CROYDON IN CRISIS: Weeks after the abrupt departure of CEO Katherine Kerswell with a £50,000 ‘farewell present’, the early exit of head of finance Jane West prompts speculation that she has become the latest council boss to receive a generous pay-off. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Jane West, the council official who has been in charge of the bankrupt borough’s finances since 2022, will be leaving Fisher’s Folly ahead of plan at the end of this month, as government-appointed Commissioners make their presence felt once again.
Early retirement: Jane West
The announcement that West is now also leaving, with the cash-strapped council’s 2026-2027 budget about to be revealed in February, has prompted speculation among Katharine Street figures that she was shown the exit by the Commissioners.
It is also being suggested that West, too, will have been offered three months’ salary in lieu of notice to go quietly.
When they were contacted for comment by Inside Croydon today, neither Elaine Jackson, the interim CEO at the council, nor Mayor Jason Perry denied that such a payment has been agreed for West
As Croydon’s corporate director of resources, West was on a salary of around £150,000. That suggests that with Kerswell’s and now West’s pay-offs, Tory Mayor Perry will have presided over pay-offs to departing senior staff amounting to almost £90,000 in a matter of a few weeks.
All change: Ged Curran and the Commissioners have overseen a churn of senior staff at Croydon
With Croydon still mired in £1.4billion debt, and after issuing a record number of Section 114 notices, it is difficult not to characterise the “golden handshakes” to Kerswell and West as rewards for failure.
West had announced her intention to leave her job almost as soon as the Commissioners were installed. West had worked with Ged Curran, the lead Commissioner in Croydon, when both were employed at Lambeth Council at the turn of the century.
West announced that her intention was to retire at the end of March, after seeing the latest, seemingly doomed, Croydon annual budget through. Something has since changed her mind since August, and she now leaves at the end of this month.
Town Hall sources today confirmed that there was no meeting of elected councillors on the appointments committee to discuss West’s departure, or any parting payment, and nor was her replacement discussed – Conrad Hall joins in January, leaving a similar job at Newham.
Significantly, Hall’s work is said to be admired by Debbie Warren, another of the Commissioners. “He is deeply dull,” said someone familiar with the situation. “Perfect qualification for an accountant.”
Looking on: Maytor Jason Perry has been reduced to the role of impotent observer in the running of the council
Katharine Street sources have confirmed that failed Mayor Perry has been nothing other than a bystander in this latest game of musical chairs among some of the council’s most senior positions.
West and the imminent departure of another three senior council employees brings to 10 the number of council directors to quit Croydon since the Commissioners arrived in July.
Kristian Aspinall joined Croydon in 2021, and has worked as director of culture and community safety, so he had overview of sport, leisure, the arts and the borough’s library service. It was Aspinall who closed four of Croydon’s public libraries, including the bungled book dumping at Broad Green, as well as overseeing the continued deterioration of the council-owned Croydon Arena venue, and who was responsible for organising the deeply under-whelming year as Borough of Culture.
Aspinall has found himself another post in the Home Counties. He has already erased any mention of “Croydon” from the intro to his online business profile…
Also joining the stampede for the exits are Kerry Critchlow, who was “director of quality, commissioning and performance improvement”, and Paul Golland, the “director of digital and resident access”.
Jumping ship: Kristian Aspinall
After years of Croydon striving to be a “digital-first” council – that is, one where residents can’t get to speak to a real human being – it was Golland who was ultimately in charge of the state of the council’s maze-like website. He also oversaw the clusterfuck which was the council’s aborted deal for “smart” bus shelters, bought from an American con man.
Golland scarpered back in August, and has since been working on a temporary contract at Hackney.
That all leaves a lot of empty desks in the now eerily quiet executive suite of the seventh floor of Fisher’s Folly… “The council appears to be haemorrhaging senior staff at the moment,” one source said today.
The question now arises is this: will any long-suffering residents notice any difference to their council services?
When West arrived from Havering in March 2022, where she had been working as that authority’s chief operating officer, the council propaganda bunker pumped out a load of old tosh about her having “a proven track record for delivering transformation programmes”. Not any longer she doesn’t…
Someone who knows the position at Croydon Council very well said that in Croydon, West was given a local government “mission impossible”. They said: “Where it all went wrong for Jane in Croydon was that she never got the help she, and the council, really needed from central government.”
Deeply dull: accountancy expert Conrad Hall
After decades of under-funding for Croydon by Whitehall, West’s departure has been agreed as the council awaits the imminent announcement of a much-improved settlement promised by local government secretary Steve Reed.
“But that won’t fix the fundamental issue with the debt,” said the Katharine Street source, “and Jane had been pleading with government, Conservative and Labour, for a write-off of Croydon’s debt.
“Without that write-off, no one can change the council’s parlous position.” In the past financial year, the council has spend £70million on loan repayments and debt interest, about 16% of its total budget, a figure which is expected to top 20% by 2028.
Dealing with that is now the job of Conrad Hall, who is on a 12-month secondment from Newham, another London borough in deep financial shit. That raises the question of why, if over six years Hall couldn’t sort out inner city Newham’s finances, how is he going to cope any better in Croydon?
“I can’t wait to get started,” said Hall, who lives “nearby” in south London.
Perhaps Curran and the Commissioners know more about what the government has in mind for Croydon than they have so far let on. Hall’s secondment may be for only as long as the Commissioners intend to remain in Croydon.
Read more: Go West! Cash-strapped council’s finance chief is set to quit
Read more: Kerswell takes another pay-off as she quits as council’s CEO
Read more: Meet the Commissioners: council experts sent to save Croydon
Read more: £400,000 ‘golden handshake’ is Negrini’s reward for failure
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She was actual a good soldier but kept back by the poisonous Kerswell
The Government Commissioners may not have done anything about Croydon Council’s toxic debt levels, but by getting all the overpaid senior staff to leave, with at least smaller pay-offs than a Negreedy, the staff costs at the council have reduced quite a bit, and as the local government gravy train passengers have moved on to afflict other LAs, and were completely useless in Croydon, nobody will be able to notice any difference in the council’s minimal offering of services.
And we can now get rid of Piss-Poor Perry in less than another six months………….!
The commissioners are anonymous in their presence at Fishers Folly.
They don’t meet with the staff who get stuff done and unless you work on the Twelth, your highly unlikely to see them even when they are in irregularly.
Sending the commissionaires in was a way of our Labour prime minister embarrassing the Torries.
Nothing good will come out of it, just makes our Labour government look better.
But when the ‘improvement panel’ was sent in by the Tory Government that wasn’t an embarrassment to the Tory Mayor and the Tory Councillors?
In 2021, when the “improvement panel” was appointed, there was a Labour council
Ah yes. I freely admit I got my dates mixed up.
Still this isnt an issue for any government to gloat over a council just because of it’s political control which is what Brooke was inferring.
Large debts are the scourge of all of Britain
But not every council taxpayer has endured 30pc tax rise in 3 years
Incompetent
Well no one is going to miss cultural Aspinal.
Always looked like he was dragged through a hedge backward and not smart enough to represent his position.
Something or nothing of a portfolio that he looked after
Good saving unless they refill it
A GIGO example at its best.
Aspinall is another ex-Lambeth type who was promoted way beyond his natural ability by Directors who all left in dubious circumstances. He was barely in his 30s and given the responsibility of running huge departments and massive budgets. These morons are trying to fast track their careers at a huge cost to the local taxpayer.
The Gravy Train needs to crash. Hard.
Yet more evidence that the role of Mayor is irrelevant and should be abolished until the Commissioners complete their role in Croydon.
The deserved cull of Croydon’s top heavy system of management is the true sign of the complete failure of the Perry/Kerswell-Reid regime era and that is was the wrong team to follow the disastrous Newman/Negrini regime. The finance issue is overwhelming, but the casual decimation of Council Services and general malaise inflicted by Perry/Kerswell-Reid warrant their own important chapter in the Decline & Fall of Croydon.
Agree. Perry should have acted quickly and exited Kerswell, Heather Cheesborough and others on the grounds of performance. Instead they clung to their inflated taxpayer funded salaries. We’ve been paying for a Mayor, a CEO and two deputy CEOs and for what? For Commissioners to have to step in. What has he achieved? More of the same. Chronic underperformers Nicola Townsend and Ross ‘Dodgy’ Gentry remain – despite Perry’s win on the back of (mostly) planning issues. Council tax continues to rise and services deteriorate. The town centre continues its decline. No accountability, no consequences, just reward for failure.
Delboy wants to replace an elected dictator with bureaucrats appointed by the Labour Party