As we approach the year’s end, we continue with our review of 2025 by taking a look at some of the Inside Croydon reports which generated most public interest
FEBRUARY
Croydon In Crisis: budget overspend now close to £100m
The council’s financial plight would come to a head later this year, as Jason “Fix the Finances” Perry proved he was capable of doing no such thing.
February is usually the time that the end-of-year sums from the Town Hall bean counters get published, ahead of the council’s bureaucrats whacking residents with the annual Council Tax hike. Tory Mayor Perry had thought he could hike Council Tax by 15% in 2023, and then present a 2025-2026 council budget without any increase in Council Tax just a year out from his seeking re-election.
He got that wrong. Very wrong.
Even the council’s preliminary figures suggesting a £100million overspend would prove to be a massive underestimate, as Perry and Katherine Kerswell, his £204,000 per year chief executive, would need to ask central government for a record bail-out of more than £130million. By the end of the year, Kerswell and her finance chief, Jane West, were both gone from Fisher’s Folly.
Can Perry survive at the ballot box next May?
Motoring penalty charges to increase to £160 in Croydon
And Mayor Perry’s answer to his failure to get his sums to add up? Hammering the motorist with bigger fines.
Perry wanted to increase Penalty Charge Notices for the most serious offences to £180, but was persuaded to go along with the lower, £160 increase, from £130. Lower level charges – which tend to be imposed when drivers overstay the amount of time they have paid to park in a car park or in an on-street parking bay – were to increase from £80 to £110 in Croydon, as councils across London increased for the first time in 15 years.
More Perry porkies: in 2021, Croydon Conservatives said they would re-open Purley Pool. They didn’t fix the finances, either
Who can afford £4,000 per month for Purley later living flats?
Last week, on Christmas Eve, Mayor Perry went to the trouble of emailing all those who have had their data scraped by him or Croydon South MP Chris Philp to claim some kind of victory over the future of Purley Pool, where private developers want to use a public site to build more than 200 retirement flats (“later living accommodation”) for profit.
The GLA has decided it has no further input in the planning process: whether the developers have the readies to go ahead with the project, or whether they are seeking further public sector concessions to boost their bottom line are questions that Perry has never addressed.
Of course, four years ago, Perry was claiming that, if elected as Croydon Mayor, he would re-open Purley Pool. Another broken promise, another undertaking that Perry failed to keep. Another of Perry’s porkie pies…
Perry and his pals have handed the site over to a shadowy development company, Polaska, which is controlled from a tax haven in the British Virgin Islands. There has never been full disclosure from Perry about who might be behind this offshore company.
In our regular Croydon Commentary slot, where Inside Croydon provides a platform for various peoplem to have their say, Lucia Briault looked at the numbers behind retirement home schemes such as Polaska is proposing, and drew some shocking conclusions.
“Core monthly costs would be around £4,000, plus bills. Oh yes, the rent doesn’t cover utilities, Council Tax, broadband, TV licence and so forth… My employer pension is nowhere near that figure. I have to wait a bit longer for my state pension (currently forecast to be about £150 a week), but that still won’t add up to anywhere near enough to cover living in a later living flat…
If I did sell my house in order to move into a retirement flat in “Purley Pool Towers”… my calculations indicate that, even assuming that the value of my investment keeps up with any increase in rent and service charges, I’d only be able to live there for about 12½ years before I run out of money.”
We ran one of our unscientific reader polls:
96.2%
of readers who took part said that they would not consider moving into Purley Pool Towers based on those figures.
Also in February…
Hindu fellowship buys Old Palace prep school site for £7.5m
The Whitgift Foundation began to tidy up some of the loose ends from its controversial decision to close its only all-girls’ independent school.
Sutton’s £2.3m heritage buildings sale to owner of derelict pub
Confidential documents show that Sutton Council had done a property deal for two of the borough’s historic buildings with an offshore company linked to the developer responsible for the long-neglected Fox and Hounds pub on Carshalton High Street.
Government panel wants Croydon to flog off the Fairfield Halls
It pays to listen to the Inside Croydon podcasts, after Green councillor Ria Patel revealed on our Croydon Insider round-table, news panel discussion thingy that she had been briefed by government-appointed officials that the Fairfield Halls arts centre might be a council-owned asset that would need to be sold to help pay off Croydon’s debts.
- If you missed our review of January 2025’s news, take a look at this: That was the year that was: Inside Croydon’s pick of 2025
- For the highlights, and council lowlights, from March, click here: Council’s closed doors, Selhurst security, Bridge to Nowhere
- Check out what was making the news Inside Croydon in April by clicking here
- While in May 2025, we were mostly watching football:After 120 years, the Eagles live the dream at Wembley cup final
- June 2025 was When council boss blocked staff from reading Inside Croydon
- In July, Inside Croydon exposed how Croydon’s cash-strapped council was paying consultant £726 PER HOUR
- Fly-tipped mattresses that the council refused to touch, library books discared all over a street in Broad Green, more buckets than businesses in the Whitgift Centre, and Reform’s dead candidate for mayor. All to be found on Inside Croydon in August 2025
- In September 2025, we were the first to report the latest housing scandal to hit Croydon, and the council
- And in October, we broke the news that Katherine Kerswell had quit as council CEO, and was to received a £50,000 pay-off
- In November and December, we even had cabinet minister Steve Reed retweeting links to Inside Croydon news reports, which included coverage of the spaghetti restaurant named the best in the country
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Is 2025 just the same as the previous three years, so we hear more lies from Piss-Poor Perry, he has failed to fix the finances and just keeps trying to get government bailouts to cover his own inadequacies?
In London, the charity Crisis is just Crisis at Christmas, but in Croydon, their Crisis Skylight cafe and shop (homelessness support centre) in Surrey Street is permanent.
Which of Crisis’ Croydon cafe and Inside Croydon’s Croydon in Crisis theme came first, and which one will be around for longest?!