A report published today by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has discovered a £1.3bn ‘financial black hole at the centre of the special educational needs and disability system – and it is growing rapidly’
Education crisis: SEND families have been fighting for their rights for several years
The deficit in Croydon Council’s DSG – the Dedicated Schools Grant – increased by more than one-fifth in the last financial year, as covid pressures and increasing demand for special education provision saw the borough’s schools spend an additional £4million of money that they don’t have.
Croydon’s DSG was in deficit by £22.52million by the end of the 2021-2022 financial year, according to figures obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for a special report on the growing crisis around funding for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities – SEND.
For cash-strapped Croydon, this increasing deficit in its education budget is presenting a significant strain on its finances, as the Town Hall looks to cut £38.4million from its overall spending this financial year. With the Whitehall-imposed commissioners watching every move, even after already axing many non-statutory services, Croydon is expected to cut a further £30million from its overall spending in 2023-2024. Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: With election day a week away, Conservative councillor and member of the scrutiny committee, ROBERT WARD, offers a few ideas for any incoming Mayor
Dear New Mayor,
Congratulations on your election victory. You have an opportunity to make a difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of your fellow residents. I wish you well. I hope you can spare a few moments of your time to consider some suggestions that I believe will help.
In my working life prior to election as a councillor, I came to value challenge and diversity of opinion. I hope you agree with me, because I think we can do a whole lot better on both.
On the evidence I have seen in four years on Croydon Council, diversity and challenge, along with openness and transparency, are thought of as all fine and dandy for an opposition party to demand, but politically naïve for a party in power. Their absence was, though, a root cause of the failure of the council to manage its finances and to deliver very poor service to residents. If we truly do not want that to happen again, we must do things differently.
There is much to be done. Continue reading
Teachers are on strike at John Fisher School today, with the backing of the majority of parents, as well as former governors and even Ofsted, as the row with the school’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese rumbles into a third month.
Book protest: teachers outside John Fisher School today, supporting the sacked governors
Governors voted not to cancel author Simon James Green’s visit for World Book Day on March 3, contrary to the Archdiocese of Southwark’s recommendation. Two governors subsequently resigned and the archdiocese sacked the rest, including elected parent and staff governors and the local authority governor, after they refused to take orders from the church.
Green is an author of fiction for teens who happens to include gay characters in his work. Continue reading
A plaque to commemorate a firefighter who died in the line of duty has been unveiled in Wimbledon this morning, close to the anniversary of his death and close to where the incident took place.
Anthony Marshall was 26 years old when he was killed. He left a wife, Cheryl, and a one-year-old son, John. He died on the day of John’s first birthday.
Both Cheryl and John attended the unveiling today, along with Marshall’s grandchildren. Continue reading
Man van man: construction worker Ernesto Montero took time out from his job at Ruskin Square to get a check-up at the Royal Marsden mobile unit. He had high PSA levels and was referred for further testing, including a prostate biopsy. Cancer was not detected
The Man Van, an innovative new outreach programme from the Royal Marsden, is offering appointments to the public in efforts to improve early diagnosis of prostate and other urological cancers.
The mobile health clinic will be based at Parkway Medical Centre in New Addington from today until Monday May 30, with men in the area invited to sign up for a free health check. A local GP surgery is also inviting all men over 50 registered at the practice to book an appointment via text.
The programme, developed by the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, RM Partners West London Cancer Alliance and The Institute of Cancer Research is aiming to improve healthcare access for men who are less likely to receive regular health checks, and are at risk of having cancer diagnosed late, when it is more difficult to treat. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: A behind-closed-doors meeting this morning discussed the Labour leadership’s controversial £437,000 golden handshake to the ex-CEO, and recommendations over the £67m spent on the Fairfield Halls. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
In the money: disgraced council leader Tony Newman and Jo Negrini, the CEO to whom he handed a £437,000 pay-off
Grant Thornton, the council’s official auditors, have raised a formal query over the £437,000 pay-off handed to Jo “Negreedy” Negrini, the former chief exec, in August 2020.
But with local elections just a week away, the council’s current CEO and leadership are trying to keep the matter secret from the public.
At 9 o’clock this morning, in the Town Hall Chamber, there was a meeting of the council’s appointments committee – normally a gathering of a handful of senior councillors and one or two top council staffers to discuss the salary level of the next top job, or who to place in charge of paper clips at Fisher’s Folly.
But Inside Croydon, and the Croydon public, were refused permission to attend, observe or report most of the substantive matters on the meeting’s agenda, because about half of the committee’s time was to be spent in “Part B”: councilspeak for a secret agenda that excludes the press and public from hearing about how often millions of pounds of public money is being spent.
Off-colour: Croydon’s new Town Centre policing team, paid for by the Mayor of London. But the officers hardly reflect the borough’s diverse communities, and include few women
Crime is an important issue in Croydon’s council and Mayoral elections. Or at least it should be. ANDREW FISHER polices the claims of the competing camps, and adds some essential context
Policing matters. The amount of violent crime is higher now than in 2010. And there are fewer police officers now than there were in 2010.
Between 2015 and 2020, London’s crime rate increased by 17.5per cent. Although police numbers are now rising, Conservative government cuts resulted in 23,000 fewer officers in that time, while 600 police stations were closed, 63 of those in London while Boris Johnson was the city’s Mayor. Continue reading
The OrWanguTang: a fresh take on nature conservation
Croydon craft brewery Anspach and Hobday has a new beer launched in support of the Orangutan Foundation.
The brewers have also teamed up with comedian Phil Wang and The Wine Society over the launch and are promising 50p per can of their new beer – The OrwanguTang – will go directly to the Orangutan Foundation.
The proceeds of just four cans is enough to sponsor a whole acre of crucial forest habitat in central Kalimantan, in the battle to save this desperately endangered species.
The OrwanguTang is a delicately salty Gose infused with orange zest and mandarin puree. The beer will be sold exclusively through The Wine Society and the Anspach and Hobday webshop. Continue reading
Everybody out: about 50 teachers are expected to take strike action today
About 50 staff at Coulsdon Sixth Form College have joined a picket line this morning, in a dispute between the National Education Union and college management over a refusal by the administration to honour nationally agreed pay awards.
Coulsdon Sixth Form College is now part of Croydon College, but it has retained its separate identity, and the terms and conditions of its staff also differ from those based at the central Croydon site.
As such, salaries of union members employed at Coulsdon are negotiated at national level by the NEU and other education unions.
Successive settlements agreed with employer representatives at a national level have not been recognised by Croydon College management, causing frustration among NEU members at Coulsdon. Continue reading
‘Things are far from perfick at the Fairfield ‘Alls’ says the award-winning actress who plays Ma Larkin, as the campaign to sack BHLive gathers momentum. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Time for change: BAFTA-winner Joanna Scanlan says she’s been let down by what has been allowed to happen at the Fairfield Halls
Joanna Scanlan, the BAFTA award-winning actress, has called on Croydon Council to back calls from some Mayoral candidates in next week’s elections and terminate the operating contract for the Fairfield Halls arts centre with BHLive.
Scanlan, the star of The Larkins and After Love, possibly has a better understanding of the shambolic way her local council is run: for seven years, she was a cast member of The Thick Of It, the programme that gave the world the word “clusterfuck”.
Now, in true Ma Larkin style, Scanlan has gone public to say that “things are far from perfick at her local arts centre”. Continue reading
No excuses: school streets have been reintroduced, some with special, extra signage for the hard-of-thinking
As Croydon pupils yesterday packed their satchels and rucksacks and headed back to school for the final term of this academic year, so the council has reintroduced 10 school streets, with restrictions on traffic.
The school streets were “paused” by the council at the end of February, largely because someone in Fisher’s Folly forgot to get the paperwork done to extend the period when the traffic restrictions – and potential for penalty fines – could apply.
The responsibility for this work fell, as so often has been the case, under the aegis of the serial bungler, Steve Iles, the director of streets and then public realm, who was recently given another new title: “director of sustainable communities”.
The council says, “The council has introduced schools streets across the borough to encourage healthy journeys during the busy school run, reducing air pollution and improving safety around schools.” Which is all commendable and to be applauded. Just a shame that they failed to get basic administration done to ensure a continuity of the measures, which began to be introduced during the first lockdown period in 2020. Continue reading
A south London council on the brink of financial collapse, getting a multi-million-pound bail-out from government, while being run by a new chief exec and with a rudderless Labour group where the leader isn’t standing for re-election in their old ward on May 5.
Sound familiar?
Not, this time, Croydon, but the neighbouring Labour-controlled council in Merton, where the government has stepped in to help with a forecasted £50million schools funding shortfall over three years which, according to an official council report, threatens the financial stability of the authority overall.
“The scale of the deficit as reported to cabinet has a significant impact on the council’s resources and potentially the financial resilience of the authority,” the Merton report states. The report also made clear that the financial issues pre-date any covid pressures on the council’s budgets. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Eighteen months after an investigation into how the council’s finances collapsed, the report into the affair – which prompted the resignation of the council leader and four execs – remains unpublished. And the council CEO intends keeping the findings secret until after election day. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Keeping us waiting: Tony Newman could feature in the Penn Report
The Penn Report, the investigation into wrong-doing at the council that prompted the abrupt resignations as councillors of Tony Newman and sidekick Simon Hall, the council leader and his cabinet member for finance, as well as four of the Town Hall’s top executives, could be about to be published.
But oh so conveniently for many senior figures at the council, the Penn Report won’t be made public until after the local elections are held on May 5.
Katherine Kerswell, the council CEO, has had a copy of the controversial report, drafted by Local Government Association troubleshooter Richard Penn, sitting in her in-tray since February 2021.
But Kerswell has refused all calls to make its findings public until the situation with a fifth exec director, Hazel Simmonds, was resolved. Continue reading
It seems every election has a joker in the pack, and this year Winston McKenzie, the candidate who declared ‘Croydon is a dump!’, is once again seeking your votes.
KEN TOWL read his manifesto, so that you wouldn’t have to
In his very wordy, two-page pitch to the people of Croydon, His Excellency, Ambassador, Dr Winston McKenzie, independent candidate for Mayor of Croydon declares that, “This town needs an enema!”
McKenzie badly wants to be that enema, to insert himself figuratively up the fundament of the borough in order to create a trickle-down treat of capitalised “NEW MONEY”.
I found this promise alluring. It looked like just the sort of investment the town needs, way beyond the vague hints at cutting fly-tipping and erasing graffiti that is characteristic of more mundane candidates.
Bull-shitters: McKenzie in the days when he was tolerated by Farage’s UKIP
However, in the interests of democracy, big promises demand great scrutiny.
In order to raise the much-needed investment, His Excellency has “arrived at the dynamic concept of a new Commonwealth agenda”.
His plans have been checked by someone. That someone – we are not furnished with anything so sordid as a name – has categorised his plan as “a project worth doing”. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Labour leadership wants to replace council staff with high street bounty hunters who get commission on every fine they issue, using a company that has been accused of ‘profiting from poverty’.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Farewell to NSOs: council cuts will see this service privatised
Whoever is elected Mayor next week will inherit a borough with 20 fewer Neighbourhood Safety Officers than worked in Croydon last year, in another back-door cut being implemented at the cash-strapped council.
The council is axing the majority of its NSOs to make a saving of £1.1million over the course of this and the next financial year.
The Labour group, which did so much to bankrupt the council, wants to replace the NSOs with high street bounty hunters from security firm Kingdom, who would issue on-the-spot £60 fines for even the most trivial offences. Under similar arrangements with other councils and land-owners, Kingdom typically gets to keep 85 to 90per cent of fines levied, with the balance being paid over to the commissioning body.
Croydon could therefore be pocketing £10 a pop every time Kingdom’s private police force pounce on an unsuspecting member of the public. That should slowly chipping away at the council’s £1.5billion debt mountain… Continue reading
North-west passage: on the 1773 Arctic expedition, HMS Racehorse accompanied by HMS Carcass brought Lt Constantine Phipps and young Horatio Nelson together
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: A reigning monarch, a National Trust property, Horatio Nelson, a Westminster Abbey wedding and an Archbishop of Canterbury all get a mention in DAVID MORGAN’s latest dispatch from the archives of Croydon Minster
When Croydon Parish Church was rebuilt after the 1867 fire, it wasn’t only the building that was reconstructed. Because of the fire damage and the raking out of the church’s charred contents, tombs and memorials closest to the walls also had to be repaired or relocated.
One such tomb was an exceptional construction.
Built of white polished marble and surrounded by iron palisades, it was originally placed at a distance from the church.
However, in the new arrangement, the tomb and the coffins inside it were moved to abut the south wall of the church. The exact placing of the marble mausoleum meant that it was only the thickness of the church wall away from the tomb of Archbishop Sheldon. Seven people were eventually buried in that tomb. Uncovering their stories provides some remarkable reading. Continue reading
Extinction Rebellion took their campaign to save the planet to Steve Reed’s doorstep last night, after a week in which the Blairite MP for Croydon North spoke out on behalf of the oil multi-nationals and called for injunctions and harsh penalties against protestors.
Protesting for the right to protest: Extinction Rebellion left their mark on MP Reed’s office last night
Reed is supposedly Labour’s shadow justice minister at Westminster.
But his call for increased police powers appears to be more closely aligned with the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill than with his party leader, Keir Starmer’s warning that “the biggest threat we now face is not climate denial but climate delay”.
Reed called for immediate and wide-ranging bans on protesters’ tactics to be put in place.
Reed said ministers should “get on with their jobs” and block further action from the Just Stop Oil group after about 40 arrests were made at Inter Terminals in Essex. Others were arrested at Kingsbury oil terminal in Warwickshire.
“Motorists were already being hammered by prices at the pump, and now millions can’t even access fuel,” Reed said. “The Conservatives need to stop standing idly by and put an end to this disruption that is causing misery for motorists.” Continue reading
The Metropolitan Police have announced that they have stopped treating the death of a man in Addiscombe on Thursday as a murder case, and the three men that they arrested have been released on bail.
The dead man, now said to be aged 39, has not yet been identified.
A statement issued from Scotland Yard said, “A special post-mortem examination has found that injuries sustained by a man found dead in Croydon on Thursday evening may have been self-inflicted.”
Officers were called to Leslie Grove Place in Addiscombe around 6.30pm on Thursday “following reports that a person had been stabbed”, the police say. Continue reading
Edwina Brocklesby is on a mission to get the older community active while combatting social isolation.
Giving a bit of stick: Nordic walking is on offer in Ashburton Park
Brocklesby, 79, founded Silverfit nine years ago as a charity that promotes lifelong fitness and healthier ageing through physical activity and social connectivity.
The charity now has more than 2,000 members taking part in activities at 18 venues in 11 London boroughs – including Ashburton Park in Croydon.
Each venue offers a choice of activities from Nordic walking, Yoga, walking football, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, badminton, indoor rowing, indoor cycling, gym classes and Bollywood dance fitness. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Moves to take the management of the troubled arts centre out of the hands of Bournemouth-based BHLive are being resisted by Labour politicians. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Not much on: the operators at the Fairfield Halls have lost the confidence of Croydon’s arts organisations
Senior officials and the Labour cabinet member in charge of the arts at Croydon’s cash-strapped council failed to take up an offer of a £5million cash investment for the Fairfield Halls, intended to help revive and restore the arts centre’s reputation and give it a kickstart to produce a broader, better-quality set of shows than those being offered by the current operators.
That’s the shocking revelation made by Neil Chandler, who for almost three years, until February 2020, had been in charge of the Fairfield’s artistic programme, working for council-appointed operators, BHLive.
In a devastating criticism of the council’s mishandling of the Halls since they re-opened, and Bournemouth-based BHLive’s blatant disinterest in the south London venue, Chandler has told this website that he managed to raise finance that could have transformed the Fairfield’s performances and events from the tissue-thin schedule dominated by tired tribute acts that is currently on offer.
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