EXCLUSIVE by JOSHUA STEIN
Croydon Council has admitted that it does not know how it spent £1.082million of public money on legal fees over the past two years.
Croydon’s cash-strapped council has debts totalling £1.7billion.
Out of control: Croydon’s Tory Mayor Jason Perry has failed to ‘fix the finances’
In July 2025, following the latest bail-out request from Croydon for more than £100million in emergency funding, the government sent in a team of Commissioners to oversee the financial management of the council, where spending seemed to be out of control.
Now a council response to a Freedom of Information request made on behalf of Inside Croydon appears to confirm the government’s worst fears.
This website has previously reported how the council’s spending on agency staff had quadrupled between 2022 to 2025, the first years under Conservative Mayor Jason Perry. And 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.
But it is not only spending on temporary staff which is being made without the most basic of records or checks.
In its response to our FoI request about spending on external legal services, Croydon Council said it does not know to whom it paid a total of £1.082million of legal fees between 2024 and 2026 because “some internal transactions do not record the supplier information”.
It is an admission which ought to be ringing alarm bells at the Town Hall, where an eight-year Employment Tribunal case brought by a whistleblower has also prompted calls from some opposition councillors for an urgent audit investigation into possible fraud.
The huge amounts spent by the council on external legal services reflects the absence of confidence in the council’s own, in-house legal department under Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense to manage even the most straightforward of cases competently, according to Katharine Street sources.
In its response to our FoI request, the council was able to detail which legal firms received payments amounting to more than £6million in fees over the two-year period, 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.
Yet £1.1082million went to a legal firm, was split between multiple legal firms, went to your mum’s friend’s grandmother’s neighbour in law’s legal firm… Croydon Council says it doesn’t have a Scoobydoo where it paid that money, or for what.
£1.1m hole in council accounts: Croydon says it is unable to readily identify who received payments of legal fees in more than 1,500 transactions
The council says that 1,551 records of legal payouts to external organisations “do not record the supplier information”.
This lack of transparency over the council’s spending records hardly inspires confidence and represents another £1million black hole in the council’s accounts.
The council refused to trawl through its records to ascertain the recipients of these payments in order to complete its FoI response.
“Tracing internal transactions back to identify supplier has been estimated to take 25 hours,” the council said, citing the limits on spending on FoI requests. “This breakdown is therefore not being provided.”
Croydon Council claimed it would cost too much…
Read more: Whistleblower’s lonely eight-year battle over council spending
Read more: Greens call for audit investigation into possible fraud at council
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 per hour consultant
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It beggars belief that you can have an accounting system which allows a payment to be entered without details of the payee!
But then this is the same council that allows an Adecco employee to sign off payments to Adecco.
The council refused to trawl through its records to ascertain the recipients of these payments in order to complete its FoI response.
“Tracing internal transactions back to identify supplier has been estimated to take 25 hours,” the council said, citing the limits on spending on FoI requests. “This breakdown is therefore not being provided.”
Is this even legal? An arbitrary 25-hour limit to find the facts suggests a very slow effort, only to be cut off after 1500 minutes. Is that based on the average 8-hour day, or is it a straightforward 25 hours from the starting bell, working through the night? Or is it the “tell me you have something to hide without telling me you have something to hide” case?
Must remember to try that one with HMRC: “I’m sorry, finding that receipt will take more than an hour.” This receipt is therefore not being provided.”
Good luck with that.
It may seem arbitrary, but it is a provision of FoI arrangements to limit the time spent in responding.
The obvious problem, of course, is how some local authorities automatically duck down behind the 25-hour or cost limits (£450) to avoid answering FoIs – and cannot/will not provide evidence to justify their workload estimate.
Not being able to locate those payment details in, as the council claims, 25 hours of searching suggests some very shoddy record-keeping.
Quite honestly this is an absolute disgrace. Lead by example? OK maybe that’s why Croydon is in such a mess – the leadership is about as honest as all the flytippers in the Borough. Really the lowest level you could get and such an oxymoronic example of “digital first” which is so heavily promoted in Croydon Council.
That information should be ready in about 3 minutes with an organisation of any competence greater than a common garden toad.
Obsfication in order to duck out of responsibility. Dereliction of duty. Untrustworthy and irresponsible, preying on the people of Croydon. This must be sailing legally as close to wind as you can possibly get.
All day long I bidi bidi boom if I was a wealthy man oh I wouldn’t have to work hard,
sounds like fiddler on a somebody’s roof.
tiles have gone missing we need a whistle on top of the roof to catch them.
Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act, if the council refuses a request because they say the costs of answering it it exceeds the legal £450 limit, they must provide advice and help you refine or narrow down your request so it falls within that budget.
In calculating the costs, the Act also states that for local authorities, the nominal hourly rate must not exceed £25 an hour. What this means is that Croydon council does not wish to spend £625 (£25 x 25 hours) to find out where over £1,000,000 of our money went.
For all we know, that problem (to put it mildly, clusterfuck being a more robust term) could be continuing. Not only that, the cash could have ended up in the pockets of people or law firms connected to councillors and/or senior council officers.
This all smacks of a cover-up. Instead of wasting time asking part-time piss-poor Perry to explain (he can’t or more likely won’t), Green, Labour and Lib-Dem councillors and local MPs should be leaning on the government appointed administrators to force the council to provide this information about where our money went.
Fixing the finances? Fiddling the figures, more like it