CROYDON IN CRISIS: Transport correspondent, JEREMY CLACKSON, on how the council kept secret another devastating ruling over the Tory Mayor’s bungling over the borough’s roads
Riding the risks: cycling in Croydon has got more dangerous under Tory Mayor Perry
Not content with making Croydon’s streets less healthy and more dangerous, Croydon’s failed Mayor Jason Perry has been costing Council Tax-payers millions of pounds due to his bungling over transport grants.
This all comes on top of the £10million fiasco over unlawful LTNs – low traffic neighbourhoods – which Perry was ordered to remove by a High Court judge who ruled that the Mayor had abused his powers by using the traffic calming measures as a money-making scheme for his cash-strapped council.
And now Transport for London wants its money back, after they funded a protected cycle lane along London Road where Perry ordered the “wands” to be removed. Perry never bothered to inform City Hall over his decision.
That alone could cost Croydon Council at least £250,000 in a refund of TfL money.
But Perry’s petulance has placed Croydon in a dispute with TfL which has also cost the council another £1.65million, at least, in lost grants in the 2026-2027 financial year.
Magic wands: Mayor Perry ordered the removal of the TfL-funded wands along London Road, but never told TfL
The latest episode of incompetence at Perry’s omnishambles council came to light at a Fisher’s Folly briefing given to Councillor Stuart King, the leader of the Labour opposition group.
The safety wands were taken out along London Road on Easter Monday. Even local councillors were not informed in advance.
Perry is a serial offender as far as vanishing wands are concerned. In 2024, Perry had the wands along Brighton Road, on the main road between Purley and the town centre, ripped out, claiming they were “unpopular”.
This, of course, was just a Perry porkie: the wands were unpopular only according to the 1% of residents in Waddon, South Croydon, Purley Oaks and Riddlesdown ward and Purley and Woodcote that Perry and his council bothered to “listen” to.
No impasse: emergency vehicles were able to navigate through the heavy traffic on the Brighton Road
Perry also claimed that the wands were holding up the emergency services because motorists couldn’t pull in to get out of the way. Another Perry porkie.
It all means that TfL has chosen to deal with petulant Perry by snubbing his requests for more funding under the Local Implementation Plan. And it’s the residents of Croydon who end up losing out.
LIP funding is the annual grants system under which TfL provides boroughs with finance to improve their road and transport networks, though only in a way that is consistent with the Mayor of London’s transport strategy.
As reported to Perry’s council cabinet last December, Croydon was seeking LIP funding of £3,358,000 for 2026-2027 and £3,603,000 for 2027-2028 – totalling nearly £7million.
It was around this time that Perry and his Conservative lackeys will have been drafting their “Motorists’ Charter”. After spending two years of his first term at least tacitly condoning anti-ULEZ vandalism and opposition, Perry has gone into his second term threatening to undone many of the traffic-calming measures, often paid for by TfL, that have been introduced over the last decade.
Counting the cost of Perry: how TfL has opted to block the majority of Croydon’s asks under the LIP funding process. More than £3.5m of applications for 27-28 are also under review
Perry’s car-supremacist blundering over the cycle lane wands is not without repercussions, however.
In a letter dated April 7, Helen Cansick, TfL’s head of investment planning for healthy streets, wrote to Croydon Council: “TfL has not issued Croydon’s 2026-2027 Local Implementation Plan 9LIP) funding letter… we are no longer confident that the London Borough of Croydon is supportive of delivering the London Mayor’s transport strategy.”
This loss of confidence in piss-poor Perry came exactly one month before he was standing for re-election. Perry’s council failed to disclose that they had had a grant application for more than £3million refused.
Nor did the council share the reasons given by Cansick, which are no less devastating that the LTN judgement handed down in the High Court in March.
Cansick wrote: “There have been decisions and statements made by the executive Mayor of Croydon, Jason Perry, about three separate LIP-funded schemes which are in direct conflict with the Mayor’s transport strategy.”
In her letter, Cansick specified the humiliating High Court ruling over LTNs (which had been installed with TfL money), as well as Perry’s redesign of the Dingwall Road/Lansdown Road cycling and bus priority scheme “which introduces motorised traffic back into the area, which did not have TfL’s approval”; and “an instructio from Mayor Perry to remove cycle segregation on London Road”.
All Perry’s fault: the letter from TfL was clear as to who is to blame for the refusal to pay Croydon its LIP fund money this years
These complaints from a senior City Hall official all specify Jason Perry as the source of the dispute.
TfL is demanding that the council submit a new LIP application for this year. TfL might also require Croydon – that’s you and me, not Perry personally, more’s the pity – to repay the £235,000 LIP funding the council was previously awarded for the cycle lanes.
Perry’s minions claim that the London Road cycle lane wands were removed because they were “not meeting the objectives of the scheme”.
The objectives were, surely, to provide safer streets and a safer cycling network. Wand binned, council officials have been instructed to draw up plans for a paint job on London Road. Perhaps they have sourced some special magic paint that generates an invisible safety shield protecting people on bicycles from motorists driving dangerously?.
The current and planned arrangements mean that anyone choosing to cycle between Purley and Thornton Heath Pond will be at greater risk of potential collision than before. The council’s designs fail to meet either TfL or Department for Transport design standards.
Petulant Perry: Croydon’s Mayor is making our streets less safe
According to the council, Croydon has no “active travel strategy”. Nor does it bother to to monitor progress in increasing cycling or walking (modes of “active travel”).
That’s awkward. Anyone would think that Perry really does want fewer people to walk or go by bike. Or by bus, for that matter.
Tom Bowell, recently appointed to Labour’s shadow cabinet at the Town Hall, told Inside Croydon: “We know that the cycle wands were not by any means perfect. We heard businesses and residents raise legitimate concerns about them. But the right response should have been evidence-led and focused on drawing up new measures that work for all road users.”
Councillor Bowell, whose Town Hall brief is “streets and enforcement” is calling for “genuine consultation” about “the future of active travel along this busy corridor and making our roads safer in other parts of the borough”, saying that that is “consultation the Conservative Mayor has failed to hold”.
Indeed, when it comes to consultation, or even hard facts, it appears that the council has not been doing its job. Councillor King noted that council staff have not provided data on road collisions before and after the introduction of the wands and defenders on the cycle lanes. King has requested that those figures are made public.
A Katharine Street source said: “That will keep some poor sod in Fisher’s Folly terribly busy.”
And they added: “There’s only one reason that they’ve been keeping any data secret up till now: it’s because the hard facts will prove that Perry’s been telling lies to suit his ‘Motorist Charter’ agenda.”
Read more: Mayor Perry’s ‘Motorists’ Charter’ to deliver more accidents, higher car insurance and even put children’s safety at risk
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: Tories accused of ‘pandering to prejudice’ over cycle lanes
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Perry hasn’t got a Cabinet, just an echo chamber. He only ‘listens’ to people who agree with him, an extreme form of confirmation bias. He won’t take advice from experts if it doesn’t fit his warped views of the world.
This wouldn’t matter much if he was the only victim of these tendencies. Unfortunately for us, we’re stuck with this prize pillock and his blundering until May 2030, or even longer than that.
A big sarcastic round of applause to the DEMOC campaigners who landed us in this situation, where a fatuous narcissistic oaf with the support of less than one in eight voters can cause so much damage to our borough