It’s the time of year when a little bit of kindness can go a long way. With Croydon’s second mayoral election now little more than four months away, households across Croydon have the opportunity to offer a poignant symbol to Jason Perry.
By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
Over-staffing: only in bankrupt Croydon could it need two mayors to perform a ribbon-cutting. But Jason Perry is a lame duck mayor who is desperate for a photo op. Any photo op
Have you ever wanted to get a message across to the people running your council?
Perhaps you wanted to pass your views to Tony Newman when he was council leader (for all the good that would have done you).
Maybe you wanted to have a word with Jo Negrini about some of the Brick by Brick flats the then chief executive wanted to inflict on the borough. Or you might have had something to say to her successor, Katherine Kerswell, who presided over three Section 114 notices – admission of effective bankruptcy – while ratchetting up Council Tax to record levels.
Well now you have your chance to make your stand, and to be really noticed.
In the past week or so, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of households around the borough have had envelopes hand-delivered. Not with seasonal greetings cards, but with the latest mean and mendacious little “survey” from Croydon Mayor Jason Perry.
“Tell Jason Perry what you think!” it says on the front of Perry’s “Croydon Town Centre Survey”.
But this is just another of Perry’s porkies. He’s really not interested in what you think.
The leaflet is another form of data-scraping, hoping that people will be mugs enough to hand over their personal details, and their valuable email addresses, all to be used in the weeks of election campaigning to come in 2026. Mayor Perry, who is paid £84,000 per year, is up for re-election in May.
Perry’s in a bit of a pickle, and he and his Tory colleagues know it. Judged on his own record, Perry is a failed mayor.
The man who pledged to “fix the finances” will have hiked your Council Tax by 33% by April next year. Meanwhile, Perry has failed to reduce the borough’s crippling debts. The debt remains at £1.4billion, pretty much the same as when Perry took office in 2022.
Don’t let him claim any different – because he will try to. And that would be a lie. Another one.
There’s been plenty of Perry’s porkies, from his half-truths about the Bridge to Nowhere, to his denial that ex-CEO Kerswell got a pay-off (she did: £50,000 of public money so she did not work her three-month notice period), to his claim that there was a Brick by Brick house built without a staircase (there wasn’t), to him pretending to know nothing about the £726 PER HOUR being paid for the services of a single HR consultant.
Perry’s term as Mayor has been a disaster almost from the start.
Unfortunate pose: another photo op, again paid for out of your Council Tax, has the elected mayor unveiling a memorial – for his political career
Perry’s council issued a S114 notice in November 2022, just months after he took office, and soon after Perry was seeking permission for a record 15% Council Tax hike. Now he is approaching what appears to be a bitter ending, with the record £136million bail-out from government last February and the arrival of government-appointed Commissioners in July.
Your Council Tax will have gone up by a total 33% in the time that Jason Perry has been in charge of Croydon Council.
It is a record of shame, not that Perry will admit to it.
Deceit by omission, withholding the true picture, is just as much a lie as his warped claims when he tries to take credit for the hard work – and well-managed budgets – of others.
Perry’s public appearances in the last few weeks have increasingly had a desperate feel to them. The council’s press office – paid for out of your taxes – has seemingly been working overtime just to keep up with the Mayor’s banal photo ops (“Jason looking at wall”; “Jason listening to music”; “Jason taking a dump on Wellesley Road…”), in a weirdly parochial Cult of Personality, all duly pumped out on to social media in a tsunami of tweets and Faustbook posts.
The Mayor’s publicly-funded publicity drive has started to reveal a narcissistic tendency, as Perry grapples with the possibility that come May 8 next year, he will have lost his job.
If that is the case, it will be only his own fault.
Trumpian: elements of Mayor Perry’s behaviour are narcissistic
Only in the omnishambles of a council run by Perry, with debts of £1.4billion, can the Mayor glory in having his photo taken at a community event where it takes TWO mayors to cut ONE ribbon!
Perry appeared in Selsdon alongside civic Mayor and Tory colleague Richard Chatterjee. The obvious question to ask was: why? Was ribbon-cutting at village fete events really in the job description of an executive mayor?
Perry’s problem, since the Commissioners arrived, is that he doesn’t have a job any longer.
Five years ago or so, when residents in the south of the borough campaigned, with Conservative support, for the switch to a mayoral system to run the Town Hall, some made the case that there was no further need for a ceremonial, civic mayor (offering an immediate saving of almost £120,000 in a four-year term). Over the course of almost four years, Perry has managed to make a very good case for the abolition of the role of the executive Mayor, too (and saving at least £330,000 over four years).
Perhaps the oddest bit of Perry behaviour came a week ago, with the unveiling of what appears to be nothing less than the gravestone for his own political career: a commemorative slab on Wellesley Road alongside a pedestrian crossing. “Here’s lies the political career of Mayor Jason Perry…” it says, or something like that.
We paid for this: if only there was a way of getting a message to the Mayor
No one knows how much council cash Perry has had spent on this particular little vanity project. Memoralising a pedestrian crossing in your own name, at public expense, is a particularly narcissistic foible – almost Trumpian, like accepting a “peace prize” from the world football body…
This was Perry gas-lighting Croydon. The need for the crossing was created by his order to close the nearby pedestrian subway 12 months earlier. In any sensible, joined-up council, they will have had a replacement crossing in place before they closed the subway. In Perry’s Croydon, instead they removed the signs that warned the public that crossing Wellesley Road could be deadly.
The Perry porkies have been coming thick and fast just lately:
Propaganda: Goebbels used to say ‘If you tell a lie big enough… people will eventually come to believe it’
“Westfield is back”: oh no they ain’t. The international developers have postponed their planning application, which was first due in November 2024, then supposed to be submitted in November 2025, until mid-2026.
“What shops do you want in Croydon?”: the council has no powers over who commercial landlords rent out their premises to.
“Mayor Jason Perry – Cutting waste, reducing red tape”: remember the over-manning witnessed in the two mayors for one ribbon, above? Under Perry, the annual bill for agency staff has soared from £14million to £54million a year, including that £726 per hour consultant.
And as for Perry’s 2021 promise to re-open the Purley Pool, well…
Every utterance coming from the Town Hall lately has been dripping with mendacity.
But now, Perry and his chums in the Croydon Conservatives have very kindly given Council Tax-payers an opportunity to spend some of their money for once.
Remember those surveys that dropped on to your doormat in the past week? They should have all arrived with a pre-paid, business reply service envelope addressed to Mayor Perry himself (though at the address of Croydon Tories’ HQ in Purley, rather than his official mayoral address at the Town Hall).
Now Perry and Croydon’s Tories want people to fill in their silly little survey forms.
But what we at Inside Croydon Towers suggest is that you don’t bother with the form at all, and certainly don’t provide them with your personal details. No one wants to become just another line on Jason Perry and Chris Philp’s database, do they?
Send a Christmas message to Perry: Croydon Tories will have to pay the postage
Just send the envelope back.
Mayor Perry, Philp and Croydon Tories will have to pay the postage.
You might want to shred the form and stuff that in the envelope before sealing it.
You could send Mayor Perry a letter outlining your thoughts. But make sure you do it on plain paper, without your name and address.
Or you could just seal the envelope and send it back empty – a poignant symbol of the real contribution Mayor Perry has made to Croydon since he was elected in 2022.
Join the Inside Croydon campaign and let’s all send a clear message to Mayor Perry this Christmas
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I’d print out a couple of IC articles outlining the Mayor’s failures and put those in the envelope.
Might be enlightening to the party volunteers who’ll be opening them to see that all isn’t perfect in Croydon!
They will likely be opened by Ian Parker, who’s no volunteer. He pockets a councillor allowance and is paid a salary by Croydon Tories as their local organiser.
Concerned that Perry has not always got it right, but who has dealing with the fall out the previous party compounded and got away with it. I believe in voting as my past family fought and died to give us the freedom to vote (my grandmother was a suferget. Who do I vote for. A party that has used public funds for their own gain or a party that struggles to get it right, or even one that can’t effect the outcome. To many professional politicians with no true interest.
Which party has used “public funds for their own gain”, Martin?
That’s a chunky allegation slipped in there, without any evidence.
Have you been listening to the lies of Jason Perry, a bloke who’s been trousering public money for 35 years?
Maybe ask Bromley how it’s done.
Wake up
Croydon is a disgrace.
It seems the only things that are growing in Croydon at the moment are debt levels and Mayor Perry’s waistline.
Jason Perry is a singular achievement in local government: a man whose uselessness isn’t incidental but comprehensive. The scale of his incompetence transcends party lines, ideology, and expectation. He isn’t merely ineffective — he is impressively, relentlessly so.
Perry combines catastrophic decision-making with the charisma of damp cardboard and the intellectual presence of a void. There is no vision, no originality, no discernible grasp of the role he occupies. What he offers instead is a masterclass in how to drain authority of meaning while clinging to office.
This isn’t a matter of political disagreement; it’s an issue of basic capability. Perry represents a threat not through malice or ambition, but through the deadening effect of sustained stupidity. He degrades public discourse simply by participating in it.
History will not remember Jason Perry for what he stood for — only for how thoroughly he failed to stand for anything at all.
So you don’t rate him then, Sal?
In discussion with others, even the act of sending out the puerile survey with freepost envelope is seen as an act of terminal stupidity.
“Charisma of a plastic soil pipe” would be a more apt description, given his day job and what comes out of the end of plastic soil pipes.
I’ll pass on all the fatty jokes and just say to the mayor, ‘show some fucking humility!’
He might also like to look up the word ‘hubris’. If only he’d acknowledge his failings and blame for the historic shit we’re in, I’d start to feel some sympathy. And … please no more gurning.