THE TOSS-CARS 2026, Part 2: Inside Croydon reveals the borough’s hardest-working councillors. PLUS: Which Town Hall figure managed just 12 reports to the council’s smartphone app all year?

Reigning champion: Cllr Karen Jewitt

The Labour Party goes in to Thursday’s local elections with the hardest-working councillor in the borough not on the ballot paper.

Karen Jewitt, who has been a councillor in Croydon for 32 years, was one of the six sitting councillors blocked from seeking selection to stand for election by the Labour Party.

With Croydon Labour still under special measures since bankrupting the borough in 2020, Labour’s National Executive Committee supervised the panelling of wannabe council candidates for the party, and together with London region officials, they also oversaw the long-listing and short-listing of ward selections.

In: Ellie Sandover, niece of Keir Starmer, was approved by Labour’s NEC

It was under this entirely opaque and non-democratic system that Ellie Sandover, the 20-something niece of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, was deemed a good enough candidate to stand for election in a safe Labour ward, as officials presented Labour members in three-seat Bensham Manor ward with a fait accompli, with only three candidates left on the shortlist, as Inside Croydon reported last year.

And it was the same nameless Labour officials who determined that Karen Jewitt was not suitable for selection in her home ward of Thornton Heath, where she has been councillor since 2018, having previously represented Woodside.

It has been suggested that Jewitt was axed because of comments she made about some of those involved in the bankrupting of the borough. Simon Hall, the discredited council cabinet member for finance, was trustee of the community charity that Jewitt worked for.

Last week, in an interview with The Times newspaper, Rowenna Davis, Labour’s candidate for Croydon Mayor, said that the Tony Newman Labour administration “… let down Croydon and let down everything it is to be Labour”.

And Davis added: “I kicked out everyone who was in denial about mistakes and completely refreshed everything.”

Did Davis really interfere with the candidate selection process, for some kind of belated “purge”?

Purge: not everyone who was associated with former leader Tony Newman has been removed from Labour’s candidates list

Because if she did, she did not do a very good job of kicking out “everyone”: Thursday’s ballot papers around Croydon include the likes of Sean Fitzsimons, Newman’s loyal chair of scrutiny who turned a blind eye to the nonsenses of Brick by Brick, there’s Stuart King and Manju Shahul-Hameed, both cabinet members in Newman’s administration, and Chris Clark, an ever-eager lackey in the later Newman years.

But it was Jewitt, a relatively minor figure in the omnishambles of the Newman era, that was given the chop.

At the time of Jewitt’s de-selection, grassroots Labour members called the decision a “travesty”.

And Labour’s decision to dump Jewitt might be deemed to be even more foolish, given the position in Thornton Heath, where Callton Young has retired and Tamar Bennett was de-selected by members (on a rare occasion that they got to have a say). Labour has been left with no “incumbency factor”, of an experienced or recognised councillor, going into Thursday’s election in this ward.

Figures obtained by Inside Croydon through a Freedom of Information request show that Jewitt undertook over 100 more pieces of casework and app reports than any other Croydon councillor in 2025-2026.

It is the third year in succession that Jewitt has won the laurels as Croydon’s hardest working councillor.

This year, combining reports submitted to the council’s crap app with casework submitted under the Town Hall’s in-house member enquiries system, Jewitt clocked up

594

– an almost 50% increase on what she managed in 2024-2025.

Member enquiries are the main mechanism for handling residents’ issues, used by councils across the country. Most councils say that councillors are “expected” to use the member enquiry system. Many councils publish the numbers on their civic website. Croydon, for reasons best known to their secretive leadership, choose not to do so.

Member enquiries aren’t the only way that councillors can connect with the council and represent their constituents, but many consider that it would be almost impossible to do casework properly without using the formal member enquiry system to communicate with council staff.

The member enquiry is primarily used when councillors seek information or assistance on behalf of residents or to address ward-related issues.

Yesterday, in the first part of our 2026 Toss-cars Awards, we reported how Conservative councillors Adele Benson (New Addington) and Sue Bennett (Shirley North) had somehow managed to go a full 12 months without either of them submitting a single member enquiry.

For their efforts, or the lack of them, councillors Bennett and Benson each received £12,367 in allowances from the cash-strapped council. Councillor Jewitt, with her 500-plus submissions on behalf of the people of Thornton Heath, was paid the same £12,367 allowance.

So it is today that with give (a little) credit where’s credit is due, for those councillors who have worked on behalf of their residents.

We have updated our way of calculating cases this year. The figures cover March 2025 to March 2026, and combine the number of member enquiries submitted by a councillor with the number of reports submitted by the Love Croydon crap app.

One issue to emerge is that, despite Croydon earning the title of “fly-tip capital of England”, with more than 1,000 fly-tips reported around the borough every week, very few of those reports are being submitted by our elected representatives via the app. More than half of Croydon’s councillors – 37 – submitted no reports on the crap app all year.

Second again: Labour’s Town Hall group leader Stuart King managed to conduct more than 400 pieces of casework

As last year, only 12 of Croydon’s councillors managed to submit 100 or more member enquiries over the course of 12 months: a seemingly modest average that works out at just two enquiries per week. Is there really so little casework being generated in a borough such as Croydon?

Our 2026 Top 10 looks remarkably similar to the 2025 Top 10, with the gold, silver and bronze medals going to the same three councillors in exactly the same order as last year: Jewitt, Stuart King, the Labour group leader (West Thornton ward; £30,389 in allowances) and Samir Dwesar (Conservative; Purley and Woodcote; £12,367).

Rowenna Davis, fourth last year, has slipped down the charts a little. Perhaps she’s been busy with other matters?

The only new entries are Janet Campbell, the deputy leader of the Labour group (West Thornton; £18,716) and Appu Srinivasan (Norbury Park; £12,367), who dragged himself into the top 10 with a relatively high number of, perhaps appropriately, app reports.

So here is Croydon’s Top 10 councillors for 2026:

Councillors doing the most casework

1, Karen Jewitt* (Lab) 594 
2, Stuart King (Lab) 412 
3, Samir Dwesar (Con) 312 
4, Simon Fox (Con) 182
5, Lynne Hale (Con) 175
6, Rowenna Davis (Lab) 169
7, Claire Bonham (LibDem) 162
8, Appu Srinivasan (Lab) 161
9=, Janet Campbell (Lab) 130
9=, Yvette Hopley (Con) 130

* Karen Jewitt is not standing for re-election on May 7.

Lynne Hale and Simon Fox are both effectively full-time politicians, on the public-funded payroll of Croydon South MP Chris Philp as well as receiving council allowances. Both ought to have plenty of time in their day job to fire off member enquiries and burnish their councillor figures.

The high number of enquiries submitted by the likes of Jewitt, King and Dwesar does, again, though, throw into sharp relief the poor efforts of the vast majority of our councillors.

App-solutely useless: Jason Perry filed just 12 reports to the Love Croydon app all year. So much for ‘taking pride’ in Croydon…

And here’s an interesting thing. By asking for the number of member enquiries submitted and the number of reports via the council app, we can also get a picture of quite how hard Croydon’s £86,000 per year Mayor has been working for residents.

Or not not working, as the case may be.

Because Mayor Perry has staff – at least two council officials, possibly on salaries of £35,000 per year each. So the cost of paying the Mayor and running his office comes in at more than £150,000 per year.

In 2025-2026, member enquiries from the “elected mayor”, as he was described in the council’s official response, came to a staggering 914, or more than 17 per week.

Yet when you look at the figures submitted from the council smartphone of “Jason Perry” (again, as per the description given in the council’s FoI response), with reports fired off to the Love Croydon app, we see he has managed just

12

all year.

And absolutely nothing since November 2025.

Therefore, we can probably all guess who has been doing the Mayor’s casework for him, then…

Read more: The Toss-cars 2026: We name Croydon’s laziest councillors
Read more: Jewitt tops councillor charts for a second successive year
Read more: Making the case for councillors’ casework to be made public
Read more: The Toss-cars 2025
Read more: The Toss-cars 2024
Read more: The Toss-cars 2023

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