CROYDON IN CRISIS: In 2018, Daniel Cox blew the whistle when he discovered that a contractor was charging the council almost double what he was being paid for his work. Cox was dismissed, and the council has spent the past eight years working with the same contractor to gag him.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

Croydon Council has spent almost £150,000 on external legal advisors and counsel since 2018 in pursuing a case against a single whistleblower who claims that a staffing agency was billing £350 per day for the services of an unqualified social worker to co-ordinate SEND support.

Another day in court: Daniel Cox will be making his case before a tribunal judge again tomorrow

The whistleblower was the under-qualified SEND support worker. So they knew that they were being paid at a rate of £22.70 per hour – around half of what the council was paying to the Adecco staffing agency via a shell company.

But instead of investigating the over-charging and potentially taking action against the staff agency, the whistleblower was sacked and Croydon Council has spent the past eight years using tax-payers’ money to pay for lawyers, internal as well as external, to contest claims made through the Employment Tribunal.

Daniel Cox is back at the Employment Tribunal at Fetter Lane tomorrow for the latest in a series of hearings in his case, as he has sought to expose the cosy relationship between Croydon Council and one of its biggest service suppliers.

Over the last two financial years, under Croydon’s failed Mayor Jason Perry, our cash-strapped council has spent almost £100million on temporary staff through Adecco – £44.4million in 2025-2026 and a budget-busting £53.4million in 2024-2025.

In fact, under piss-poor Perry, Croydon’s spending on agency staff quadrupled from 2022 to 2025.

As Inside Croydon revealed last year, one “transformation” consultant, brought in to cut costs by cutting other people’s jobs, was being paid £726 PER HOUR.

And careful investigation of the authority’s own paperwork showed that the council was allowing hundreds of thousands of pounds of invoices from Adecco to be signed off by an employee of… Adecco.

What Daniel Cox has been trying to expose since he was abruptly dismissed in 2018 is that all-too-cosy relationship between some council managers and outside agency Adecco appears to have existed for several years.

The tactics used by lawyers acting for Croydon Council and Adecco throughout this saga has been to use legal technicalities to block or dismiss Cox’s claims, rather than ever make a case to explain how someone who was not qualified to work in SEND support was being charged to the local authority at £350 per day when they were actually being paid half as much.

And Cox has the receipts.

Because at one point in the whole process, an Adecco lawyer sent Cox some of the invoices submitted to Croydon Council.

Cox’s battle with Adecco and Croydon Council stems from a previous crisis at Fisher’s Folly, one which prompted unchecked spending of tens of millions of pounds.

In 2017, Croydon Council’s children’s services department failed its Ofsted inspection, rated as “Inadequate”, and with children in council care at risk of serious harm.

It was a massive scandal of neglect and incompetence for the then Labour-controlled council, whose response was to throw money at the problem – at least £30million over the course of the next two years.

Much of this would be spent through staffing agencies, such as Adecco.

Cox started work in the council’s Special Educational Needs (SEND) department in October 2017. He was initially assigned as an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) assistant.

“He was an agency worker,” a judge noted, for the avoidance of any doubt, in a ruling from a previous Employment Tribunal hearing held in 2020.

Cox was initially hired by Adecco, “who assigned him to the third respondent”, meaning the council. Adecco subsidiary Giant Professional Ltd is the other respondent in Cox’s Employment Tribunal case.

Cox contends that in January 2018, he was approached by the council’s interim manager for SEND placements and asked to apply for the role of “EHCP co-ordinator”.

Cox says that he said he was not qualified for the role, but nonetheless was persuaded to apply for it. “The claimant contends that he was informed that he had been successful in the application,” the judge’s ruling says.

“The respondents contend that the claimant entered into a contract with the second respondent [Giant] from 29 January 2018. It appears that from this time the claimant was charged out to the third respondent [the council] as an EHCP co-ordinator, or in any event at an increased rate.”

The judge does not address the obvious question: why wasn’t Cox simply put on the council payroll (albeit for a job for which he was not qualified), rather than be part of a convoluted, internal corporate invoicing arrangement? It might be useful for the council’s auditors to seek answers to such mysteries…

“It also appears to be common ground that the claimant did not, in fact, work as an EHCP co-ordinator, but continued in his original role. The claimant contends that one of his colleagues did work in the EHCP co-ordinator role, despite not being qualified to do so.”

It was around about the time of this bit of agency worker jiggery-pokery that other people in the council department “discovered that the claimant was being charged out to the third respondent [the council] by the second respondent [Giant] at a rate in excess of that for an EHCP assistant.

“The claimant contends that staff at the first respondent [Adecco] gave his colleagues this information.”

What do you do in such a situation?

Daniel Cox reported it.

“The claimant sent a number of emails raising his concerns and attended meetings with staff of [Adecco] and the [council] at which he raised these issues. His principal concern, at least initially, was that he considered his personal data had been given to his colleagues in breach of the GDPR.

“This culminated in the claimant writing on 5 July 2018 to [Adecco] alleging that there had been breaches of the GDPR in respect of his pay information, that he had been underpaid and that staff were being put into jobs for which they were not qualified.

“In the pleadings the claimant contends that he had disclosed information that tended to show that there had been fraud – essentially, that [Giant] was overcharging the [council] by claiming that staff were working at a higher level than they were, and then not passing on the additional payment to the workers.

“On 8 July 2018, [Cox] states that he was informed by [Adecco] that his assignment with the [council] had been terminated.”

It was in April 2021 that His Honour Judge James Tayler handed down his judgement, after Cox had appealed against a previous tribunal’s ruling to dismiss his case.

Judge Tayler’s 32-page consideration of the case included: “The first respondent…”, meaning Adecco, “… had applied for strike out or a deposit order by email dated 9 October 2020, on the basis that from 29 January 2018 the claimant had not been an employee of the first respondent, and that there was no, or little, reasonable prospect of success in the allegation that he had made a protected disclosure.”

A protected disclosure is when a worker reports workplace wrongdoing or danger that is in the public interest, giving them legal protection against losing their job or facing unfair treatment. It is what whistleblowers do.

Prosecution lawyer: Jacqueline Harris-Baker was the council legal director in 2019

So employment agency Adecco’s case was to block Cox’s claim because he was a temporary worker, and not an employee. That’s the same Adecco whose entire business is predicated on providing temporary workers…

And there’s more… “On 5 April 2019 the third respondent…”, Croydon Council, where Jo Negrini was the chief executive at the time and the borough’s senior legal official was Jacqueline Harris-Baker, “… applied for strike out or deposit order, principally on the basis that there was no, or little, reasonable prospect of the claimant establishing that he had made a protected disclosure.”

Croydon Council persecutes and prosecutes its whistleblowers.

Even today, under different chief executives and council legal bosses, and  with a Tory Mayor over the past four years, Croydon Council has continued to conduct legal warfare against whistleblower Daniel Cox, all the time paying expensive lawyers out of residents’ Council Tax.

He’s got the receipts: just one of the Adecco invoices that Daniel Cox has obtained while pursuing his case

Judge Tayler ruled that a previous tribunal judge had made errors in law in agreeing to the council’s and Adecco’s application to strike out Cox’s claim, and that she had also failed to find that Cox’s case was in the public interest.

A 10-day ET hearing in October and November 2024, with the council and Adecco all lawyered-up, went less well for Cox. So he appealed again.

After eight years, Cox is still standing his ground and fighting for what he feels is right. After his appearance at the Tribunal tomorrow, Cox faces another full hearing, listed for January 6 and 7, due to be heard by His Honour Judge Tayler, who decided his successful appeal in 2021.

Cox has conducted his case with some pro bono legal assistance, but mostly by himself, at immense costs, personally and financially.

Croydon Council and agency staff giant Adecco have infinitely deeper pockets to pay for their legal representation. Whether persecuting a whistleblower in this way is an appropriate use of public funds is a question Croydon Council has never addressed in the past eight years.

According to the council’s own figures, since 2018 it has spent

£146,233.08

including VAT, on external lawyers working on the Daniel Cox case.

That doesn’t take account of the many hours of time devoted to the case by the council’s in-house lawyers working in legal director Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense’s department in Fisher’s Folly.

Of that £146,233.08, solicitors Browne Jackson – who have done very well out of Croydon Council’s constant turmoil in the past few years – have been paid £73,096.08, while another £76,137 has been spent on “counsel fees”.

When, next April, your Council Tax is ratcheted up by another 5%, so increased by 39.7% by Mayor Jason Perry since 2023, you might want to think of Daniel Cox, and how he has been persecuted at huge public expense since 2018 simply for blowing the whistle on council spending.

Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant
Read more: Children’s services passes Ofsted inspection despite 5 deaths
Read more: MP and union join calls to save CALAT from Perry’s cutbacks
Read more: Perry drives a black cab through council’s consultation rules

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