A Croydon MP who receives almost £200,000 per year, to pay for aides and a constituency office, has her phone staffed for just four hours each week.
WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, on how at least one of Croydon’s well-funded MPs has closed up shop for a verrrry long Christmas break
Ho! Ho! Ho!: Croydon West’s MP Sarah Jones gives her considered response to the government funding announcement. But her constituency office was closed
Sarah Jones, an MP for Croydon for almost nine years, closed up her constituency office this week, leaving residents of Croydon West unlikely to be able to have their enquiries and problems discussed in a face-to-face meeting with her staff for a period of almost three weeks.
Jones, who has a total of six aides on her staff, receives almost £200,000 per year from Parliament to run a constituency office and pay her assistants.
Jones, representing Croydon West since the 2024 boundary changes, has her constituency office in the Whitgift Centre, where it is literally hidden away out of the sight of the public, in the “management suite” on the third floor of the increasingly decrepit shopping mall which is managed by Westfield.
The MP’s unusually long and unexplained office closure was discovered on Wednesday, when a delegation from the Croydon Trades Union Council managed to beat a path to her office door, only to find the lights were off and no one at home.
There was no sign on the office door to explain the working hours closure, nor anything to provide information on when the MP’s office might re-open.
There’s nothing on the MP’s (publicly funded) website, either, about closures over Christmas and New Year.
Not open much: the contact page on Sarah Jones MP’s website, which reveals that the phones are staffed for just two hours on each of two days of the week
And when the delegation arrived, there was no answer to the office’s entryphone.
Phone calls to the office went straight to answerphone. Mind you, that ought not come as a complete surprise: according to Jones’s website, her constituency office phone line is staffed for just four hours each week.
But after navigating their way to the third floor, despite the Whitgift Centre’s blocked off and escalators and out of service public lifts, the delegates from Croydon TUC discovered that there was not even a letterbox in the sturdy-looking entry door to Jones’s office.
That meant that the delegation had nowhere to leave an urgent letter for the MP on a life and death matter – the 40-day hunger strike (now 42 days) of one of Jones’s constituents, Teuta Hoxha.
Hoxha has been held on remand in prison without trial for more than a year, one of eight in similar predicaments because of their support for Palestine.
The delegation, led by former Croydon Labour stalwart David White, was forced to try to find its way back out of the Whitgift Centre, with no option but to send their letter to MP Jones by email.
Inside Croydon understands that the MP’s constituency office closure was nothing to do with the outbreak of “super flu”. At the time, the majority of Jones’s staff were in Westminster, rather than in Croydon serving their constituents. It was originally planned for the office also to be closed yesterday and today, and not open again until January 5.
Hunger strike: Teuta Hoxha is a pro-Palestine hunger striker in jail. But her MP has not met with her supporters to discuss her case
Had that occurred, it would have meant that MP Sarah Jones’s constituency office will have been closed for 10 working weekdays at the end of December and into early January, in addition to Bank Holidays and weekends.
For many of Jones’s constituents, or at least those fortunate still to be in a job, there will be no such flexibility, as they will be expected to work up to December 24, and may well have to be back at work again in the week between Christmas and January 1.
Perhaps as a response to Wednesday’s visit from the Croydon TUC, or the reporting of Inside Croydon, we understand that the office may have re-opened yesterday or today, if only briefly, just on the off-chance that some brave constituent might have taken on the Whitgift maze to try to find their way there.
Jones is a junior minister in Keir Starmer’s Labour government, so she won’t personally be available to meet constituents as much as a backbench MP.
But that is why she is funded to have a staff of six to answer phone calls and handle correspondence (not that much will get through the non-existent letterbox), and to manage the constituency office.
Of course, we are in an environment where the security and safety of public figures, and their staff, has to be taken very seriously – two MPs have been brutally assassinated in their constituencies in the past decade.
No way up: with staircases removed and escalators blocked off, how can anyone manage to find their way to Jones and the ‘management suite’?
And while there was no one in Jones’s constituency office to deal with the plight of hunger striker Hoxha, Jones was busy – apparently in her living room at home – recording a piece to camera for social media about the government’s financial settlement for Croydon, the borough council which Jones’s Labour colleagues managed to bankrupt.
Four or five years ago, so little was heard from the MP about the desperate situation at the Town Hall under Labour’s Tony Newman and Alison Butler, that Jones became known to some Croydon wags as “Silent Sarah”.
It is beginning to appear that some of Croydon’s MPs, like its council, now actively try to keep the people they are supposed to serve as distant as possible, with emails a convenient default option.
David White has known Jones for many years, having been the local Labour Party secretary when she was the CLP chair. White’s voluntary work for Labour was significant in getting her elected as Croydon’s first woman MP in 2017, winning the then Croydon Central seat from the Conservatives’ Gavin Barwell.
So he had cause to be very disappointed not to be able to hand over his letter at the MP’s office.
“With a public facing role like being an MP, in my opinion you and your staff do need to be reasonably accessible,” White said.
“Being contactable by email isn’t enough. Having a constituency office which is hidden away and hard to find doesn’t fit the bill either.
“My experience of sending emails to Sarah in recent years has been that you wait a long time for a reply and then get a stock response, usually written by a member of staff rather than Sarah herself.”
And at just before 2pm today, that’s exactly what White received in response to the appeal on behalf of Hoxha. A stock response, and no promise of action, in an email addressed impersonally to “Dear David White”.
However, Jones did respond personally and swiftly to Inside Croydon’s enquiries today, although she opted not to address all our questions.
“As you know, many MPs don’t now have public offices for safety reasons. We do, and we see constituents in the office every day,” Jones wrote (by email, of course).
“We have set phone times, which we advertise on the website.” Yes, a grand total of just four hours per week.
“We have a small team of six people,” Jones wrote, perhaps not really grasping the true concept of “small”.
“I run advice surgeries, sometimes public ones we advertise and sometimes by appointment for people who have emailed in, which people can book on to…”. Which, surely, is the least to expect from a good constituency MP.
No one’s in: David White managed to find Sarah Jones’s office, but neither she nor her staff were there
And apparently unaware of the issues of the digitally disconnected, such as many of her older or poorer constituents, Jones wrote: “Emails are always the easiest way to get in touch.”
The MP declined to answer our direct question about the funding that she receives from Parliament to run her constituency office. “Costings are all publicly available,” the MP wrote.
According to the parliamentary guide published by Erskine May, for a London MP, that’s an annual budget of £192, 120 – £27,660 towards constituency office costs and £164,460 for staffing.
“I’m sorry no one was there when they dropped by,” Jones continued, “with such a small team who work across Croydon and Westminster, it will always be a risk that people will be out.
“We do visits to people and organisations, so people are often out and about.” For instance, today the MP was having herself video’d ambling along by a mural at East Croydon Station. All vital stuff, of course. Not.
“We don’t advertise that the office is open for that reason,” Jones said, justifying having no set opening hours just because she, or her office manager, can’t be arsed.
This, though, only increases the suspicion that Jones and her “small team” would really rather not have any visitors to their hidden-away lair in the Whitgift Centre. Until Inside Croydon pointed out the error earlier this year, they gave an incorrect address on their website for their own office.
Now, that is looking less like incompetence, and more like a deliberate act to avoid having visitors.
“Always best to get in touch [in] other ways…”, she means by email, “… and agree a time to come in.”
Jones and her “small team” of six say they handle 9,000 cases every year – that works out at around 25 cases per person (including the MP) per week.
They also handle 35,000 emails a year – which is something they’ve brought upon themselves by only answering phone calls for four hours a week and being deliberately vague about when their office is actually open.
Inside Croydon did ask Sarah Jones for the reason behind her office’s unannounced closure. She declined to answer.
By comparison, the constituency office of Croydon East’s Labour backbench MP Natasha Irons, for instance, will be open on Monday, December 22, before closing for Christmas the following day, and re-opening on Monday, January 5.
We also approached Steve Reed OBE, Morgan McSweeney’s old muckah and the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North, when he can be bothered) and Chris Philp, the “nose in search of a bum” and MP for Croydon South, to ask them for their Christmas opening hours for constituents. But neither of them, or their publicly funded staff, bothered to respond.
Bah! Humbug!
Read more: Croydon TUC calls on MP to support Palestine hunger striker
Read more: ‘It was Jeremy Corbyn who won the election for me’ says Jones
Read more: Labour councillor’s Friends of Israel pose starts selection row
Read more: Kind words but no action: how Croydon MP responds on Gaza
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
People get what they voted for and don’t seem to learn that politicians are now professional and it’s just a job/ career. Plus we have very little choice choosing what devil to give power to. Also if you vote for a candidate that’s not getting done what is needed don’t keep voting for them or their party. Remember when voting it not always what is best just for you, but the people that are around you. High tax’s on the working people is not productive you need a balance or the workers will give up.
“As you know, many MPs don’t now have public offices for safety reasons” wrote Sarah Jones.
Bobby Dean, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, has one and can frequently be seen in public, standing outside the shopping parade in Wallington on Saturdays.
Maybe if Labour’s policies and practices were not so devious and repugnant, its MPs wouldn’t need to hide away from the voters they claim to represent
Ms Jones is now my MP following the boundary changes,, worst thing that ever happened .. get me back to Croydon South Na Mr Philp ASAP please.
You must have led a charmed, pampered existence if that is the worst thing ever to happen to you.