And the Commissioners arrived at Fisher’s Folly, to do the job that Mayor Perry and his £204,000 per year council CEO had failed to do
JULY
Perry’s cash-strapped council that is paying £726 PER HOUR for consultant
In denial: under Croydon’s failed Mayor Jason Perry, agency costs have quadrupled since 2022
They tried to deny it. “I don’t recognise those figures,” was the form of dissembling words chosen by Croydon’s failed Mayor, Jason Perry.
Perry probably didn’t recorgnise the £726 per hour rate being paid to a consultant via a staffing agency because he had not gone through the council’s own invoices quite as closely as Inside Croydon had done, with the help of an accountant and business expert.
Things at Croydon Council become more absurd by the day: that £726 per hour payment was in respect of the services of one consultant, a former colleague of Croydon’s HR director Dean “Shagger” Shoesmith, to advise the HR department on… cutting staff costs!
Our research into the council’s payments also discovered that Croydon Council was allowing an Adecco employee to sign off hundreds of thousands of pounds in Croydon Council payments to… Adecco.
The figures unearthed from the council’s monthly payment documents – which are mostly available to the public – show that Croydon had gone from paying £14million for temporary and agency staff in 2022 – before Perry took over – to at least £54million by 2025.
This is a significant factor in the council busting its budgets under CEO Katherine Kerswell, with her liking for spending millions on external consultants to advise on how to cut the council’s costs.
- Inside Croydon had previously uncovered a £1,000 per day consultant, hired to head up the planning department, “Interim Adam” Wilkinson, hand-picked by Kerswell, but who had been forced to wind-up his consultancy company by the taxman. Within days of Inside Croydon exposing this slack recruiting by Kerswell and “Shagger” Shoesmith, Wilkinson was out the exit door at Fisher’s Folly, one of several highly paid interims to depart once the Commissioners had been appointed.
Fighting for their future: student nurses protesting outside Mayday Hospital, after they were told none of them would be offered jobs after they finish their training coursexx
Student nurses left ‘abandoned’ and ‘neglected’ by NHS Trust
A shocking story emerged from Mayday, Croydon’s largest hospital, where almost 100 student nurses were approaching their graduation, but after three or more years working on the wards for free – while accumulating tens of thousands of pounds in student debt – they were told that there would be no jobs at the end of their course, as would usually be the case.
Croydon University Hospital, as it is sometimes known, wa in the middle of a recruitment freeze, while also closing wards to save money.
The A&E department, meanwhile, is having to deal with an average of 450 patients daily.
“How is it that the largest borough in London is so chronically underfunded?” said the student nurses at the time, echoing an increasingly familiar theme.
Surrey, Lambeth and Bromley beat Croydon as rotten boroughs
Our annual trawl through the report from the Local Government Ombudsman revealed that under the statistically approved numbers which average out the number of complaints by population, which the LGO prefers, the residents of Haringey ought to be very concerned, as in 2024-2025, they were table-toppers for a second year.
Lambeth are in second place in a table of shame which has nine London boroughs in the top 11 – Croydon’s neighbours Bromley are 11th, so officially worse than Croydon!
For the first time since the LGO had provided figures in this way, Croydon had dropped out of the top 10, to 31st. Sutton does marginally better, at 53rd. Sarf London neighbours Southwark and Lewisham were both in the top 10 of rottenest boroughs.
Croydon CEO Katherine Kerswell must have been so pleased. Or just relieved.
Westfield looking for ‘bargain basement’ sale of Croydon site
More buckets than businesses: the desolute and deserted Whitgift Centre, where Westfield management have been driving out traders
Respected trade magazine Property Week reported that Westfield could flog off their interests in south London once and for all, in order to plug a financing hole in another scheme in Hamburg.
Westfield and their Croydon-based partners, the long-suffering Whitgift Foundation, denied the story, but the Property Week report was based on URW’s own investor report, which says that the Croydon site is “being considered for ‘co-development or future disposal’.”
Westfield’s third version of a planning application had been delayed from late 2024, and was now due to be submitted to the planning authority, Croydon Council, in November 2025. That deadline has come and gone, with no sign of the planning application.
All indications are that the any planning application from Westfield, part of Paris-based URW, won’t be seen publicly now until after May’s local elections, if at all. URW are now playing a crude game of poker with the government and GLA to see how much subsidy they will produce for their private development scheme.
A significant problem for Westfield, in large part thanks to their own commercial indecision and inertia after 14 years of development blight, is that Croydon is no as valuable a property asset as it was when Boris Johnson and Gavin Barwell (who he?) unveiled them as the preferred developers in 2012.
Also in July…
Oh dear…
Bromley by-election sees historic first Reform win in London
That history guy:
YouTuber Swallow is taking us on a Croydon walk through time
The cost of failure…
McArdle’s reward for Croydon failure: £1,200 per day in Brum
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- 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 February’s top news stories, have a look at this: Purley Pool, porkie pies and a busted budget
- 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
- 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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