Not waving but drowning: five years since he promised to reopen Purley Pool ‘immediately’, now Jason Perry says he has no idea when it might open
Not for the first time, Croydon’s Mayor is out of his depth when facing the most straightforward of questions, reports PEARL LEE
Five years after promising to reopen Purley Pool “immediately” as part of his original election campaign, and Croydon Mayor Jason Perry has been forced to admit he has no idea when work on the £60million scheme might begin.
“I can’t give you a time right now,” Perry was forced to admit to a resident last night when asked about the long-promised pool.
Meet the nightmare: Perry’s little publicity stunt back-fired badly when he met a resident with a digital recorder and proper questions
Perry was caught while playing with a bucket and spade in his own little sand pit in a town centre multi-storey car park.
Croydon’s £86,000 per year Mayor thought he was doing a bit of proactive public relations, meeting residents at Costa del Croydon while accompanied by his own personal propaganda minder. They clearly hoped to deliver a few pat answers without having to face anything resembling proper scrutiny. Just the way Perry likes it…
But the Tory Mayor was put on the back foot when one resident arrived and began recording her questions, and Perry’s piss-poor answers.
The audio from that encounter has, inevitably, made it on to social media. Perry’s nervousness about being recorded can be heard in his voice. In less than seven minutes, Perry delivered six outright lies (the council’s finances are “stabilised” he tried to claim more than once).
It was when asked about his 2021 flagship policy of re-opening the Purley Pool that Perry was at his most unconvincing, and was found to be completely out of his depth.
Planning permission for a controversial scheme involving 220 high-end retirement flats with a public pool attached was granted by Croydon Council in February 2025.
Since then… tumbleweed from the scheme’s developers, Polaska, who are controlled by secretive company registered in the British Virgin Islands tax haven.
“Purley Pool’s still happening. It’s taken longer than I would have liked,” Perry told the citizen journalist armed with a digital recorder.
Asked when work on the pool might realistically happen, Perry began to flounder as if he had been chucked in at the deep end without his arm bands on.
“I can’t give you a time right now,” said Perry.
“Of course it’s on the agenda, we’ve gone through the whole process, got a planning permission, done a planning application. It’s going to take time to build a pool. You don’t build pools in five minutes.”
Better than nothing: the planning committee was given the ‘like it or lump it’ approach to Polaska’s ‘imperfect’ scheme at the meeting in February
It took less than three years to build Waddon Leisure Centre, the last new swimming facility to be built in Croydon, which opened in 2013.
When he was seeking people’s votes the first time round, at the 2022 local elections, Perry was claiming that the existing Purley Pool and leisure centre could all be repaired and reopened using less than £3million from levies paid by property developers.
Five years later, the pool remains closed, the leisure centre is derelict.
Perry’s original, “fully costed” election pledge was abandoned after he took office in May 2022. Perry had fucked up majorly – or he had lied to the public. Structural surveys found that the ageing leisure centre needed substantially more work than Perry had claimed throughout his campaign.
The Mayor then threw his support behind a very different scheme from Polaska, who appeared as the long-term leaseholder of the council-owned site.
backing developers: MP Chris Philp spoke in favour of developers Polaska, and against the objections raised by seven residents’ associations
Polaska wants to demolish the pool, the former Sainsbury’s supermarket and Purley’s multi-storey car park. In their place would go the expensive “later living” flats, buildings reaching as high as 12 storeys, and a new leisure centre and 25-metre pool.
Polaska was forced to revise its original planning application after City Hall condemned it as “wholly unacceptable” because it offered no affordable housing on publicly owned land.
In February 2025, the scheme was granted planning permission, by a planning committee which has a Conservative councillor as its chair and following speeches in support from the Conservative MP for Croydon South and the Conservative London Assembly Member for Croydon and Sutton.
But receiving planning permission and actually building anything are two very different matters. Developers generally have three years from the date planning permission is granted to begin construction work on an approved full scheme. Polaska are already half-way through that period. There’s still no firm construction programme.
City Hall sources suggest that Polaska has become uncomfortable with some of the conditions attached to their planning permission. As well as the costs of providing a public swimming pool at no cost to the public – a key promise from Perry when Polaska first came on board.
Broken promise: Perry joined loca protesters six years ago, but has failed to reopen Purley Pool
Croydon Council has refused to disclose important details of its agreements with the developers, citing “commercial confidentiality”. Planning documents have also revealed that the cash-strapped council could be required to subsidise part of the supposedly “free” leisure centre’s construction costs.
In April, council officials used public money to place a large banner outside the abandoned pool claiming that the regeneration project was being “driven” by Perry. The fact is, the Purley Pool project is stalled.
The banner was hurriedly removed after the council’s Monitoring Officer was forced to agree that its promotion of the Conservative Mayor during the election period broke the law.
Months later, and there’s still no sign of this project, supposedly “driven” by human dynamo Jason Perry, even letting off the handbrake, never mind getting into first gear.
Read more: Council now to pay subsidy for Perry’s ‘free’ Purley Pool
Read more: Residents scathing of report on Purley retirement flats
Read more: Who can afford £4,000 per month for Purley later living flats?
Read more: GLA rejects Polaska Purley Pool plan as ‘wholly unacceptable’
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“The audio from that encounter has, inevitably, made it on to social media.” – got a link?
Yes. But we don’t perform a service for anonymous email accounts.
You have the quotes. Verbatim.
I thought Piss-Poor secured his second term of failure as Croydon’s mayor by promising not to have any housing developments in the south of the borough, but he and the dodgy Chris Philp, are only thinking about providing another swimming pool in Purley IF they can also get planning permission for hundreds of flats in the centre of Purley built above the swimming pool.
It is good job that your photo of Piss Poor Perry looking “all at sea” in a swimming has him wearing a suit, as a photo of the man who ate all the pies in Croydon n swimming trunks would be X-rated!
Perry? Human dynamo? Clueless clot, more like it.
You could have ended that headline at “idea”…..
This was a major plank in Perry’s first Mayoral Campaign and he relentlessly made it the forefront of that Campaign. Did I miss the bit where he said he wasn’t going to deliver it in his second term?
Let’s face it he is masterful at non-delivery.
Perpetual Piss Poor Perry found Pissing into Planned Pool that’s been Protracted.