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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