Business ‘improvement’ district has received hundreds of thousands of pounds of public cash while Tory Mayor was one of its directors
Having a giraffe: part-time Perry and Matthew Sims, the chief exec of Croydon BID
Jason Perry, Croydon’s £86,000 per year part-time Mayor, has quit as a director of Croydon BID.
Piss-poor Perry’s resignation from the unpaid role of director of the Croydon Business Improvement District was posted to Companies House documents on Friday.
Insiders have revealed to Inside Croydon that Perry’s erstwhile fellow directors had not been informed of the Mayor’s resignation.
In Perry’s time on the board of Croydon BID, at least £243,000-worth of public money was channelled into the private company – similar to the amount that Tony Newman’s Labour council paid in mid-sized contracts to a company owned by party big-wig David Evans.
Typically of Perry, the small businessman who holds public office but avoids public scrutiny, the Mayor did not respond to Inside Croydon’s invitation to comment of his abrupt change of status or the reasons behind it.
Likewise, Matthew Sims, the chief executive of Croydon BID, did not respond to our invitation to answer a simple and straightforward question.
Perry was appointed to the Croydon BID board in 2022, shortly after the Conservative councillor and managing director of guttering suppliers Carlton Building Plastics was elected as Croydon Mayor for the first time.
Quitter: Perry has refused to explain his abrupt resignation from Croydon BID
The many potential, and obvious, conflicts of interests for Mayor Perry as head of the council while being a board member of a self-appointed lobby group for the town centre’s biggest business interests, including Westfield, seemed to escape him or were ignored by Perry.
Perry is the man who put the “moron” into oxymoronic in respect of Croydon BID. Have you seen what has happened to Croydon town centre since Croydon Business “Improvement” District was formed in 2007?
Croydon BID claims to be independent, and describes itself as “not-for-profit”, which means it channels all its income into paying the salaries and costs of Sims and six other staff, while funding a succession of lame and barely noticed publicity stunts. According to Croydon BID’s most recent company accounts (to end of March 2025) it spent £338,000 in staff salaries, social security payments and pension contributions over the course of that 12-month period.
The BID represents almost 500 businesses and organisations based in and around the town centre, who pay a levy for the privilege on top of their business rates. Smaller traders, and their interests, tend to be excluded from the BID.
Members include the Whitgift Centre and Centrale, Boxpark, Mott McDonald, LSBU Croydon and property management and estate agency Stiles Harold Williams, through which they have a close affiliation to the developers’ group, Develop Croydon. Have you seen what has happened to Croydon town centre since “Develop” Croydon was formed in 2010?
While Perry was a BID board member, public money flowed via the council into the BID coffers.
Croydon BID directly received a £50,000 grant from the Borough of Culture fund, administered by the council, which was used to erect plastic giraffes around the town centre, in the cause of “boosting footfall”.
Andrew Taylor, the deputy chair of Croydon BID, a director of a hospitality business, was handed £28,000 to stage a Surrey Street Carnival. This event never took place and Taylor’s pub, Mr Fox, has since closed.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the transfer of public cash to “private” and “independent” Croydon BID was the £165,000 from the Home Office’s Safer Streets Fund “to tackle town centre crime and anti-social behaviour”, according to the council. What they actually mean was to use the funds to clear the high street of rough sleepers and street drinkers, in case they might put off passing trader from Croydon BID’s retail businesses.
Mayor Perry, while a director of private company Croydon BID, was directly responsible for routing this public cash into private hands, “through a formal collaboration”, according to the council in December 2023.
The money is being used for what they are now calling “street rangers” – they really mean PCN bounty hunters – and a radio system between BID members and the external security contractors.
Where this re-directing of public cash appears devious is that, because Croydon BID is contracting the bounty hunters, the arrangements with the private security firm are placed outside the public scrutiny that would be available if they were paid with the Home Office grant by the local authority.
Despite resigning from Croydon BID, Perry retains other directorships in at least two other private companies (including his struggling plastic retailer), so he remains a part-time Mayor and a full-time liability.
Read more: Perry is director of company handed £50,000 culture grant
Read more: Mayor Perry is failing to ‘fix the finances’ at his own family firm
Read more: A town centre amble that goes from the sublime to ridiculous
Read more: Croydon BID’s latest lame stunt: a 15-foot-tall Christmas elf
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Opening Haling Grove toilets is about his level – if only for a photo opportunity.
As Croydon Council are bankrupt, heavily in debt, not supposed to spend money on anything non-essential, and run by (ineffectual) Government Commissioners, preceded by an equally ineffectual Improvement Panel, why was the powerless and piss-poor mayor able to give grants to his mates at the (ironically-named) Business Improvement District at all ?
Typical of piss poor. How did he find 30000 dim witted Croydon residents to vote for him?
They didn’t necessarily vote for Perry they voted to stop the worst council in the country from getting in power again. Remember the multi million pound debt, the small inner circle who grossly mismanaged our council tax, Brick by Brick, £30 million wasted on buying a loss making hotels and so on. Any alternative had to be better, and it is.
The multi-million-pound debt was accumulating from 2010, when under a Conservaative administration, including Perry, they paid way over the odds for Fisher’s Folly as part of the disastrous CCURV joint venture with John Laing, and by 2014 owed £800million.
In other factual inaccuracies, the Croydon Park Hotel was bought as a development opportunity, not as a going-concern hotel, and there remains questions to be answered over why the council agreed the purchase price it paid. As there remains questions to be answered over the council selling the property for less than it paid for it, under orders from the then Conservative government.
As piss-poor Perry demonstrates on a daily basis, “any alternative” is not better. Just more incompetence piled upon incompetence and hubris.
Instead of getting these 6 figure grants to build woke signs, build giraffes and stage events no one gives a shit about, wouldn’t it better to use this money to PAY high end shops / restaurants to open up in Croydon. I.e. permanent fixtures because everyone else is leaving. I.e. John Lewis, Mercato Metropolitano, Market Halls etc.etc. because since inception BID is a total failure…and the derelict town centre is proof.
You can’t use arts grants to rent retail premises.
You might wonder why members of Croydon BID aren’t complaining about the development blight in the town centre. And then you look at the board members: Perry (until last Friday), Westfield, the Whitgift Centre, Centrale and the Whitgift Foundation, all backed up by Stiles Harold Williams.
These are the interests served by Croydon BID, no one else.
What exactly is a “woke sign” ??