It’s not just failed Mayor Jason Perry who has been found to have acted unlawfully, as other Croydon Conservatives show a casual disregard for the law which is costing residents millions of pounds, and putting cyclists’ lives at risk. By JEREMY CLACKSON, transport correspondent
Months after Inside Croydon broke the news that Croydon council had unlawfully removed taxpayer-funded safer cycling infrastructure, Croydon West’s Labour MP Sarah Jones and Will Norman, the walking and cycling commissioner at Transport for London, finally joined the fray.
MP Jones said that Croydon’s “funding for safer crossings, better bus journeys, improved cycling infrastructure and road improvements has now been put on hold because of the Mayor’s catastrophic failure to work constructively with TfL”.
Norman posted on Bluesky that, “Croydon unlawfully removed a safety scheme paid for with public money. Rightly, TfL have required the money to be repaid and paused future funding – subject to the council submitting a revised plan that meets the requirements.”
This has been met with a hysterical response from Mayor Perry’s most loyal lapdog, Alasdair Stewart. Promoted in the post-election reshuffle, Stewart is now Perry’s cabinet muppet responsible for our roads, for which the councillor for Purley Oaks and Riddlesdown trousers more than £41,000 per year in SRA – Special Responsibility Allowance – and basic councillor allowance.
Unlawful: TfL’s Will Norman has not been impressed by Perry’s petulance, and wasting of public money
In an hysterical fit of hypocrisy, Stewart told the London Standard, “Ms Jones has been a Croydon MP for almost a decade. Her residents may reasonably ask what she has delivered of comparable significance before she issues another party-political attack.”
Stewart then claimed that, “Jason Perry and Conservative councillors were elected to listen to residents, not rubber-stamp schemes they have made clear over many years they do not want. We will continue standing up for their priorities.”
Stewart must regard anyone who wants to ride a bicycle as “not a resident”, and therefore not to be listened to, after he and Croydon’s failed Mayor have managed to make Croydon a more dangerous place to cycle, something which was never mentioned in Croydon Tories’ election manifesto.
And as this website has highlighted, ripping out cycle lane wands and not bothering to tell TfL comes at a cost: around £15million in a single year for the cash-strapped council, if you include the refunds for those fined in Perry’s unlawful LTNs, all of which will be paid for by Croydon’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers.
Not that it matters to Stewart, who is meant to chair the council’s “Croydon Advisory Forum on Active, Sustainable and Accessible Transport”.
The forum has not met since March 3. It seems unlikely it will ever meet again, with Perry, and Stewart in tow, committed instead to a “Motorists’ Forum”.
This new body “will bring together representatives from TfL, the emergency services, residents’ associations and other organisations to help make travelling around Croydon safer and easier”. Despite being statutory consultees on council transport matters such as disabled parking bays, the Croydon branch of London Cycling Campaign has not received an invitation. It is not the only example of Perry’s Tories failing to meet their legal responsibilities.
Stewart’s promotion into Perry’s inner circle came as a replacement for the notoriously lazy Scott Roche. It signals a right-ward shift in Perry’s stance on green and ethical issues. Roche was cabinet member for streets and environment. Stewart is cabinet member for streets and enforcement.
In his register of interests on the council website, Stewart openly admits his membership of Toby Young’s racist, transphobic extremist “Free Speech Union”. Neopbaby Young’s Union gained particular notoriety when it supported a Northampton Tory councillor’s wife, Lucy Connolly, after she posted online “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. She was referring to Muslim asylum seekers, who had wrongly been blamed on social media for the murders of children in Southport. Those crimes were in fact committed by a British-born Christian. But, hey: free speech!
Perry and Stewart proclaimed a commitment to making Croydon safer and healthier by supporting residents to switch to cleaner transport, which they say “is a key step in reducing carbon emissions locally”. But that’s only if you want to travel in a great big electric car, like the one Perry owns.
Safe roads: cycle lanes with wands operate perfectly well in other London boroughs. Just not in Perry’s Croydon
Perry’s undisguised war on cyclists saw him order the ripping out of wands that offered some protection to the cycle lane on Brighton Road. Perry claimed that they were unsafe, something at odds with those being used safely in other parts of London, including on TfL roads such as Grosvenor Road in Westminster.
Removing the wands on London Road was an act of malice aforethought.
An eyewitness, Adrian Waters, noted that they were removed on Easter Monday 2026. So council contractors working on Bank Holiday double time, at least.
That act of civic vandalism was one month before the council elections. By committing his sabotage while he still could, Perry wasn’t taking any chances. Had he lost to Labour’s Rowenna Davis, he would have saddled her administration with the bill for reinstatement.
In a video released just days before the election, Perry made all sorts of false claims about the wands: they caused congestion (they really don’t), they held up emergency vehicles (wrong again), they hurt local businesses (no evidence) and there was “popular support” for their removal.
It’s familiar territory for pro-car Perry, who has no qualms about having the public pay to satisfy his personal prejudice.
Faced with (belated) criticism from MP Jones and TfL’s Norman, Perry, was caught out in a crisis of his own making. Just as he did with his costly LTNs blunder, Perry opened his mouth and put his foot in it. He made a glib response that the council will repay TfL. Except it’s not Perry’s money. It’s ours.
How to claim an LTN refund from Croydon Council
- If you think you might be owed a refund on an LTN fine you were charged for in one of the six unlawful LTNs, between March 2024 and March 2026, this is the link to the council’s refund form: https://www.croydon.gov.uk/parking/croydon-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-ltns-penalty-refund-request
There’s also the small matter of the wands removal being unlawful. It’s part of a pattern with Perry for ignoring the law when it doesn’t suit him, as with the LTNs, and with his association with anti-ULEZ Facebook groups whose members included Islamophobic extremists, one of whom blew up a camera in Sidcup with a homemade bomb.
Freedom of Information requests to Croydon Council asking for documentation concerning the wands removal have remained unanswered – another instance of Perry’s council failing to meet its legal duties.
Cycling activist Alan Malarkey recently wrote to all of Croydon’s councillors and Mayor Perry about the removal of safer cycling facilities on the borough’s main roads controlled by the council. Some of their comments reveal a lot, including more casual disregard for the law by Croydon Conservatives.
Simon Brew, Conservative councillor for Purley and Woodcote (pictured left), wrote that “most drivers respect the white lines most of the time, but if traffic is held up by an obstruction and no cyclist is using the lane, it makes sense briefly to move into the cycle lane to bypass the obstruction”. Poor old Simon: he’d fail his driving test if he followed that advice with an examiner beside him. If the white line is not dotted but solid, then crossing it is an offence under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984.
For his part, Stewart told Malarkey that “I’m proud to be part of a Croydon Council administration that believes in ensuring our road infrastructure works for everyone – pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, bus users, tradespeople, couriers etc”.
Ignoring his council code of conduct obligation to treat people with respect, Stewart accused Malarkey of being a “cycling fanatic”.
Perry and Stewart appear to be working increasingly closely, with the Mayor’s very ambitious protégé being regarded as the rising star of Croydon’s Tory group. It’s a low bar, though. A very low bar.
Their partnership has become known by Katharine Street insiders as Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Their latest bollock-drop being the fact that Croydon Council’s investment in cycling to allow more people to go by bike was based on… Conservative government policy.
Read more: Borough’s motorists will be forced to pay for Perry’s mistakes
Read more: High Court judge orders end to Croydon’s ‘unlawful’ LTNs
Read more: Tories accused of ‘pandering to prejudice’ over cycle lanes
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I hope that Conservative Croydon council and Labour City Hall come to a resolution on this.
The loss of road safety money is likely to lead to serious injury or death for highway users in Croydon, including pedestrians.
Surely the resolution is for Croydon to comply with the terms of the grant money it accepted from TfL.
What other resolution is there?
This isn’t free money for Croydon / PPP to just do what it likes with. It’s for specific purposes.
TfL needs to be sure it will be spent onto those purposes and until Croydon does so it’s right to go slow on paying anymore money over.
Mayor Perry is happy to take responsibility for the council’s (few and far between) successes. Why can he not take responsibility for blunders such as illegally modifying infrastructure which result in the council paying back money to TfL?
I would like to see him in court and suffer a punishment for such cavalier behaviour. Only when he personally suffers consequences will he abandon his disregard for the law.
In a social media post days before the May 2026 election, Jason Perry said that the offending items were “Labour’s wands”. Google Street View tells a different story: https://snu.to/SouthCroydonBusGarageOctober2022 shows the scene on Brighton Road in October 2022, after Mayor Perry had been in office for 5 months. There is a complete absence of wands outside the South Croydon bus garage.
That location is significant, as it was where a man cycling into Croydon in November 2023 crashed into a “defender” left invisible in the dark, as reported by Inside Croydon https://insidecroydon.com/2023/11/17/crunch-cyclist-seriously-injured-after-crash-in-sabotaged-lane/
The June 2024 view of the same location, https://snu.to/SouthCroydonBusGarageJune2024, clearly shows wands with defenders, which is two years and one month after Jason Perry became Mayor. They were not “Labour’s wands” as he claimed, they were his.
There’s a similar discrepancy on London Road. Google Street View shows that the wands in place in October 2020 https://snu.to/5UtOaz were a clearly visible fluorescent orange and white, as used today by Transport for London on some of their main roads. By March 2025, https://snu.to/KingswoodRoadLondonRoadMarch2025 shows they were the kind that Mayor Perry deemed unsafe and ordered their removal.
It looks very much like the unsafe wands weren’t inherited but were installed on his watch.
Evidenced truths and highlighting attempts to rewrite wrongdoing and gaslight anyone not compliant with their sleazey style of administration. Shameful bunch – well commented Austen
The location of the wands caused issues in some areas. They seemed random and didn’t cover a whole road making cycling more dangerous as cyclists had to pull out into the traffic when the wands stopped suddenly.
The wands on Brighton Rd Purley obstructed the traffic and buses travelling North by Purley Hospital as the lane was often blocked by a car waiting to turn right into Whytecliffe Rd. The traffic backed up to Purley Cross. Emergency vehicles couldn’t get through a cars couldn’t pull over. Who was consulted on locations? Purley isn’t a safe iron for cycling in my opinion. Russell Hill and the Gyratory is far too dangerous and had NO cycling wands as it’s not suitable. I think the council took the money from TFL and then plonked the wands in random stretches of straight flat road.
Bollocks.
Would you care to expand upon your argument?
The capacity for Croydon Council, or its contractors, to make a bodge job of the installation of new traffic installation is not completely beyond possibility, surely?
Definitely within the scope of probability.
Arfur – perhaps you are referring to what happens when the poor cyclist has realised there is a vehicular maelstrom just ahead and not a Conservative misused magic wand in sight slammed on the brakes and slid onto the Crossbar? The real fiction of Now you see me 3? Brought to you by the Arch Wasteman Stewy