20s plenty: Mayor Jason Perry seems to be in a terrible rush to remove a measure that is proven for reducing collisions and for reducing car insurance premiums
Just what might be coming round the corner in council business now that Jason Perry is back in the Town Hall? Probably a BMW being driven at close to 40mph, reports PAUL LUSHION, our environment correspondent
Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, has used his re-election for a second term as an excuse to declare war against cyclists, pedestrians and even young children walking to school.
The man whose big mouth has already cost the cash-strapped council around £10million over his money-spinning Low Traffic Neighbourhoods has now pledged to make Croydon’s roads more dangerous for all road users, including motorists.
In his manifesto, which was kept under wraps so as few people as possible could ever get to see it before the election in May, the man who imposed unlawful LTNs on six Croydon streets now blustered that he was “standing up for motorists”.
Petulant Perry: stripped of financial power, Perry wants to make our streets less safe
He even had someone draw up a “Motorists’ Charter”, to pander to the red necks and racists of Nigel Farage’s party, where Perry said he would “Continue leading opposition to Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ expansion”.
We have some news for Perry and his flag-shagging motorist mates: deaths linked to poor air quality in London dropped by approximately 40% between 2019 and 2024 following the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone, though facts have never been piss-poor Perry’s strong point.
“No more anti-car agenda”, Perry’s “Motorists’ Charter” says, laying out Perry’s anti-people agenda.
Perry’s “Motorists’ Charter” also promised to “Use legal challenges, petitions and public pressure where needed”, and “Make Croydon the borough that stands up for motorists”. Is that, genuinely, a hill worth dying on?
The Charter also included a Perry promise to “Consult on removing unnecessary 20mph limits.”
“Unnecessary“? Unnecessary for whom? Perry fails to say…
This, remember, is the £86,000 per year Mayor who decided road safety patrols outside six primary schools – lollipop men and lollipop ladies – were “unnecessary“, all for the saving of less than £60,000 per year.
Given the dressing down Perry received from a High Court judge in March for his blatant hypocrisy over LTNs – “… the Mayor’s apparent lack of public enthusiasm for the road safety or health case for these schemes,,,”, His Hon Justice Pepperall said in his summing-up, using polite legal language for saying Perry is a liar – it is increasingly difficult to find any subject on which anything that our part-time Mayor says that can be relied upon to be true.
Yet since the election, Perry has doubled-down on “reviewing unnecessary 20mph speed limits where they are not supported by residents”.
But what does Perry mean by “reviewing”? What form might that take?
“There won’t be any meaningful reviews,” according to one Katharine Street source. “Perry has already made up his mind.
“A genuine evaluation starts with questions. Perry’s starts with the answer – his answer.”
As reported in Inside Croydon in 2024, what passes for truth and objectivity in most quarters is replaced by lies and prejudice with porkie pie Perry and the Croydon Tories.
Croydon has had its 20mph zones for almost a decade, mostly introduced on residential streets which are often narrow, and where pedestrians are going about their daily tasks.
The case for 20mph is well-made, with studies showing fewer casualties and reduced car insurance premiums, improved traffic flows and reduced fuel usage. In 2025, Transport for London published analysis of more than 150 20mph schemes, some implemented since 1989.
The report found:
- 40% reduction in the number of people killed
- 34% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured
- 75% reduction in the number of children killed
- 50% reduction in child casualties
- 35% reduction in collisions and
- 36% reduction in casualties on London borough roads.
The Mayor of London has a Vision Zero goal that aims for deaths and serious injuries to be eliminated from London’s transport network by 2041. The strategy to achieve this includes safe speeds, streets and vehicles, and safer driver behaviour.
Unfortunately, the Mayor of Croydon has zero vision.
Jason Perry is willing to risk other people’s lives and limbs to harvest votes from the extremists who would otherwise vote Reform, and was happy to help stir up disaffection among those who resorted to vandalism, racism and terrorism to oppose ULEZ.
Desperate stuff: part-time Perry is nore worried about losing votes to Reform than in doing the right thing
Figures supplied last year by the Metropolitan Police to the Putney News about 20mph enforcement across London found Croydon’s boys and girls in blue tackling speeding in 20mph zones on average less than once a week for the period 2021 to 2024.
But it is worth noting that 80% of the 212 actions that the police did take were for drivers speeding in excess of 36mph in a 20mph zones. When Perry talks about cutting crime, he’s never referring to those who do it by the way they drive.
Imagine what the outcome might be if Perry asked the Met Police to pursue rat runners and boy racers with the same rigour that he sends them out to deal with what he perceives to be a major threat to law and order, homeless people.
It’s not just bad news for people who happen to be walking, cycling or being driven when hit by one of Croydon’s dangerous drivers. Removing 20mph limits is going to hit the very people Perry claims to be championing with his planned “Motorists’ Forum”.
Increasing speed limits will turn Croydon’s residential streets back into the rat runs they were a decade ago — the cut‑throughs for delivery drivers, the shortcuts for impatient commuters and cabbies who don’t live locally and don’t care who or what they clip on the way through.
When your road becomes a high-speed shortcut, it’s not the wing mirror on Perry’s BMW iX3 that gets smashed. It’s yours. And when your car insurance premium goes up because your street or neighbourhood has become a high‑risk zone, it’s not Perry who will pay for it. You will.
How to claim an LTN refund from Croydon Council
- If you think you might be owed a refund on an LTN fine you were charged for in one of the six unlawful LTNs, between March 2024 and March 2026, this is the link to the council’s refund form: https://www.croydon.gov.uk/parking/croydon-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-ltns-penalty-refund-request
And if you live in one of the many households in the borough that don’t even own a car, such as Fairfield (where nearly two-thirds of households are car-free) or Selhurst, South Norwood or Broad Green (nearly half), you’ll be delighted that Perry will be “listening” to the Tory voters in the south of the borough, where nearly 90% own at least one car or van.
How will Perry decide that 20mph limits are “unnecessary”?
When he ripped out the cycle lane on Brighton Road, he cherry-picked support to back his decision. Only 458 people objected to the taxpayer-funded scheme to give people the choice to travel quickly, cheaply and safely by bicycle. That was less than 1% of the population of the four wards affected – Waddon, South Croydon, Purley Oaks and Riddlesdown and Purley and Woodcote. Of those who responded, 91% of them did not even live on Brighton Road or its adjoining streets.
And what next? There’s been a suggestion that Perry will issue some edict from his mayoral office in the Town Hall that could remove protections from School Streets – measures introduced to encourage parents and carers to walk their children to school, or take bikes or scooters (“active travel” it is called), and which have proved to be very popular with teaching staff and families, if not the chancers stung by a £160 fine for deciding to drive down a School Street at the busy times of day in term time.
The one saving grace for the School Streets are those ANPR cameras and their pesky Penalty Charge Notices: as Perry used to admit before he got his wrist slapped by a High Court judge, he really can’t afford to do without the revenue they generate.
The real test of Perry’s resolve over the 20mph zones will come if he decides to rip out the council’s 20mph signs and restrictions from Castlemaine Avenue in South Croydon, just across (very busy) Coombe Road from Lloyd Park, where he has his £1.2million, seven-bedroom family home.
He has form in this regard. So might piss-poor Perry pander to Reform with a few cancelled 20mph zones around the borough, but opt to keep the rat-runners away from his own front door?
Read more: School street scheme scrapped on road next to Mayor’s home
Read more: Perry’s go-slow council could take 5 years to pay LTN refunds
Read more: UnConnected Croydon where cycle lanes become dead ends
Read more: Tories accused of ‘pandering to prejudice’ over cycle lanes
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P P PERRY is an idiot !
Start by prosecuting drivers above 20 mph limit such dangerous driving! Perry is endangering us😳
Excellent news! Well done Mayor Perry. Get rid of unnecessary 20 mph limits and free us from the Labour- typical means of control. Hopefully he will start with Purley Downs Road and Pampisford Road and urge the police to re-direct the scarce resources they will save to more important crimes such as shop thefts and car thefts.
A lovely piece of emotive writing but… Mark Drakeford was hugely confident in 2022 that what everyone in Wales really wanted was for all roads in Wales to be 20mph with no exceptions for common sense. And how many Assembly seats does Labour have in Wales today? 9. Because in the privacy of the ballot box where people can cock a deaf ‘un to emotional blackmail the box marked “terminal boredom and misery in pursuit of the puritanical vision zero” isn’t that appealing … Particularly in areas of lower population density. Instead they ticked the boxes marked Plaid & Reform…. After all, if they’re going to be sneered at as Reform types anyway… Outside Zone 3 trying to bring in 20 zones everywhere is defying political gravity… I think anyway …but no doubt you think it’s an accident we have a Tory Mayor and these things are unrelated…?
What an excellent,and brave, comment.
Plaid Cymru supported the Welsh Labour party in bringing in 20mph limits to make the roads safer for everyone in their nation.
They are now the largest party in the Senedd following the 2026 elections. Deform and the Welsh Tories both pledged to get rid of 20mph, but like Labour, the Conservative vote collapsed and Farage’s fascists didn’t get the results they wanted. That was despite a lie campaign that claimed the safer roads would cost the Welsh economy £9 billion.
Plaid , with support from Labour and the Greens, are highly unlikely to make all the roads in the principality more dangerous. They have however undertaken to review Labour’s implementation which they described as “a mess”.
Your sneering about “emotive writing” and “emotional blackmail” marks you out as a Mr Toad, not to mention borderline sociopath; if someone you cared about had been intimidated or hit by an impatient driver, you might just change your mind.
Oh, and it’s “crash”, not “accident”; the latter describes your conception
Perry did not make this an election issue in Croydon. He released his manifesto barely a week before polling day. So you can’t really ascribe his very narrow election victory to this single policy.
And you also overlook how the 20mph restrictions are actually effective in Wales, where there’s been a 22% reduction in collisions.
440,000 people signed a petition against Drakeford’s blanket 20mph policy. He had to water it down. Lee Waters, deputy minister for climate change who led the 20mph rollout resigned saying everyone kept being beastly to him on twitter. Ofcourse now Welsh Labour says that the policy was “miscommunicated” because I suppose that sounds better that “we were a bit fanatical about 20mph limits and our attempt to socially engineer people out of their addiction to cars went badly pear shaped”.
I see that Morgan McSweeney is saying now that Labour wasn’t prepared for government, and that sending Peter Mandelson to Washington as Ambassador was a mistake as well. Who’d have guessed?
Labour has had more than one instance of “miscommunication” over the past couple of years.
It’s a good euphemism for saying they fucked up. Which they manage to do, even with sensible, progressive policies that help people.
And just before the last Mayoral election he removed the cycle lane barriers from London Road between West Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond with no consultation at all.
“Just before the last Mayoral election…”.
Specifically, on Easter Monday bank holiday, when we can assume that the workmen received overtime pay. I live on London Road and have a photo of the operatives at work.
On 10th April, I emailed my local councillor, Manju Shahul-Hameed, to ask why this was done, and why it was done on a bank holiday.
She replied on 21st April telling me that he had “raised this matter with the Council to seek clarification on the reasons for the removal, the decision-making process and whether any consultation was undertaken”.
I emailed her twice after that and, on 8th June, she told me that “I will contact the Council again to request a response and action on this matter”.
After emailing Cllr Shahul-Hameed again she replied on 29th June to tell me “I have now asked the Council to respond as a matter of urgency and I am also copying in the directors responsible for this area so that the matter can be escalated.”
I also raised a Freedom of Information request to ask the same questions. The council is required to respond to FoI requests within 20 days. After 20 days, the response was (to paraphrase), “we’re too busy”.
If a private company were run like Croydon council, they’d have gone bankrupt long ago. Oh, wait a minute…!
The London Road wands protecting the cycle lane allowed cyclists to ride with a smidgen of hope that motorists wouldn’t drive into them. Now, motorists can veer in and out of the cycle lane as much as they wish. Furthermore, they can, and do, park in the cycle lane (despite double yellow lines), forcing cyclists to move out into the main carriageway.
If the council has an anti-cyclist policy that puts cyclist safety deep down in the hierarchy of priorities, why do they not openly say it and save time?
Mayor Perry deserves thanks for removing those cycle lane barriers. For the next challenge: how about removing the unnecessary cycle lane on Ampere Way and also re-visit the Brighton Road cycle lane to make modifications which would enable motorists to avoid breaking the law while they seek to keep traffic flowing and minimise exhaust emissions e.g. at the junction with Haling Park Road?
Tell you what Derek, you just write a list of the roads you drive down and tell Inside Croydon and Perry what you want done to them. Don’t hold back.
Cycle lanes? Gone.
Bus lanes? Gone.
Pesky pedestrian zebra crossings? Gone.
Time-wasting traffic lights? Gone.
Pavements too wide? Widen the road instead!
Speed humps? Gone.
Pay for parking? No more.
20mph limits? Gone.
30mph? On a borough A-road? 40mph it is!
As Piss-Poor likes to tell us, he’s “listening”, and now that he’s “fixed the finances”, there’ll be no problem in getting your wishes fulfilled
May I ask all those commentators on here how they suggest a blind person is supposed to safely cross a side street intersecting with a main road safely if drivers are permitted to drive up to 40 MPH? Given silent vehicles, background noise and all the other ambient sounds it is very hard to do safely. I ask as around a month ago I was hit by 2 separate cars — one crossing a road like the one described above and the other crossing a petrol station forecourt — below 20 MPH and I stand a much better chance of not being significantly hurt, or perhaps worse still my cane being broken if drivers remain below 20.
What about rat runs. We have plenty of narrow roads in this borough, roads with cars parked on both sides. 20 MPH is absolutely plenty on these roads and to allow people to go faster places children, the disabled and the elderly at unnecessary additional risk.
On what roads in Croydon is it legally possible to drive at 40 mph? You can’t even drive over the flyover at 40 anymore even though it’s physically impossible to run over any pedestrians on it because there are no pavements? Still I suppose there’s the outside risk that someone might perambulate down the central reservation and we must guard ourselves against every possible eventuality if we hope to reach vision zero. I can only think of the south end of the Purley Way? Maybe somewhere out towards Selsdon or New Addington? I noticed the pointless chevrons and unused lorry parking bays have disappeared from the north bound carriageway of Roman Way which I think is technically 40 for a couple of hundred meters … ? That’s the only other 40 zone that springs to mind? 20 kind of works in Lambeth and Southwark. I get what they’re trying to do… and although it’s tediously slow it does create a nice atmosphere… but out here? 20 all down the Purley Way? That said the number of times I’ve been diverted off the Purley Way due to a near fatal car crash… You have to wonder how people manage to turn their cars over going to MandS or Lidl in a 30 zone full of traffic lights but it seems to happen on a regular…. Sometimes I think the problem is you can’t fix stupid …