Poor value for money: Croydon’s £87,000 per year lame duck Mayor, Jason Perry, at last night’s council budget meeting maintained that he has Croydon ‘on track’. Few believe him
“I have stabilised the finances of this council,” Mayor Jason Perry delusionally claimed at Croydon Council’s budget meeting last night. According to Perry, the finances are “back on a stable footing”.
Perry resisted the urge to echo the “strong and stable” slogan of Theresa May, but there was something reminiscent in the way that, the more the Mayor made claims of stability, the less plausible it seemed.
Green Party councillor Ria Patel pointed out that in 2021, Conservative Perry had not promised to “stabilise” the debt, but to bring it down to less than £1billion. After four years, the council debt remains exactly where it was in 2022, despite cuts, closures and Council Tax hikes. All pain, no gain.
Perry even claimed last night that, “our requests for Exceptional Financial Support are going down”. It was only on Tuesday this week that it was announced that Croydon Council has been granted £119million in “Exceptional Financial Support”, up from the £110million required last year, £38million in 2024-2025 and £50million in 2023-2024. The finances are getting worse, not better.
Claire Bonham, the Liberal Democrat councillor, pointed out that far from “exceptional” this extra funding (which is paid for by the council selling off assets) has “become normalised” in Jason Perry’s Croydon.
Over the same period, Council Tax for Croydon residents has increased by 33%, even as services have been cut, libraries closed and primary schools’ lollipop crossing patrols axed.
Labour’s mayoral candidate, Rowenna Davis, stated that the 33% increase was the largest increase in London over that period, and pointedly asked why, if the finances really were “back on track”, as Perry claimed, did the government send in Commissioners to run the council?
The government’s decision to send in Commissioners last July was due to their concerns about financial (mis)management in Croydon. This is reflected in the fact that Croydon is receiving the second-largest EFS settlement in the country for 2026-2027.
Croydon’s increased need for EFS comes despite what the Tory council cabinet member for finance Jason Cummings magnanimously referred to as “funding fairer now than it was before…” the Labour government’s fair funding review.
Mayor Perry acknowledged that Croydon would receive an extra £61.8million in government funding over the next three years – a 14.8% increase over previous grants. With Croydon now requiring more than double the EFS that it needed in 2022, this only highlights how poor Croydon’s finances remain after four years of Mayor Perry “fixing” them.
Perry and Cummings both noted trends that are affecting every council across England – rising levels of homelessness, increasing demand for adult social care and children’s care services and steepling costs of SEND provision.
Some government action is proposed. The Renters’ Rights Act soon comes into force – despite Conservative and Reform opposition. And the government is tentatively moving forward with reform of SEND provision, including a £4billion package of investment, which includes writing off councils’ SEND debts.
Bail-outs ‘normalised’: LibDem councillor Claire Bonham,
Despite repeatedly referring to “Labour’s debt mountain” – half of which was accrued before 2014 under the prior Conservative administration, of which Perry was a leading player – and which he has failed to fix, Perry, said people should vote for him again to “keep Croydon on track”.
Bonham pointed out that “things are not getting better”, highlighting that a Band D property will, from April, be paying £600 more per year in Council Tax, while fly-tipping in Croydon had increased by 50% in the last year.
“At least Croydon is still No1 at something,” Bonham said, sharply.
Towards the end of the near-three-hour meeting, Bonham and the two Green councillors voted against Mayor Perry’s budget and latest Council Tax increase. It passed by 33 votes to 3 with 31 abstentions, all of them Labour councillors.
The final business of the night was councillors’ own allowances. There was no abstaining this time, as the council chamber passed what according to the council papers is 4.1% increase by 62 votes to 3.
Mayor Perry, despite still drawing his full £84,000 salary (soon to increase to £86,628, following last night’s vote), is currently not an “Executive” Mayor in any real sense. Decisions are ultimately approved by the Commissioners who were appointed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
Despite this, all the Conservatives and Labour councillors voted through the above-inflation 4.1% increase in their own allowances and a £2,686 bump in the Executive Mayor’s pay. The Green councillors and Liberal Democrat voted against.
It’s fair to say that the Conservative Mayor inherited a council in crisis in 2022 – and Councillor Davis was scathing about the previous Labour administration when I interviewed her last week. But Perry has, despite his claims, made the situation worse, not better.
Even if his spin is correct, stabilising a council that is in perpetual crisis is hardly a win anyway.
Perhaps that’s why the Conservative mayoral candidate is the only declared candidate not willing to be interviewed by Inside Croydon…
He may not have fixed the finances, he may have closed libraries, and he may have saddled us with a 33% hike in Council Tax, but at least he voted himself a generous pay rise – even if the government has imposed Commissioners to oversee the council instead of him.
What a farce!
- Paid-up subscribers to this website can listen to The Andrew Fisher Interview with Labour’s Rowenna Davis by clicking here
- Andrew Fisher will be interviewing Liberal Democrat candidate Richard Howard and the Green Party’s Peter Underwood over the next few weeks
- We still have an empty Zoom slot available for Mayor Perry, should he pluck up the courage to face some proper public scrutiny
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
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