CROYDON COMMENTARY: Is Mayor Jason Perry deceiving voters about the state of Croydon Council’s debt? iC reader SIMON JELLIPOT certainly thinks so
At the last local elections in 2022, Jason Perry, the Conservative candidate for Executive Mayor of Croydon, made a pledge to “fix the finances”.
Feeling the heat: Croydon’s £86,000 per year Tory Mayor Jason Perry
Now, in his flyer to voters seeking re-election in 2026, he purports to show that he has reduced the debt since taking charge of Croydon Council.
He says, and I quote, “Since 2021, we have made £230million in savings.”
He counts the savings that pre-date his taking control of council spending in May 2022.
The majority of those savings came from one-off receipts from the sale of property owned by the council. These are savings that can only be matched by selling off more council assets in the future.
Does this mean that he has stabilised Croydon’s debt as he claims?
Let’s look at his graph in his re-election flyer.
Dodgy graph: election leaflets distributed by Conservative candidate Jason Perry is at best misleading – and deliberately so
The distance between each of the dates along the horizontal axis of his graph are the same.
At a quick glance, this gives the impression that all three periods are of equal length of time. But whereas 2014 to 2018 and 2018 to 2022 are four years apart (the cycle of council elections), 2022 to 2025 is only three years apart.
The intersection points on the graph appear to coincide with Croydon Council’s financial year ends, March 31.
The debt shown on the graph for 2025 is £1,388million – often referred to as £1.4billion.
Yet the debt shown on the balance sheet in Croydon Council’s financial statement for 2024-2025 is £1,600million. That is £212million difference.
I asked Mayor Perry about this difference. He informed me that his graph only tracks a subset of Croydon Council’s debt. He had chosen to use this data because it showed debt having “stabilised” between 2024 and 2025.
But when I looked at Croydon Council’s financial statements for those years, it showed that total net debt during the year had risen by £221million.
Worryingly for us Council Tax-payers, Mayor Perry doesn’t seem to think that an increase in debt of £221million over one year is significant!
At the time of distribution of Mayor Perry’s re-election flyer in March 2026, the debt at the end of that month could have been estimated well within the accuracy of his chart. As Mayor, he has access to this information. This would have shown the change in debt over his full term in office. Unsurprisingly, he chose not to do it.
The indications are that during the year to March 2026, Croydon Council’s debt rose by a further £0.1billion to
£1.7billion
Croydon Council’s press office has so far not been able to provide me with a more accurate number of what is, after all, a set of bank balances, one month later.
All this is important to Mayor Perry’s record in office and his claim to have “stabilised Croydon’s debt”.
Was his workmanship sloppy in selecting the numbers he used and in the design of his chart, or did he deliberately set out to deceive voters to support his argument?
Increasing Croydon Council’s debt, especially after the sale of council-owned land and buildings, is not what I think voters would recognise as having “fixed the finances”.
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Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, refused to give a pre-election interview to Inside Croydon, where he would have faced questions about his record in office – and Croydon’s increased debt- Paid-up subscribers to this website can listen to The Andrew Fisher Interview with Labour’s Rowenna Davis by clicking here
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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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Meanwhile…
“A Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate who was deselected by the party over his Christian views has won his legal battle…In the judgment agreed by both parties, the Liberal Democrats conceded multiple breaches of the Equality Act 2010, including harassment and victimisation, and accepted that it had allowed Campanale to be “mocked and abused in relation to his beliefs”.”
No need to cite the Christian News, Ron, when we reported the case on Inside Croydon four days ago.
https://insidecroydon.com/2026/04/30/sutton-libdem-should-not-be-a-lawmaker-after-court-defeat/
………catchy comment, Ron
A doo-ron-ron, a doo-ron-ron…….
Showing your age 🥳
Showing you’re ageist
See you later, Ron
Perry hasn’t eliminated Croydon’s debt, restored financial stability, or avoided further borrowing. The council still relies on government bailouts, faces ongoing budget gaps, and remains under external oversight due to its finances. The Croydon shambles Perry inherited has not improved – its time to give someone else a go.
This is almost Lib Dem-esque and their skewed graphs!
Oh and PPPs lack of recognition that he failed.
You know, I think Perry does recognise that he’s a total failure. It’s just that he is also a con man, and has made it his mission to con the Croydon public for a second time in four years.
He is as incompetent as he is a hypocrite and a liar.
Come on, he’s not that good
I’ve never met Jason Perry so can’t judge his personality, might see if there’s any YouTube footage. At least the rate of increase in debt seems to have slowed down.
Perry flogs Croydon residents pipes while feeding them lies, both equally full of shit…..