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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