EXCLUSIVE: Once the election results were in last month, Croydon’s Labour leader agreed what’s been called ‘a shabby, short-sighted stitch-up’ to keep Green councillors away from important planning decisions – while also boosting allowances paid to their party. By STEVEN DOWNES
Secret deal: Labour’s Stuart King (left) and Tory Jason Cummings have worked together to marginalise elected Greens
Croydon Labour entered into a secret deal with the Town Hall’s Conservatives to block the Greens from having a seat on the all-important council planning committee, Inside Croydon can reveal.
The behind-closed-doors deal led to the planning committee being reduced in size from 10 seats to just eight, in order to make it impossible to include a Green councillor, under council rules which are supposed to distribute committee seats proportionately among the five political parties now represented at the Town Hall.
Most council committees, as announced last week, have been increased in size for 2026-2027, to enable Greens, Liberal Democrats and even Reform Ltd councillors to take part in the various functions of the local authority.
The Green Party, with eight seats (including the “independent” Mark Adderley) now the third-largest group on Croydon Council following the May local elections, has also been denied the position of chair or deputy chair on any of the council’s committees, as ought to have been the case with 11.4% of the Town Hall’s 70 seats.
A spokesperson for Croydon’s Greens has described the Lab-Con pact as “a shabby, short-sighted stitch-up”.
The 1% club: Cllr Rowenna Davis
Senior Katharine Street sources have confirmed that the deal over the Green shut-out was agreed at a secret meeting in the aftermath of the local elections. Present at the meeting were the Tories’ Jason Cummings, promoted to “deputy mayor” after failing to fix the council finances over the past four years, and Stuart King, the leader of the Town Hall Labour group who “masterminded” Rowenna Davis’s losing campaign to become Croydon Mayor.
Croydon remains a Conservative-controlled council as a consequence of Jason Perry scraping back as executive Mayor by just over 1,000 votes.
But Labour has the most councillors, 30. The Conservatives have 28 councillors, their lowest tally since 1965. The LibDems and Reform have two councillors each.
The rules on political balance and committees are set out in Sections 15 to 17 of the
Local Government and Housing Act 1989, as amended. According to a report that went before last week’s full council meeting, “The council is required to review the representation of different political groups… The allocation is determined by applying the political balance rules prescribed by Section 15(5) of the 1989 Act.”
The first bit of the “fix” agreed between King and Cummings was to continue with the charade that Mayor Perry is a 71st member of the council, thus giving the Tories a bonus extra seat. It also had the (albeit marginal) effect of reducing the proportions allocated to Greens, LibDems and Reform – but crucial when only parties with 12% or more of council seats quality for a place on an eight-seat planning committee.
Under the Lab-Con pact, last week six other committees were all increased in size by one seat: the appeals committee (now seven-strong, with a Green councillor, three Labour and three Tory), the appointments and disciplinary committee (7: 3L, 3C, 1G), audit and governance committee (8: 3L, 3C, 1G, 1LD), civic mayoralty and honorary freedom committee (7: 3L, 3C, 1G), the ethics committee (7: 3L, 3C, 1G) and the scrutiny and overview committee (7: 3L, 3C, 1G).
Division of power: how the official council papers did the arithmetic for who gets committee seats
Had the planning committee remained at 10 seats, as it has been for more than a decade, then the Greens will have taken one seat under the proportionality rules. But with just eight planning committee seats, the Greens’ 11% was not enough to warrant a seat.
Not a single chair or deputy chair position at the council has been allocated to the Greens.
The Lab-Con pact is a sign of how badly Labour has taken defeat in the Croydon mayoral election. Nearly 20,000 voted for the Greens’ Peter Underwood, as Labour’s candidate Davis missed out by just 1% of votes cast. Last week, Davis wrote, “We lost because the left split more than the right.”
Labour responded to the growing popularity of Green leader Zack Polanski and the loss of the Gorton and Denton byelection earlier this year by declaring all-out attack on the Greens, ordered by No10.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer – or “Uncle Keir” as he is known in Croydon Labour circles – urged his party to paint the Greens as extremists, even declaring at PM Questions that Polanski’s party is “high on heroin, soft on Putin”.
Witchhunt: Labour MP Steve Reed
It has been a mission enthusiastically embraced by Zionist-funded Steve Reed, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North when he can be bothered), whose public witchhunt saw Green candidates suspended by their party over historic social media postings. This included Adderley, who was nonetheless elected in Reed’s backyard of Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood and has taken his Croydon Council seat as an “independent” councillor.
It’s not just Labour who have adopted smear tactics. Throughout Wednesday’s council meeting in the Town Hall Chamber, far-right Tory blow-hard Mark Johnson repeatedly interrupted proceedings by shouting “Hamas supporter!” or similar whenever Green Party councillors were named or speaking.
National Green Party sources described the attacks on their party from others as “desperate”. “They’re trying everything in their power to stop us,” Polanski said last month.
All of which makes any electoral pact between Labour and the Greens at the Makerfield byelection on June 18 increasingly unlikely, and therefore could make the return to Parliament of “the King of the North”, Andy Burnham, a tighter race than it might need to be.
Nasty party: far-right Mark Johnson
Elsewhere in London, Labour has entered into deals with their Tory opponents in Brent and Barnet after having lost their controlling majorities on those councils. Those moves – to the disgust of many union members and the remaining socialists in Starmer’s party – were at least conducted in an open manner.
But not in Croydon, where such manipulation over the planning committee and lucrative chair appointments is liable to make future collaboration between Labour and Greens to try to vote down Mayor Perry’s policies very unlikely.
“They’ve neutered the council,” one Katharine Street source said of the impact of Labour’s move with the Tories.
“And they’ve played into the hands of Reform, who accuse Tories and Labour of being ‘the uniparty’.
“The pay-off to Labour for keeping the Greens off planning and allowing the Tories to chair that committee is the tens of thousands of pounds they will get in special responsibility allowances.”
Today, Paul Ainscough, one of the Green councillors elected last month, told Inside Croydon: “Keeping Green Party councillors off the planning committee is a shabby, short-sighted stitch-up by Conservatives and Labour.
“It highlights that the Green Party is the real opposition in Croydon.”
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