Bad gateway: the message that anyone trying to access information on the council website got this morning. Croydon is spending £42m over four years for this digital-first ‘transformation’
By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
Poet Brian Bilston was on stage at the Ashcroft Theatre last night*.
In between frequent references to Clare Grogan, his cat and the seemingly unstoppable onward march of AI, Bilston read from his poem Message to the 14-year-old Me.
Given time
and with a little luck on your side –
you can achieve a basic level of competence
in a limited number of simple, unremarkable things
Bilston might have been writing about Croydon Council when he came up with those lines.
Our council has spent years, and tens of millions of public money, to become “digital first”. In the main, that has meant making real people redundant and closing the Access Croydon area in Fisher’s Folly, while investing money in AI robot systems and widgets, of varying degrees of competency. Even in a limited number of simple, unremarkable ways.
‘Ask Croydon Council’: and get an incompetent, inaccurate answer
For example, even today, if you ask the chatbot on the council website, “Who is CEO of Croydon Council?”, it is still saying “Katherine Kerswell”.
Kerswell left her job at Croydon Council in October 2025.
But it was cheaper for Kerswell and Mayor Jason Perry to provide a digital-first system that doesn’t work than it is to employ people to deliver services and achieve a basic level of competence.
Kerswell, pathetically paranoid and possibly never quite attaining a basic level of competence, left Croydon after committing the cash-strapped council to spending £42million on her digital first “transformation” policy by 2029. This followed handing £1million to Boston Consulting for them to advise the council that its website isn’t very good.
Boston’s one real practical piece of advice was to add a chatbot to its website. The same chatbot that can’t get the answers to questions of fact correct.
And this morning, for at least two hours, digital-first Croydon Council’s website wasn’t working. So not even achieving a basic level of competence.
Anyone seeking more detailed information about Mayor Jason Perry’s next unbalanced budget, or Council Tax increases, the cuts to CALAT, or Perry’s “strategy” for parking, permits and roads, would have been greeted by a service message.
“Bad Gateway”, it said, like an unhappy owner scolding their dog for eating the farmers’ market sausages.
It was a 502 error.
This is where an intermediary server talks to the backend origin or application server, but the backend “returns garbage, invalid data or no usable response at all” (we got that response from Google, in case you wondered).
“The service behind this page isn’t responding to Azure Front Door,” said the message on the council website, channelling Larry Grayson for the digital age.
If you wanted to sign the petition opposing Mayor Perry’s cuts to CALAT, for two or three hours this morning you wouldn’t have been able to. “Azure Front Door wasn’t able to connect to the origin.” The incompetence of his council was helping Mayor Perry out once again.
Not-so-smart: the council lost millions over its ill-judged deal with a New York con man for bus shelters
This omnishambles was achieved after dismantling the council’s legacy IT frameworks and replacing it with what is described as “moving to agile in-house operations, and embedding automation into public workflows”.
Jo Negrini – remember her? – had started this process, hiring in expensive senior managers for the new Croydon Digital Service.
It was this department that had all of Croydon’s bus shelters ripped out because they had done some money-spinning deal with a New York fraudster who never made a single “smart” bus shelter. It took several years, and being bailed out by Transport for London, who manage to achieve a basic level of competence, before most of the missing bus shelters got replaced.
And it was this “agile” Croydon Digital Service which decommissioned the council’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM setup (which cost a now seemingly modest £1.5million per year in upkeep and fees) and replaced it with a Netcall Liberty Create platform. It is this which now has all the council’s online forms, for Council Tax, residents’ parking permits and a couple of dozen other functions. Some of which work. And some sometimes don’t.
Like this morning.
The website appeared to be functioning “normally” – including providing inaccurate information about senior council officials – by around 11am.
We asked Croydon Council’s propaganda department to explain this latest failure to achieve a basic level of competence. We even invited part-time Perry to provide a comment.
Neither had bothered to respond by the time of publication. But then, both rarely, if ever, achieve a basic level of competence.
Stand-up poetry: Brian Bilston delighted his audience at the Ashcroft Theatre last night
*Brian Bilston is more than competent on his national tour. There were close to 400 people in the Ashcroft Theatre last night, and most seemed delighted with his fusion of stand-up and poetry.
Waterstones’ staff, allowed to escape the dead zone that is the Whitgift Centre, did a roaring trade in sales of Bilston’s latest book, How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside. And the dear old Fairfield Halls management was able to demonstrate that, even on a cold wet October night, they really can pull in a decent-sized audience for decent acts.
And so achieve a basic level of competence.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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