CROYDON IN CRISIS: The cash-strapped council paid a single firm of solicitors £2m over a two-year period. Now it has been forced to admit that it spent another chunk of public money in pursuing a housing case in which they had admitted they were in the wrong – in 2014.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
The lawyers’ friend: the cash-strapped council’s £192,000 per year CEO Katherine Kerswell
Between 2022 and 2023, cash-strapped Croydon Council paid a firm of external solicitors almost one-quarter of a million pounds, all on a single legal case that they had already lost in the courts.
Inside Croydon reported the outcome of the landmark case of R (Imam) v London Borough of Croydon in November, after the council had taken the matter all the way to the Supreme Court.
Ruba Imam is a wheelchair user and mother of three. She and her family have been living in accommodation which in October 2014 – almost 10 years ago – Croydon Council accepted was unsuitable.
Yet while lawyers for the council went to the Supreme Court making the case that the authority did not have the financial means to meet its legal duty to provide suitable housing for Imam, it was paying barristers and solicitors a total of £305,038.31 to run its doomed case for it. Continue reading
Mayor Khan said that he recognises that families are in urgent need of support. The meals will help with the spiralling cost of living by making sure that children in state-funded London schools will receive free school meals through and into 2024-2025.
The inspection, conducted in November last year, was CALAT’s first full Ofsted inspection since 2010.
The London Fire Brigade says that there were no reports of any injuries. The cause of the fire was an electrical fault.
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: For his first column of the year, DAVID MORGAN has delved into the Minster archive to look at newspaper reports of what was happening in Croydon 100 years ago
Swinton was visiting the venue in the Croydon Clockhouse for the second time in six months, at the invitation of one of her oldest friends, Thick Of It/After Love star Scanlan.
The news that a former £140,000 per year official is to be investigated by their professional body over their part in crashing their council’s finances will be widely welcomed by residents.
A four-week trial at Croydon Crown Court heard how the men, all from Sutton, punched, slapped and verbally abused residents with learning disabilities who were in their care at Grove House.
The Trust still has 300,000 trees to give away as part of its free trees scheme, with the deadline for applications just days away – next Monday, January 8.
Simon Mole and Gecko will be staging two family shows full of poems, raps and songs about all your favourite prehistoric protagonists (and some you haven’t heard of yet!).
