CROYDON IN CRISIS: Council bosses were either over-confident that they would win the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods case at the High Court, or ‘completely, crassly incompetent’.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Mayor Jason Perry, who has been claiming that he has got Croydon “back on track”, failed to include the possibility of his council losing its legal challenge over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in the authority’s corporate risk register.
Hypocrisy: Jason Perry, Croydon’s £86,000 per year Mayor, has been caught out once again
And given that the court case was fought over whether the cash-strapped council was issuing £160 Penalty Charge Notices to help plug holes in Perry’s unbalanced budgets, there was no allowance made in the Tory Mayor’s latest budget, passed last week, for the possibility that the LTNs might have to be removed.
According to a Katharine Street source this afternoon, “It is just completely, crassly incompetent.
“How can they have not even considered the possibility that they might lose the case, and the £10million in revcenue from fines that they have budgeted to receive?”
Early estimates put the loss of the road fines revenue – which is supposed to be used only for road repairs and improvements – as costing Croydon Council around £2million this year alone. The council’s own figures, when proposing to make the LTNs permanent in 2024, was that fines would raise £10.7million over a four-year period.
Then there is the administrative costs of managing refunds, and the cost of the fine refunds, which could amount to at least £5million.
And all because witless Jason Perry told a public meeting after he had been elected Mayor that, “£20million of future income… would have to be replaced.”
Judgement: Justice Pepperall made his ruling based on the comments of Croydon’s Tory Mayor
High Court judge Justice Pepperall has ruled that the legal orders from 2024 which made six Croydon LTNs permanent should now be quashed. The council has three weeks to appeal against the ruling.
The LTNs are at Dalmally Road, Addiscombe; Elmers Road, Addiscombe; Parsons Mead in Broad Green; Sutherland Road, Broad Green; Holmesdale Road, South Norwood; and Albert Road, also South Norwood.
The LTNs, according to Croydon Council, “aim to improve the lives of those living in Croydon”, and are “intended to support people live healthy lives. That could mean being more active, breathing cleaner air, getting to know neighbours, getting involved in the local community or living in a more attractive, clean and green neighbourhood”.
Croydon Council has so far refused to issue any comment following the devastating ruling handed down by judge Hon Mr Justice Pepperall yesterday. And that’s before they have been asked to explain why a High Court case with a potential multi-million-pound impact was not included in the council’s risk register.
A council corporate risk register is a formal document that is supposed to list the most significant threats and opportunities facing the authority’s objectives. It acts as a tool for management to assess, monitor and mitigate risks — such as financial, operational or reputational — to ensure the smooth running of the organisation. Or in Croydon’s case, not.
The legal case, brought by a shadowy organisation calling itself Open Our Roads, had been contested at the High Court since late 2024, and in June 2025 counsel for the council got the case thrown out on procedural matters.
Only an appeal by lawyers working for Open Our Roads managed to drag the council back to court in December, despite Croydon’s legal efforts to delay and dismiss.
Such has been the churn of senior staff at the council that none of the directors who were responsible for handling the legal case, all interims, are still working at Fisher’s Folly. The council chief executive, Katherine Kerswell, left her job in October, helped on her way by a £50,000 pay-off approved by Mayor Perry.
The council’s corporate risk register has not been updated since early September last year.
It includes such things as the risks to the council’s finances surrounding the new stand at Crystal Palace, or “maintaining parking revenues”, and it lists as a strategic risk the audio-video equipment in the Town Hall Chamber. But there’s not a dickie bird about a multi-million-pound LTN legal challenge.
Risky business: the council’s strategic risk register was last updated in September. There’s no mention of the LTN legal case
A report on the risk register was discussed at a council meeting last November, when Jason Cummings, Perry’s cabinet member for finance, “advised that the visibility of the council’s risk register and how the risks were managed was an important part of the operation of this council”.
Oh dear.
“The fact that Perry’s council did not factor-in losing a major court case which could result in lost revenue, and maybe even the refunding of millions of pounds of fines, will not go down well,” a Katharine Street source said.
“They’ve either been blindsided or hidden it. That’s shocking.”
Such serious shortcomings in the way the council is (still) being mismanaged could come up for discussion at next Thursday’s audit and governance committee. But some Town Hall figures fear that £86,000 per year Mayor Perry and the council’s paid officials, such as interim CEO Elaine Jackson, will try to run down the clock on the matter until Croydon enters the period of pre-election purdah, when all political debate is gagged.
Councillor Stuart King, the leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall, tonight told Inside Croydon, “Jason Perry’s hypocrisy has caught up with him. He campaigned against LTNs and then, when he became Mayor, the High Court has found that he made them permanent for financial reasons, and in doing so acted unlawfully.
“Taxpayers in Croydon are now on the hook for millions as the Mayor needs to fill a gaping hole in next year’s budget that is entirely of his own doing.
“This latest financial fiasco by Perry comes on the back of a ‘misstatement’ of £15million in costs, the loss of a £22million asset sale and the need for the highest-ever government bailout to balance his budget.
“Residents should call time on Jason Perry’s mayoralty at the elections in May.”
Read more: High Court judge orders end to Croydon’s ‘unlawful’ LTNs
Read more: The next battle in the culture wars? Traffic bollards
Read more: London’s toxic air is ‘a public health emergency’ says charity
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Councillor Stuart King was the Labour politician behind introducing LTNS.
Just goes to show that they are all as bad as one another.
Labour decided to abolish school crossing patrols and introduce LTNs and then criticise.
It will be council staff and tax payers who will suffer as selfish motorists get off the hook.
LTN income bought a lot of services and it can’t be replaced.
On one hand council tax payers want better services and then bite the hand that is feeding them.
You reap what you sew.
“Illegally raised LTN income bought a lot of services and it can’t be replaced.” There, fixed that typo for you.
The LTNs were declared to have been unlawful—outside legal powers—not illegal, a criminal act. The court condemned misuse of authority, not criminality
“The council has 3 weeks to appeal”.
What, throw more money they don’t have, to try and overturn a ruling, that itself was an overturned appeal, from a case that had been thrown out on procedural cause, not on merit, and hope for the best?
I bloody hope not!
This could end up costing more than the revenue raised or to be reimbursed! All that based on dodgy law in the first place! The council’s incompetence plumbs new depths in their efforts to scrape some revenue.
Sorry if I missed it, but I see no reference to costs either!?! Usually, the losing side has to pay the other side’s costs, which, once it’s been upped to the higher courts, escalate into tens, or even hundreds of thousands pounds. This means Croydon Council will have been landed with a huge amount , to be borne by us, Croydon’s hapless taxpayers. 😬
And, if CC decides to try and appeal, those costs will keep on going up and up, with absolutely no guarantee they’ll win; you don’t usually win cases based on bad law, and CC’s case was defective in the first place.🤷♀️
This is our Local Authority, ladies and gentlemen (and the undecided): unable to balance budgets, they cut legal corners and getcaught out, which ends up costing them more than if they had followed the law in the first instance. It’s happening all the time, these LTNs are just one example; they have been caught out before in educational law, SEN law, social care law, you name it.
Finally, before anyone beats their usual “what about Labour?” mantra, let me state for the record that this dig is aimed at the WHOLE of Croydon LA, past, present, and probably future, regardless of who effs up at our expense, or whose party they represent. The lack of care in how it’s run is endemic. We need some good, competent, and honest people to step up or this town will keep on dying around us.
There’s no reference as to costs because the lawyers appearing for Open Our Road did so pro bono.
Costs (if incurred) are only reimbursed by the losing side if (a) they are applied for and (b) the Judge grants the application and even then may not cover everything.
Costs awards aren’t automatic.
Roughly the first 30 pages of this ruling concerns procedural issues. The language is pretty dense. There’s plenty of incompetence to go around here.
I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like the applicants initially applied to the wrong court and missed the deadline for making their application. The council whilst ticking the box on their formal acceptance didn’t submit a needed form to indicate they questioned the court’s right to hear the case, hence why the case was then heard.
Had they done this the case would probably have been rejected due to being out of time, 3 months, for Judicial Reviews now.
This case illustrates the problem with the Executive Mayoral system. If the Mayor says I don’t like these things, but we can’t get rid of them due to the money they bring in, then makes them permanent, you have the proverbial smoking gun. Hence the ruling.
The judgement makes no ruling concerning LTNS in general, just the way these ones were made permanent.
Mayor Perry seems to have cost Croydon residents approximately 27.5 million. 22.5 for the housing project discussed here and another roughly 5 million in repayable fines, unless of course the council appeals and succeeds.
That’s 27.5 million that isn’t going into the care given to elderly residents, special educational need provision for our school children or street cleaning. Fix the finances?
Just to remind readers, I will be standing as a Liberal Democrat candidate in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood.
A risk register is the key tool used to identify business risks and opportunities and formulate a plan to manage them should they impact the business. If this massive risk wasn’t on the risk register you can be pretty confident there’s more of the same they don’t even know about yet.
I was a Management of Risk accredited trainer and coach in the Home Office, and the lack of corporate governance in this corrupted council suggests that nothing has really improved since the council first went bankrupt.
The failure might well be down to poor executive leadership, but I would have also expected senior elected politicians to be all over the corporate risk register and for it to be approved by Cabinet, possibly also by the Executive Mayor. Maybe it was a lack of interest, awareness or just old-fashioned incompetence…
Denying in court something the now Mayor confessed to, his confession published in the Telegraph, might be in the top five stupid things Croydon council has done this year and it’s barely March. If the court case had been on the corporate risk register serious consideration should have been given to settlement to avoid an embarrassing High Court judgement and refunding of unlawful fines. In this parallel universe the LTNs would likely have been suspended immediately, full proper consultation undertaken and a fresh, legally defensible decision made to avoid further reputational damage.