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Rubbish contractors don’t know how many bins there are

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Four years after being caught out ripping out 1,000 street bins – all to make work for rubbish contractors Veolia a bit easier – and now Croydon Council is forced to admit it has no real idea of how many litter bins are on the borough’s streets.
PLUS: the Coulsdon banking hub, the Croydon spaghetti restaurant named the best in the country, and another Croydon exodus – from the council offices

NOVEMBER

Saga of Croydon’s vanished bins and the audit that never was

Rubbish service: Croydon Council can’t even count the number of bins on its streets

More citizen journalism, thanks to the dogged work of the people at Litter Free Norbury, who have kept the council, and their rubbish contractors Veolia, in close check over the number of bins on their streets.

According to LFN’s Tony Hooker, of 33 litter bin locations in his area that were provided by Croydon Council in response to a Freedom of Information request, in 26 cases, there is no bin present.

That’s a 78% fail rate by our council.

Or what Hooker called: “Totally inaccurate nonsense”.

In 2021, aided by official council figures provided in FoIs submitted by Hooker, we reported how 1,000 bins had been removed from Croydon’s streets in the previous three years.

Since then, requests to the council for information, an asset audit and an explanation for the vanishing bins, all received only a limited response. And now a senior executive at the council has admitted that promises, in 2023, to conduct an audit of the borough’s bins has all been binned – because council staff are too busy getting to grips with the latest multi-million pound waste deal with the borough’s rubbish contractors, Veolia.

That’s right, the same Veolia who in 2023 Mayor Jason Perry binned for being… well, rubbish.

Coulsdon rocked by bankers’ decision to abandon new hub

One step forward, two steps back: after joining the Coulsdon banking hub in May, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland are no longer having cheque deposits accepted

Here was a terrific example of a story that matters to throusands of locals, was read tens of thousands of times, and it all came about when a loyal reader sent through to us an email they had received from their bankers.

As things stand, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland (both part of the same business group) are no longer having cheque deposits accepted by the Post Office or banking hubs from today, December 31, 2025.

Lloyds and Bank of Scotland customers received letters notifying them of this loss of service in October. Croydon South MP Chris Philp, who tried to jump on the banking hub bandwagon and claim credit for it when it opened earlier in the year, has proved about as useful as a rubber cheque in lobbying Lloyds/BoS to maintain full services in Coulsdon.

Also in November…

More churn at the top as interim directors leave the council

It is reckoned that at least 10 exec level officials at Croydon Council, only salaries of £110,000 per year, including some interims on £1,000 per day, have left the council since mid-summer, when the government announced it was sending in Commissioners.

Croydon spaghetti restaurant named UK’s best at trade awards

Croydon gets a new booze park as council grants café’s licence

PICK OF THE PODCASTS: For our final podcast interview of the year, award-winning actress Joanna Scanlan (known in some quarters as “the sweary woman off of The Thick Of It”) entered the virtual studion under the Flyover to talk about the David Lean Cinema, where she is patron, as well as the demands of her latest starring role, in the BBC drama Riot Women.

You can listen to this interview on Spotify by clicking here.

Our podcasts are premium content for subscribers to Inside Croydon, so you will need to pay to listen on our Spotify page or sign up as a patron on Patreon.

Local journalism is in steep decline, and other news websites like Inside Croydon are under threat of closure. Yet there has never been a greater need for citizen journalism. Who funds us? No one…except you.

And that has got us all the way to December, which hasn’t quite finished (at the time of writing), and which has seen even Steve Reed retweeting links to Inside Croydon’s news stories (though, we think, possibly, inadvertently).

We hope that our brief review of some of the top Croydon news stories of 2025 have at least brought a smile to your face.

We’ll be back with more Croydon news from… well… January 1.

Happy New Year!

Inside Croydon – If you want real journalism, delivering real news, from a publication that is actually based in the borough, please consider paying for it. Sign up today: click here for more details

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