was chair of the local party, our committee wrote to the party to express our concern over David’s case. Our correspondence was ignored. As far as we know, White, who had been a lifelong Labour member, has never taken up the opportunity to rejoin the party.

Savvy slogans: Labour candidate Rowenna Davis has borrowed widely for her campaign material

Nevertheless, Labour has again selected its strongest possible candidate locally. But in 2022, two years after the Labour council’s financial collapse, that wasn’t enough for Val Shawcross, the Labour candidate who lost to Perry by just 500 votes. Since then, Labour and the Tories have both lost support in the polls – and they face serious threats from rival parties.

The winning candidate next May is likely to be the one that loses fewest votes from 2022, and the party that manages to get their core supporters out to vote.

Earlier this year, Davis adopted the campaigning slogan “Fund Croydon Fairly”, as used by this website and local activists in 2023. Now she is using the Andrew Pelling-esque “People First” on her pre-Christmas delivery.

One bit of optimism is that Croydon should be a beneficiary of a recalculated funding formula that will apply from next year. As campaigners have noted for years, and now even Mayor Perry has managed to realise (something he managed to overlook during all those years of Conservative government), Croydon has been underfunded for decades. 

How a party with no candidates might influence the elections

Even before it had an agreed name, more than 750,000 signed up to find out more about Your Party, because there was a huge void for the sort of socialist politics represented by its key figures Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

Neither Corbyn (who I interviewed in August) nor Sultana have covered themselves in glory in recent months – making legal threats and counter-threats against each other.

Rather than agreeing to elect a leader or co-leaders, delegates at the Your Party inaugural conference in Liverpool at the end of November voted for a collective leadership model. This is interesting because essentially it’s a vote of no confidence in both Jeremy and Zarah, and one that is well-earned.

All gone wrong: MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana have been involved in acrimony since the launch of Your Party

The danger with a collective leadership model is that it becomes a proxy vote between those seen as Team Jeremy versus those seen as Team Zarah.

The whole thing still feels quite fragile, and could easily collapse amid acrimony, or die an agonisingly drawn-out death.

A leak this week of Your Party membership numbers showed that across the four Croydon parliamentary constituencies (including Streatham and Croydon North), more than 400 people have become members of Your Party. Islington North, Corbyn’s own parliamentary constituency, has 405 members of the new party.

Yet activists in Your Party in Croydon tell me they still have no access to a local membership list or any funds that might enable them to select candidates or run a campaign in May’s local elections. This may lead to Your Party not standing candidates in elections that are less than six months away.

A kind interpretation would point out that, 125 years ago, in 1900, the cobbling together of the Labour Party from the Labour Representation Committee – bringing together various left groups and trade unions – was quite messy and rambunctious, too. But that had the advantage of not being livestreamed to thousands, and of having the stability of being backed by established, organised and stable institutions in trade unions.

How Your Party develops in 2026 could have some influence on the outcome of several closely fought councillor elections in May, and even on who becomes Croydon Mayor.

• 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:

• 12,500 Croydon children lifted out of poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap. But what about homelessness?
• Streeting’s ‘manoeuvres’ do nothing to reduce NHS waiting lists
• Now even Mayor Perry agrees we need to Fund Croydon Fairly
• We have been betrayed by broken promises, deceit and scandal

• Click here for more by Andrew Fisher

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