It could yet go down as the biggest mugging ever seen in Croydon – the day that nearly 36,000 people were conned into voting for Conservative Mayor Jason Perry.
So just how did Perry, the incompetent Mayor who hiked your Council Tax by 33% and still managed to increase council debt to £1.7billion, manage to scramble together enough votes to get re-elected last week?
That’s the underlying question that our panel of readers, joined by former BBC London politics editor Tim Donovan, try to answer in our local elections special edition of the Croydon Insider.
For this episode of our premium content, available free-of-charge to paying subscribers of Inside Croydon, our panel of readers are Oumesh Sauba, the co-founder of the Croydon Business Association, former Labour councillor Brian Finegan and nearly-councillor Connie Duxbury, who stood for the Green Party in South Croydon ward.
They joined iC Editor Steven Downes in our virtual studio Under The Flyover for an hour-long discussion of the local elections and what it all means for Croydon over the next four years.
Tim Donovan offers his expert analysis on the “earthquake election” across London, as the results from Lambeth to Hackney, from Bexley to Tower Hamlets are discussed, and our panel try to answer the unanswerable…
Plus they explain how
- You can’t have NOC – No Overall Control – in a borough which is run by an Executive Mayor (which the people at Retch and the BBC seem not to understand)
And they discuss:
Croydon’s nepobabies (such as Jack Barwell, pictured right)- Reform resisted – what happened to Farage’s party?
- How the left vote split cost Rowenna Davis the mayoralty
- The Mayor candidate who was fined £40,000 by the Home Office, and
- What next for Croydon over the nextfew weeks, and years?
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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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Key pledges from Mayor Perry’s 2022 campaign and early administration included:
Fixing Finances: A central promise to manage the council’s multimillion-pound contracts better and end the excessive borrowing that led to bankruptcy.
Planning and Development: A commitment to remove “SPD2” (Supplementary Planning Document 2), which was viewed as causing over-development, to protect the suburban character of the borough.
Cleaning up the Borough: A pledge to tackle the rise in graffiti, fly-tipping, and litter, described in his manifesto as “dirty with mattresses to be found on most street corners”.
Regeneration: To push forward with the delayed redevelopment of the town centre, including the Westfield development.
Reversing “War on Motorists”: A promise to review and remove Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and reduce excessive parking restrictions.
Restoring Public Services: Focusing on improving residential services and tackling the backlog in grass cutting and general street maintenance.
So how how much of his 2022 promises were sucessfully achieved?
Don’t forget his promise to reopen Purley Pool which now seems to lie with some company in the British Virgin Isles that doesn’t seem to have built as much as a garden shed. Still waiting for shovels to hit the ground and start building the pointless monstrosity, including a bunch of flats that no-one will probably want to buy. Potentially another Westfield-esque development in the making.
It seems people wanted to give Labour a drumming in the polls so rather than do anything useful, those who could be bothered to get off their backsides collectively voted for the other “big party”. In this case it seems like self-sabotage by the electorate because by doing this, all they have achieved is sending Croydon to the dogs through wilful neglect.
Croydon hasn’t been helped in at least in two ways: The past decade of administrations who have had what seems like a lot of incompetent self-serving people and by the funding removed by the tories in 2014 where they turned the council into a business for which most people are not qualified. Hence a plethora of ridiculous decisions leading to losing money hand over fist. Look at Westfield, Purley pools, selling off assets at rock bottom prices, shoddy building by Brick-by-Brick etc and others as mentioned previously.
Until the electorate decides to be slightly serious and take an educated risk rather than following what their parents, grandparents and the family tree of countless generations blindly did, it looks like Croydon and others like it are going to continue to be saddled with predictable undesirable outcomes.
Mayor Perry really didn’t do much until late last year. For 3.5 years he did absolute fuck all then when the elections came closer he decided to do a Rowenna and copy her with social media blitzes with highly exaggerated claims taking all the credit for. Whoever penned the nickname Part Time Piss Poor Perry was very correct. I suppose the good ppl of Croydon will get another 3.5 years of nothing but hot air.
Plus another Council Tax Hike.
My reasoning regarding this terrible result is because a lot of votes which otherwise would have gone to Rowenna Davis ended up going to the Green Candidate, who would have possibly been a good Mayor. But I am of the feeling that Rowenna would have been the BEST choice for Croydon even though she is a member of the Labour party.