On the way out: Croydon has been forced to scrap six unlawful low traffic neighbourhoods. But don’t expect the council to email you offering to refund any fines you might have incurred

CROYDON IN CRISIS: What do you mean, you can’t easily find how to claim a refund of the unlawful low traffic neighbourhood fine you were forced to pay? Do you expect the council to make the repayments system simple and easy?
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES 

A council scrutiny meeting, held last week, was the first opportunity for public debate on the £10million cost of refunding thousands of motorists who were fined for driving through six Croydon low traffic neighbourhood streets that a High Court judge declared to be “unlawful”.

AWOL: part-time Perry did not show up for scrutiny meeting on LTNs

But at the meeting in the Town Hall Chamber, the council director responsible for the borough’s roads, Venetia Reid-Baptiste, was missing. She’s been given the night off, according to one of her colleagues, because she had been at a meeting earlier that day and late the previous night. Those meetings were clearly far more important that being scrutinised over a £10million hole in her departmental budget.

Also conspicuous by their absence was Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense, the council’s senior legal official, and therefore the person ultimately responsible for the omnishambles that saw Croydon spend two years defending the indefensible (what Mayor Jason Perry had said in public).

Lawrence-Orumwense is notorious as the council lawyer who took this website to the High Court after we published “confidential” correspondence that the council had already published on its own website. Lawrence-Orumwense was backed in that futile and costly failure of legal advice by Mayor Jason Perry.

In his place was Gina Clarke, who is apparently the council’s head of corporate, commercial and planning law. Clarke may have spoken, very, very quietly, just once all meeting. She appeared to be trembling as she did so.

AWOL: monitoring officer Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense was away on holiday

Lawrence-Orumwense’s absence was said to be because he was away on leave. Following the embarrassing High Court defeat over LTNs, and the two years’ worth of expensive external legal advice that he commissioned, there are many within Croydon Council who believe that former estate agent Lawrence-Orumwense should be invited to make his leave of absence permanent.

Also absent from the scrutiny meeting (the clue’s in the title) was Croydon’s £86,000 per year executive Mayor, Jason “part-time” Perry, the man whose comments about LTNs had got the council into this multi-million-pound mess. No explanation or apology was offered for the executive Mayor’s absence. Though the reason for his absence was obvious enough: Perry really is in the shit over this.

Perry’s Conservative mates on the council tried to have the matter blocked from being discussed altogether. Tory councillor Alasdair Stewart, the vice-chair of the scrutiny and overview committee, used his position to veto the matter being called in, though it made it on to the agenda so that the decision not to appeal against the High Court ruling and the council’s system for paying fine refunds might be discussed.

How to claim an LTN refund from Croydon Council

• If you think you might be owed a refund on an LTN fine you were charged for in one of the six unlawful LTNs, between March 2024 and March 2026, this is the link to the council’s refund form: https://www.croydon.gov.uk/parking/croydon-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-ltns-penalty-refund-request

And there was the small question of why a £10million High Court case never made it on to the council’s risk register. “In my view, it was a risk that should have been flagged during the council’s budget-setting process,” Leila Ben-Hassel, the chair of scrutiny, told the meeting

With the three key council figures responsible for the omnishambles managing to dodge the scrutiny meeting, taking the lead on explaining the position was Conrad Hall, the recently appointed corporate director of finance.

According to Hall, the council was in for around £7.5million in fine refunds, together with £2.5million to £3million in revenues predicted for the coming year that now won’t be received. “It’s rather difficult at this early stage to make a reliable estimate,” said Hall. No one at the meeting dared suggest that this was very much what Hall is employed to do – and it had been three weeks since His Hon Justice Pepperall handed down his ruling.

“Financial plans for next year will have to be adjusted,” Hall said, winning the night’s No Shit Sherlock award in so doing.

Fronting up: Conrad Hall, the council’s new finance director, answered the questions that Perry and others dodged

The consensus from Hall and from Jason Cummings, Perry’s council cabinet member for finance, was that this missing £10million wasn’t such a big problem, because the council was about to report an underspend of between £22million and £23million. A rare Croydon Council underspend that will now, of course, be much reduced.

“The council did everything correctly,” Cummings told the meeting.

According to Cummings, a £10million risk need not be included on the risk register because, “there was nothing unusual about this case”. It was hardly convincing.

“The judgement was unusual,” Cummings said. “It was quite a departure. It was the discretion of the judge to rely on public statements.” Those being the statements made by Mayor Jason Perry, who told public meetings that he could not remove the LTNs, as he had promised when seeking election, because the cash-strapped council needed the money.

Later, the scrutiny meeting was told that Mayor Perry’s public remarks had been cleared by the council’s legal department. So he doesn’t even have the excuse that he was making it up as he went along. Though he does now have a potential scapegoat.

The decision not to appeal was discussed. Because if the judgement was quite as unusual as Cummings suggested, then perhaps there were good grounds to appeal against it. But apparently, advice from a King’s Counsel, a different one from the one who had conducted the case in court and advised that there was no chance of the council losing, now said that there was no chance of the council winning the appeal.

That new advice has never been made public, although it conveniently allows Mayor Perry to drop the matter just ahead of local elections, and mutter stuff about he was really always against the pesky LTNs anyway.

Cummings went on to suggest that everyone should praise the Mayor for being honest…

In an entirely unscientific piece of polling run by Inside Croydon, 86% of readers think Perry should resign as Mayor over his handling of the LTN scandal.

Ben-Hassel asked what the council might do now about managing the refunding of the unlawful fines. “What is the council considering now? Is it engaging residents affected by the fines?” the chair said.

There was, she said, “no clarity”.

Hunt the refund: the council’s website has no obvious link on its front page for the thousands of people who have to claim LTN fine repayment

Hall said that there was no need for any contingency plan, of hiring extra staff to handle the many thousands of claims expected from those who received Penalty Charge Notices for fines of up to £160 a time from Perry’s LTNs.

Croydon Council holds the details of every single fine it raised on the six LTNs in question from March 2024 to last month (fines charged on LTNs before that are not refundable; before Perry made the LTNs permanent, the low-traffice zones were administered entirely lawfully). The council could, quite reasonably, email those concerned to advise them of the change of circumstance.

But it now appears that the council is going to wait and only make refunds when people come forward with valid claims.

Perry’s council is doing its best to keep quiet about the refund system, in the faint hope that it might reduce the amount of fines it has to pay back.

On the front page of the council website, there’s buttons to direct the public to where they can pay their Council Tax (up 33% since Jason Perry became Mayor), or pay a parking fine (kerching!), or to report a fly tip (in the fly-tipping capital of England).

But there’s nothing to direct anyone to the LTN refund page.

In fact, you have to click through dozens of news articles, and on to the fourth page of the council news section, to find “Statement on low traffic neighbourhoods”. Again, no mention of fines in the searchable headline. Nor of refunds. It’s almost as if someone has set out to baffle Google.

When you click on the article, there’s porkie pie Perry, with his disingenuous nonsense as he tries to claim the credit for the removal of the LTNs. Not until the end of the statement does Perry offer, “I can confirm that residents who received a penalty notice whilst the schemes were in operation will be able to claim refunds.”

Yet, initially, Perry and his council failed to provide any information about just how those refunds might be claimed.

The article was published on March 12 – more than a week after the High Court ruling. Four days after that, on March 16, a couple of lines were added, buried at the very bottom of Perry’s “statement”, with another link, to yet another page on the council website, where determined residents could, at last, find an online form with which to claim for the repayment of the unlawful fine.

There’s no phone number, no special “fines hotline”, to call with any queries, nor any dedicated email address clearly published for residents to pose their questions.

This has all the signs of a council trying to wriggle out of paying as many of the unlawful fines as possible.

Buried: details of how to claim a refund are hidden beneath pages of articles about what a good job Mayor Perry is doing

Tory Perry’s council looks to have borrowed a chapter out of the playbook used by Labour-run Lambeth when they got turned over on an LTN scheme in West Dulwich last year, saving themselves around £1million through a combination of slow processing and “data management issues”.

Lambeth, just as Croydon is now doing, avoided making automatic refunds to the drivers whose records were on its database, but instead required motorists to make a claim, placing the onus on the victims of the unlawful scheme.

Next came the excuses: Lambeth claimed that it was the council policy to delete personal data after six months, making identification of all affected parties impossible. Almost six months after Lambeth lost their court case, less than 10% of the estimated £1.5million in fines had been repaid.

And according to official figures provided by the council in a Freedom of Information response to Inside Croydon, whether through under-staffing or a deliberate go-slow, their rate of processing the refunds is far from impressive.

The council FoI states that £7.2million of fines had been issued across the six LTNs between March 2024 and March 2026.

Between March 16 (when the refund scheme opened) and the response date (March 25), a grand total of £10,000 had been refunded. At that point, the council had received 774 “verified valid LTN refund applications”. Of those, 135 had been approved for repayments – just 17% of claims verified.

“This will require close monitoring,” chair Ben-Hassel had told the Town Hall Chamber  last week. At a scrutiny meeting where Mayor Perry, his top council lawyer and the corporate director for roads couldn’t be bothered to turn up.

• Click here to read the judge’s ruling against Mayor Perry in full

Read more: High Court judge orders end to Croydon’s ‘unlawful’ LTNs
Read more: Council failed to include High Court LTN case on risk register
Read more: LTN fine refunds on the way – but Perry doesn’t yet know how

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