CROYDON IN CRISIS: After four years of record Council Tax rises and record borrowing from central government, the borough’s bungling Mayor appears to think that the new occupier of No10 Downing Street might solve his problems.
By our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE
Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor. clearly has too much time on his hands.
On £86,000 per year, piss-poor Perry has been reduced to turning up for photo-shoots with a pair of pantomime scissors to open public lavs, or to pinch a ride on a kiddies’ roundabout – jobs for which we are also paying a ceremonial mayor and deputy.
One year since the government parachuted in Commissioners because Perry and his dysfunctional council could not be trusted with the borough’s finances, and now the Mayor has so little to do, he’s taken up letter-writing.
On hearing that another local authority mayor, Andy Burnham, had managed to become Prime Minister, Perry thought it a good idea to write a begging letter to No10 Downing Street asking for yet more money.
In Perry’s four years in charge at Croydon Town Hall, his council has needed £343million in emergency bail-outs from central government.
The council’s total debt under Perry has ballooned to £1.7billion.
And that’s despite Perry hiking Council Tax by 33% since 2023.
Going up: in the four years since Jason Perry has been Mayor of Croydon, the borough’s total debt has soared to a record £1.7bn
Yet Perry, like a slightly-too-well-fed Oliver Twist, thinks it a good idea to fire off a begging letter. “Please Mr Burnham? Can I have millions more?”
This is the same Jason Perry who, among the first things he did at this week’s meeting of full council at the Town Hall, was the push through an amendment to give a pay rise to his mate, Jason Cummings, who now will be paid £45,872 per year in allowances. It’s a promotion, and a reward for failure. Cummings has spent the past four years as Perry’s cabinet member for… finances.
The following day, Perry nodded through proposals that will pay the council’s new chief executive £275,000 – a 50 grand pay increase compared to incumbent Elaine Jackson’s current wage packet. Many local council figures regard the Croydon pay offer as “danger money”.
And Perry also agreed to pay up to £1,500 per day for an interim CEO to fill in for interim CEO Jackson between September and, at the earliest, January 2027.
This interim’s rate of £1,500 per day would work out at more than £350,000 per year if paid over a 12-month period.
Bog standard: £86,000 pa Mayor Perry has so little to do, he’s taken on ceremonial tasks from the civic mayor
Yet despite this apparent ease in spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money, Croydon’s Mayor somehow thought it appropriate to send another begging letter to the government.
Unusually for Perry, he did not have his letter, signed by him as “Executive Mayor of Croydon”, published on the council website. But he’s posted it in full on the Croydon Conservatives’ website, so we can be sure that this is political gesture politics, rather than any real effort to negotiate a real deal for the borough.
In his letter to PM Burnham, Perry writes: “Over the last four years we have taken difficult decisions to stabilise the council, strengthen governance and rebuild trust. We have made significant progress, but there is still much more to do.
“My aspiration is straightforward: a cleaner, safer and more prosperous Croydon, with thriving neighbourhoods, successful businesses, strong public services and a council that lives within its means.” Perry needed another £119million bail-out just a few months ago to balance his and Cummings’ latest unbalanced budget.
According to Perry’s letter to the Prime Minister, “Local government needs a better settlement from Whitehall.” Our Mayor appears to have forgotten 14 years of austerity under Conservative-led governments – governments under Johnson and Truss, Cameron, May and Sunak – that brought us to this point, without a murmur of dissent from Tory loyalist Perry.
Part-time Perry then laid out a little wish list of his own for the Prime Minister, including “longer-term funding settlements, allowing councils to… invest in prevention rather than crisis management”, for “business rate reform”, “reform of temporary accommodation funding”, and even “stronger regeneration, land assembly and compulsory purchase powers, helping unlock stalled sites, build homes and support town centre renewal”.
Seriously: this was a gold medal performance in gas-lighting. Has Perry been swotting up on the manifesto of his Labour rival for Croydon Mayor, Rowenna Davis? Or reading the Inside Croydon columns of Andrew Fisher?
And this is what we might have won: Labour’s losing mayoral candidate already has a working relationship with Andy Burnham. Jason Perry is reduced to patronising the new PM
Presumably, Perry would have had to read iC on his computer at home: so paranoid has the authority become under Perry’s pathetic leadership, council-owned computers are blocked from accessing this website.
“These reforms are not simply about giving councils more powers,” patronising Perry wrote to the PM. “They are about creating the conditions for places to become more self-reliant, more resilient and less dependent on central government intervention.
“Croydon is determined to stand on its own two feet,” Perry wrote. That sounds like more of Perry’s eye-watering Council Tax hikes on their way…
Councils, according to Perry, need to be rewarded for growth, “not simply tasked with managing the consequences of a system that is too often fragmented and short-term”.
So, with the Commissioners firmly in charge leaving part-time Perry nothing much to do, our £86,000 per year Mayor is reduced to doing performative letter-writing, supporting many of the policies he was dismissing just a few weeks ago.
And when he is next asked what he has done for Croydon, after four years of bungling and incompetence, Perry will point to his letter and blame Andy Burnham and the government for only bailing him out with £300million…
Read more: £275,000: Loadsamoney Perry breaks the bank for new CEO
Read more: Perry’s council to face Judicial Review over Access Croydon
Read more: Perry promises – again – Bridge to Nowhere to open ‘next year’
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Perry is making two mistakes in my opinion. First he’s making his plea on behalf of just one council. If he combined with other councils, and preferably showed public support through a petition or similar, it would carry a lot more weight.
Secondly he doesn’t appear to be asking for the most important thing – writing off by the Government of a large part of the £1.7bn debt. Without this the Council’s position is unsustainable.
Funny isn’t it? In 2014 the money for councils was taken away by the Tories. Admittedly there was probably a lot of wasted money, but that doesn’t seem to have changed, it’s just being lost in a different way.
This change in direction forced the councils to try to be inventive and make money for themselves, but not being voted in as business people this was never going to work. Tory naivety or deliberate manipulation, choose whichever you want.
Move forward to the present day, a decade later, now a Tory is asking for money back, not from the Tories, but from Labour, who were against removing the money in the first place in 2014. I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on them.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Who on earth voted for this incompetent again? And for what possible reason? It beggars belief 🤦🏽♀️
Closing libraries and garden centres did absolutely NOTHING to getting that £1.4bn debt pile down then . More of a statement to put the Labour Party down and defer blame probably. Good PR though as it got PPP reelected. Croydon Council owns 127 parks so Burnham will probably take that in exchange for the £1.7bn Croydon owes them.
If someone did acquire Croydon’s parks and open spaces from Croydon Council, they could not fail to do a better job of looking after them.
Remember, Perry has to have conflict with things to cover up his continual failings and find someone to blame.
Which is why the draft London Plan and its Green Belt proposals is a political gift for him.
A gift? Yes but PPP will more than likely mess it up.
Burnham will not indulge Croydon with more cash because its mayor is a Tory who happens to be wholly incompetent.
“including “longer-term funding settlements, “
The man’s an idiot. Does he not read his own budget papers?
This years funding settlement IS for three years covering 26/27, 27/28 and 28/29 which enables councils to plan better. Does he not remember the year on year settlements in the past?
As to more money that boat has sailed. This year also implemented a new settlement formula. Opening it up Croydon opens it up for other councils as well.
Burnham made Manchester a thriving economy as many big businessss switched from rip off London to low cost Manchester. That along with huge proactive Saudi investment and low interest government housing loans also contributed to prosperity. Not sure if Croydon Council are solvent, but if not, they have nothing to lose so perhaps Mayor Perry should take a leaf out of the ex mayor of Manchester’s book and reduce business rates lower than anything in London and switch URW and other developers for Saudi investment because most of the time they get stuff done. He should take the risk as Burnham’s focus is more Midlands and will not be favourable to any borough in London , let alone write off debts or give out extra loans.
Can anyone remind us who it was, during this year’s local election campaign, that scoffed at the proposal to use CPO powers to rid the town centre of “corporate squatters”, and to replace them with a consortium of willing, and able, developers?
The heart has been ripped out of Croydon town centre, not just by Westfield over the past 14 to 15 years, but also by the Chinese owners of the Nestle tower and St George’s Walk over the last seven or eight years. The buddleia behind the hoardings is close to 15ft high. The protective shutters on Segas House – a heritage building with huge potential – are so old that they have warped or fallen off altogether.
None of this has been caused by the council’s financial collapse. All of it has been caused by successive councils prostrating themselves for (certain) developers, failing to act in the broader interests of the whole of the borough, and failing to act as a “critical friend” and insist that the land owners behave properly.
And Perry’s has been the biggest appeaser of developers over his council career, going back to before 2010 and his cheer-leading for the arrival of Westfield.