‘A vision of the nation’s political future in Croydon’s concrete jungle’: the national media seems to have discovered Croydon this week
CROYDON COMMENTARY: With local elections fast approaching, the national press has been taking a closer look at Croydon. Business owner NITIN MEHTA posted a comment in response to an article in Murdoch-owned The Times, and here expands on his points
I have lived in Croydon for 50 years and served on many bodies. My experience is that there is a tendency everywhere to not rock the boat.
Those in charge of taking decisions or entrusted to monitor the goings on of an institution never ask awkward questions. No matter how glaring the irregularities, there is a tendency to just nod and move on. “Do not rock the boat” is the mantra of Croydon’s Establishment.
As a member of the committee that was set up to oversee the funds allocated to Croydon after the riots in 2011, I experienced this first-hand. When I queried the money spent, I was told the figures would be presented at the next meeting. At the the next meeting, I was told that the figures had not been calculated yet. After that, the committee was dissolved.
Look the other way: civic pride in our neighbourhoods has eroded, says Nitin Mehta
When the very people who are there to fight your corner, but do not, you know that a rot has set in. This practice is widespread, in all institutions. The first instinct of individuals on these bodies is to cover the institution they have been appointed to get justice from.
In this “bargain”, it is the aggrieved individuals who just become a statistic.
The bodies will proudly announce the number of people who approached them, but not how many had their grievances resolved.
That is why Croydon has been bankrupted three times. Once elected, most politicians are hardly visible. Most people will never have seen their ward councillor or the local MP. If you are Joe or Josephine Public, you will need to have a lot of perseverance to get the attention of your representatives. Your emails will get ignored. Your phone call conversations with the council or secretaries of prominent politicians will leave you with a distinct feeling of being fobbed off. If you ever manage to get through.
There are a few exceptions of councillors who go out of their way to listen to people’s grievances. The tragedy is that they, too, seem to fail in bringing any relief to businesses or residents. Why else does West Croydon Station continue to be such a blight to the town centre?
The negativity has seeped into the citizens. Civic pride in our town or neighbourhoods has eroded.
‘Celebrity on the streets of Croydon’: The Times gets a whiff of life in south London
People just walk by avoiding eye contact with rubbish piled on the streets, alcoholics and drug dealers huddled in corners. It’s a dystopian nightmare.
To add to the problem, failure in local government is rewarded handsomely. Council chief executives with salaries of much more than the Prime Minister have departed Croydon as total failures, and yet received “golden handshakes” as they departed.
If they were not a failure, then the Whitgift Shopping Centre, which has been dying of neglect for years, would have been transformed by now.
I have an idea to stop the knife crime, if anyone would listen. Croydon does not deserve the reputation it has.
- Nitin Mehta owns a business based on London Road, West Croydon
- Anyone can write a Croydon Commentary, which is here to provide a platform for our readers to offer their personal views and experiences about what matters to them in and around our corner of south London. To submit an article for consideration for publication, email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention
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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
- Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
Croydon is at least fortunate to have Inside Croydon to hold Croydon’s institutions and landowners to account. In the old days, the Croydon Advertiser was always too close to the council to carry out any meaningful investigations. With regards the funding issued after the 2011 riots, Inside Croydon ran a story in August 2014 – https://insidecroydon.com/2014/08/15/croydon-risked-handing-back-20m-unspent-riot-recovery-cash/ I hope that the new Mayor will understand the useful role which Inside Croydon has in shaping the future of Croydon and the new Mayor will engage with IC and will encourage Croydon Council staff to engage more with IC too. It was ridiculous for the council to ban staff from reading IC on the council’s computers. Croydon Council has done some positive things recently between Ruskin Square and the Whitgift Centre and it would be good for IC to cover these good news stories too – without it becoming a lackey to the Town Hall’s own press department!
As Pete Townshend would put it , “meet the new Mayor, same as the old Mayor “
You’re showing your age old man
I’ll always be younger than you, old boy
Now, now, fellas. Play nicely. You are both old enough to know better.
“If they were not a failure, then the Whitgift Shopping Centre, which has been dying of neglect for years, would have been transformed by now.”
But the Whitgift isn’t a council property. Its fate lies in the hands of its owners.
Have councillors held up the redevelopment by denying planing applications? No they haven’t as far as I’m aware.
Until the owners come up with a plan and make a planning application then all the Mayor and Councillors can do is say a few warm words (and members of the planning committee can say even less lest they say something that opens them up to accusations of bias when an application eventually come up for approval).
And we all know warm words butter no parsnips.
It’s the same with West Croydon station. It isn’t under the councils control so all the council can do is badger TFL about it as well as any privately owned properties in the vicinity. The former may be more responsive but the latter likely not.
As to knife crime it is certainly an issue. Mr Mehta says he has ideas but who has he sent them to? Councillor and the Mayors email address are all publicly available. As are Mayor Khans and the Croydon GLA member.
I would suggest he contacts all the newly elected councillors and the Mayor after the election is over with his actual ideas – people are more likely to respond to well thought out ideas than gereric ‘something must be done”. Give them a good few weeks to respond and then compile a list of who has and hasn’t responded, I’m sure IC would be happy to publish a list of the recalcitrants in due course.
He could also raise this via a public question before a council meeting
I commend Mr Mehta for his community spirt and civic engagement. He sounds like the sort of person who should be a Councillor.
You see, Chris, that’s just the problem. The politicians’ line – Lab or Cons – on Westfield has always been to claim all credit when the proposals are waved through the planning committee. And when fuck all happens for 14 years, then it’s nuffink to do wiv them, guv, it’s a private development.
If only there was a little bit more honesty around our Town Hall, and the council used all its powers for the existing residents and established businesses in the borough, rather than just jumping to the tune of a few corporate interest, including the Whitgift Foundation.
The fate of the Whitgift Centre does not solely lie “in the hands of its owners”, Westfield.
The council could have not fined Westfield for failure to deliver, and then hand the £6million back to Westfield for their poxy kiosks.
They might not have handed over effective planning powers to Westfield with their detail-lite “Masterplan”.
It’s long overdue for our council to take more effective role in directing the developers to deliver – Westfield will, after all, be receiving many millions in housing subsidies from Housing England and the GLA.
As for West Croydon, we are constantly advised that the council is “working closely” with TfL and Network Rail. So closely, in fact, that at East Croydon, the Bridge to Nowhere remains incomplete 14 years after it was put in place – and all because the idiots in Croydon’s planning and legal departments – when under supervision of then Cllr Jason Perry – failed to get developers Menta to agree access for contractors to do the works required on their site.
So, if the people working on London Road say it is a mess, then their council really ought to be banging the table with TfL and Network Rail a little more loudly.
It’s the same with West Croydon station. It isn’t under the councils control so all the council can do is badger TFL about it as well as any privately owned properties in the vicinity. The former may be more responsive but the latter likely not.
I think we can reasonably assume that Nitin has indeed sent his other proposals to councillors and the council. But these represent more of the ignored and unreplied correspondence he refers to elsewhere.
Public questions? You have got to be joking – under Mayor Perry, they have been censored, edited and carefully chosen to allow Perry and his clowns in his cabinet to conduct performative politics, and carry on as they always intended.
Nitin is right: the council gave up listening to the people it is supposed to represent a very long time ago.
I wonder whether Inside Croydon might be able to organise some form of interview with the Whitgift Foundation so that they can explain their stance on Westfield’s current proposals – if they are not bound by confidentiality agreements. The Whitgift Foundation used to be a force for good in Croydon but the name “Whitgift” is now closely associated with the Whitgift Centre and Croydon’s decline. It would be useful for the Whitgift Foundation to have a chance to put forward their own proposals for Croydon’s regeneration – given that their finances are so closely connected to Croydon’s.
We conducted two podcast interviews with the Foundation’s new chief exec and with the chair of the Court of Governors in 2025, David. You can find them on our Spotify page.
Their aims are closely aligned to Westfield’s. It’s a kind of multi-billion-pound Stockholm Syndrome.
“That is why Croydon has been bankrupted three times. ”
As usual an author of an article on the state of the council fails to mention the austerity policy invoked by the Conservative/ Liberal Democrat government that decimated local government finance over the last 16 years. Yes, the council has a massive role to play in this as well through its incompetance in managing the decreased budgets, but the ball was set rolling by Cameron, Osborne and Clegg.
Up to a point, Ev. Look around you. Every other local authority in England and Wales (or at least most of them), were also subject to the same funding cuts as Croydon.
Only Croydon was so horrendously badly managed, with failed children’s services (2017) where children in care were dying, and then the failures on housing (Regina Road) and Brick by Brick. Only a council as badly run as Croydon could have failed to provide “free money”, covid business grants, to local businesses that qualified for the aid because, well… the admin was a bit shit.
It was not until after the extra stresses of covid emerged that other councils began issuing S114s. Some councils, such as Woking, also went down the property developer route and went bust in a vain attempt to plug the austerity gap created by the government.
But Croydon got there first, and has done it bigger. And there remain plenty of other councils that have not gone bankrupt and have endured austerity. Ask yourself why.
“The oppressive fug of cannabis … the unmistakable, ammonia stench of urine ” plus a whiff of Labour hypocrisy
Except, Arfur, to be clear: those were the choice of words of the author of the article, not the candidate.
Perhaps we ought to be concerned where Davis herself says, “I kicked out everyone who was in denial about mistakes and completely refreshed everything.” Is Rowenna Davis saying that, McSweeney-like, she interfered in candidate selections?
And if she kicked out “everyone”, why is Sean Fitzsimons, Newman’s lickspittle who ignored concerns about Brick by Brick, still a candidate in 2026? Or Chris Clark? Or Manju Shahul-Hameed? Or, for that matter, Stuart King?
You are quite correct.
I did mention the incompetence of the council over the period. My point is that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats seem to have been forgotten regarding the role that they played in the destruction of local government and they shouldn’t be.
Forgotten? Not by Inside Croydon.
Nor forgiven.
Croydon council is the most useless, appalling set of bone-idle halfwits I have ever dealt with and it’s an extremely low bar.
I have tried to deal with multiple departments, with local councillors, with all manner of staff there about antisocial behaviour problems and nobody is remotely interested in doing anything to help. Most of them never even bother to reply to repeated queries. How they have the sheer brass neck to take a salary from public money is staggering.
Councils attract the least capable and least qualified people around, but even knowing that, Croydon is an utter, utter disgrace.
West Croydon station needs a heavy police presence for a month. Every single person pushing through the gates at the station (front and bus station side) needs to be arrested on site immediately. We don’t need security guards nodding their heads at people as they have no ability to enforce the law.
Agreed Mike, but heaven help us if they use facial recognition to catch the repeat offenders – the liberals will go ballistic!
1000% this. And frankly at most other London stations too, it’s an absolute disgrace what is happening.
Dear “Barry”, or whatever your name really is.
You can only have 100%. The clue’s in the words “per cent”.
And no more anonymous comments. Thanks
A while back Inside Croydon published a list of the worst offending councillors regards casework/lack of it, could you perhaps republish/update it to help us in our voting intentions? My councillor still does not respond to emails