CROYDON IN CRISIS: Did Mayor Perry’s appointments committee bother to conduct a full background check into the employment record of the man they have just handed the council’s top job and £1,500 per day pay?
A big Croydon welcome to £1,500 per day interim chief executive Mike Jackson, who starts work at the cash-strapped council today.
Interim’s interim: Mike Jackson starts at Croydon Council today
Jackson is Croydon’s third CEO in the space of 10 months, and might yet give way early next year to a fourth CEO, as his new employers are advertising for someone to take over in a permanent capacity, offering £275,000 per year – making it one of the best-paid roles in local authorities in England.
Croydon Council is £1.7bn in debt and has been in special measures since 2020, with government-appointed Commissioners effectively in control since July 2025.
Now while Mike Jackson is very likely to have been fully aware of the straitened circumstances of the authority when he applied for the Croydon interim role, there are growing doubts over whether the cross-party appointments committee, chaired by serial incompetent Mayor Jason Perry, ever bothered to make the most basic of background checks.
Jackson’s last job was as CEO of Richmond and Wandsworth boroughs, where under an innovative dual authority arrangement, he was among the country’s highest-paid civic servants on £281,443 base salary.
Until, that is, July 2024 when Jackson announced he was standing down “for personal reasons”. Coincidentally, this was soon after, as Returning Officer for the General Election, Jackson managed to lose 6,558 votes in Putney.
Jackson has not held a full-time role since.
Until today, of course, with Croydon’s taxpayers funding his interim pay, which works out at a rate of £360,000 per year.
Croydon residents are also paying the eye-watering fees for the executive headhunters GatenbySanderson, who put together the four-person shortlist for the interim role while starting the recruitment process for the permanent chief exec. Those two tasks are likely to cost Croydon Council north of £150,000.
The council, of course, already has a exec director of human resources, Dean Shoesmith, who is paid a six-figure salary, supported by his own departmental staff, who might usually be expected to look after matters such as recruitment.
Now, though, questions are being asked about whether GatenbySanderson, or Shoesmith, researched Mike Jackson’s previous work, such as when he was employed at Norfolk County Council, and his part in a controversial episode which ultimately cost that local authority £30million.
In 2013, Jackson was working in a senior position at Norfolk County Council.
That November, Private Eye reported: “The scandal of unelected officers keeping elected councillors in the dark has reached crisis point in Norfolk. On the controversial issue of a waste incinerator for the county, councillors have complained of being bullied, misled, and refused sight of a full copy of the county’s contract” with the incinerator company.
The Eye failed to elaborate on who might have been the senior officials who were doing the bullying, misleading and withholding of key documents.
“Now they have discovered they were not told by officers [meaning council staff] in the summer that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was ‘reviewing’ its allocation of PFI credits for the incinerator, worth £169million over a 25-year period.” That’s a bit of an oversight.
“The first they knew was when the council formally announced on October 18 that DEFRA had withdrawn them, leaving Norfolk without any money to fund the burner.”
And the report added: “But the Eye has discovered that the director of environment, Mike Jackson, knew the funding was formally at risk back in June – but he never told his boss, cabinet member [Councillor] David Harrison.” Oh.
“Jackson had previously tried to convince Defra and the then environment minister, Caroline Spelman, that Norwich City Council supported the incinerator when it didn’t.” Oh again.
Public opposition: Norfolk council officials, including Mike Jackson, chose to ignore the views of Kings Lynn residents
It wasn’t just Norwich that didn’t want the incinerator.
There was widespread public opposition to the £500million scheme, opposition which was ignored by Norfolk’s then Conservative-run council. Only when the Tories lost control of Norfolk CC to a coalition did more damaging financial details emerge.
The Eye reported that pulling out of the incinerator deal “could technically bankrupt the council”.
The costs of cancelling the contract had not been factored into council budgets, the Eye reported. “Officers were so sure the contract was home and dry that they never bothered to budget for it.”
Those “officers” included Mike Jackson, who has today started lining up his pen collection and paperclips on his desk on the seventh floor of Fisher’s Folly, Croydon Council’s offices on Cost A Mint Walk – itself a project which notoriously cost more to build per square foot of office space than The Shard, an over-priced £150million building that was approved by a previous Tory-run council. The cabinet member responsible at that time was Jason Perry.
Jackson never faced any consequences for his part in the multi-million-pound clusterfuck of the unwanted and unaffordable Kings Lynn incinerator because, by the time Norfolk had forked out £30million in compensation to contractors Cory, he had already left to take on his first top job at a local authority in the West Country. Trebles all-round!
And after two years out of work, Jackson was handed the interim CEO role in Croydon by a unanimous vote of the committee chaired by piss-poor Perry. Did they really know nothing of his time at Norfolk? Or Wandsworth and Richmond? And what did they do to check?
Inside Croydon has highlighted previously the failures of proper checks when the council has taken on senior staff, such as “Interim Adam” Wilkinson, who was forced to quit his planning role in Croydon after this website had revealed that he was recruited at around the same time that his private consultancy company was being formally dissolved as a consequence of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs having the business wound-up for its failure to pay tax, owing tens of thousands of pounds.
Wilkinson was one of a series of questionable appointments made during Katherine Kerswell’s time as Croydon’s chief executive, a period which the Commissioners criticised for an over-reliance on expensive interims and even more costly outside contractors.
Expensive choices: Katherine Kerswell spent £48m on outside contractors while council chief exec, most of that approved by Mayor Perry
According to a report in the Torygraph last week, under CEO Kerswell, Croydon has spent £48million on consultants since 2020.
That might be one of the reasons Kerswell quit in a hurry last October.
It might be reasonably expected that a permanent replacement should be in place by now, 10 months later.
Except that Mayor Perry and Dean Shoesmith didn’t get round to advertise for the role until July 2026 – nine months after the vacancy occurred. Such dither and delay has effectively doubled the amount of money to be paid to expensive recruitment consultants.
Only time will tell whether those recruitment consultants have actually done a decent job to justify those massive fees.
Read more: Kerswell takes another pay-off as she quits as council’s CEO
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 PER HOUR consultant
Read more: HR director’s suspension at Sutton raises serious questions
Read more: £275,000: Loadsamoney Perry breaks the bank for new CEO
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