Foster Care Fortnight started today and runs until May 24, and the council is hoping to use the occasion, even in these unusual times, to recruit new foster carers who might transform children and young people’s lives by offering them safe and caring home.
With the largest population of under-18s in London, Croydon has around 800 children and young people in care – more than anywhere else in the capital. Of these, around 400 children are placed with our foster carers. Continue reading
Paul Scott: recruiting sergeant for the democratically elected mayor campaign
Paul Scott, one half of the Labour council tag team that is determinedly allowing the borough’s green spaces, kids’ playgrounds and nature reserves to be buried under a wave of ready-mix concrete, has dismissed out-of-hand complaints from residents that the planning committee is being conducted in an undemocratic and “underhand” manner.
Scott’s response to an email from a resident, in typical combative and unapologetic style, is reproduced in full below.
Scott is very well-rewarded for his role as a public servant.
An elected councillor for Woodside ward, as the cabinet member for planning he is in receipt of £45,000 per year in council allowances. Scott shares two homes in the borough with his wife, Alison Butler, the deputy leader of the council and cabinet member for housing (£48,000 in allowances). Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Brick by Brick have been patting themselves on the back, but their high-staffing levels, low-experience levels and expensive schemes ought to be deeply concerning, according to SEBASTIAN TILLINGER
Alarm bells should be ringing all over Croydon Council about Brick by Brick.
In typically patronising Brick by Brick style, their papers show Wontford Road Green with a question mark where they intend to build
The council-funded housebuilder is working in a financial bubble.
Common Ground, their in-house architectural practice advising on development, employs 10 architectural staff. Why is Common Ground not designing out the whole project rather than just doing limited feasibilities? I doubt there is a developer anywhere else in Britain with a 10-strong internal architectural practice advising on development decisions.
Can Croydon Council be so stupidly naive to have signed off this model? Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Ahead of tonight’s ‘big’ announcement from the Prime Minister, with a set of new slogans, RICHARD ACKLAND warns us to be wary of the real meaning behind the language used
Many are looking ahead to the “post-virus” era, quite naturally. May it soon arrive!
And it’s clear that there will be many developments which are likely to create permanent changes to our habits of life. Some are obvious, like the increase in online shopping and of working from home, both of which will encourage Thatcherite individualism and be detrimental to our functioning as social beings.
There are probably plenty of others, for better and for worse, some of which aren’t yet apparent even to the keenest of observers.
But I’m more interested in the impact of the crisis upon our language, or at any rate upon the uses to which it is being put. Continue reading
When Brick by Brick released details of its latest blitz on the borough across two dozen sites, many of them in New Addington and mostly intended to deliver one- and two-bed flats, the council-owned company wheeled out one of its leading figures, Chloe Phelps, to give an interview to the uncritical trade press.
Chloe Phelps: council architect and now employed as No2 at Brick by Brick
Ever since it was formed, Brick by Brick has shown a greater willingness to discuss their projects with their mates who read the Architects’ Journal or Property Week than they have ever managed to engage with those who are paying their very generous wages – the people of Croydon.
When the latest batch of sites was announced, Phelps patted herself on the back on Twitter, saying that she is “super in love with the Common Ground Architecture schemes the team have been beavering away on”.
So as her company embarks on the badly biased planning process for this latest batch of developments, we thought Inside Croydon’s readers might be interested to see what rookie developer Phelps, the rather grandly titled “head of design and commercial and deputy chief executive of Brick By Brick and Common Ground Architecture”, had to say for herself in her trade press interview. Continue reading
Brick by Brick is demonstrating some desperate-looking urgency over its next wave of 24 sites around the borough by announcing them during the coronavirus emergency lockdown – making it impossible for them to stage what anyone would recognise as proper public consultations over the proposals.
This site was meant to be completed by January 2018
Which might just suit the loss-making house-builder’s purposes.
So far, since the company was formed in 2015, whenever they have submitted an application to the local planning authority (Croydon Council), Brick by Brick (who are owned by Croydon Council) have been granted permission.
Many of their first-wave of developments have encountered lengthy delays (the Pimp House at Norwood Junction, with its built-in public library, was meant to be finished in January 2018; builders have been on-site at Kingsdown Avenue since June 2018), but few have encountered much in the way of penalties from the local building standards office (run by Croydon Council).
It is therefore of grave concern to the existing residents of the sites which have been earmarked for development by Brick by Brick. Continue reading
Millwood Servicing is the latest firm to sign up as a Patron of Croydon’s Legacy Youth Zone, committing £75,000 over three years to support the new centre’s activities.
Staff from Millwood Servicing on a visit to the Legacy Youth Zone
Opened on Whitehorse Road last September, the Legacy Youth Zone is a £6.5million purpose-built youth facility that provides access to an indoor climbing wall, sports hall, fully equipped gym, an arts and crafts studio, music room with recording studio, training kitchen, a 3G football pitch, dance and drama studio – all for just £5 annual membership and 50p per visit.
As a Founder Patron of the charity, Millwood Servicing as pledged to donate £25,000 to Legacy each year for the next three years, which will go directly towards supporting thousands of young people from Croydon to meet new people, develop their skills, experience new opportunities and enjoy their leisure time in a safe and inspiring environment.
Cheers… this jug has much to answer for
The ingeniousness of Inside Croydon readers knows no ends.
First, David Morgan digs out the story behind a prolific 18th-century poet and lyricist, Francis Fawkes.
Fawkes happened to be the curate of Croydon parish church – known these days as Croydon Minster – and won favour with an Archbishop of Canterbury who was living in the palace nearby.
But then yesterday another reader, John Honnor, takes the manuscript from a song in a popular stage show of the period which used Fawkes’ Toby jug lyric and has put the notes to the tune and recorded it on YouTube. The performance seems redolent of that age.
Thank you, David and John. Continue reading
When we reported the demise of Croydon’s Debenhams store yesterday, the question posed was “who might move into the large store space next?”
Next in Centrale is about to expand into the Debenhams site
And the answer soon offered up was: Next.
Hammerson was able to play hardball over the second CVA by Debenhams in the space of 12 months because they had managed to line up Next to take up some of the space to be vacated in their Centrale and four other shopping malls around the country. Yesterday, they announced that the clothing retailer will open five standalone beauty halls in former Debenhams stores.
Next said it had signed flexible leases with Hammerson for space in the flagship sites at the Bullring in Birmingham, The Oracle in Reading, Highcross in Leicester, Silverburn in Glasgow and Croydon’s Centrale.
In a departure from its established clothes retail operation, Next will brand the space “The Beauty Hall from Next”. Continue reading
According to Jo Negrini, it is the fault of the borough’s small businesses that her council has failed to distribute half of the £60million they were given by central government for use as covid-19 emergency grants.
Six weeks into the business covid fund scheme, the council is still sitting on £25m of government grants
Negrini is Croydon’s £220,000 per year chief executive.
Croydon is among the worst councils in London for distributing emergency funding to businesses, according to Whitehall figures. The money is intended to help firms’ cash flow during the lockdown period when many have been forced to shut up shop.
Traders in Croydon who were promised their payment inside seven days have been left to wait for nearly six weeks for their cash. Some report great reluctance from council officials to putting anything in writing to them, and others relate being shouted at in phone calls with council staff. Continue reading
GENE BRODIE, education correspondent, on the increasingly desperate-looking moves to salvage anything from the town centre regeneration
Croydon Council’s “cunning plan” to dig the town centre out of the hole created for it by the Whitgift Foundation and Westfield is to have a campus… for the 95th-best university in Britain.
Coming to a disused and run-down shopping mall near you
After nearly a decade of the supine local authority doing the bidding of big business and the borough’s biggest land-owner, it has become glaringly obvious that neither Westfield nor Hammerson have any appetite for spending £1.4billion on a large retail development in the increasingly shabby and run-down town centre.
Even with a significantly scaled-down, residential-led development, centred around building thousands of flats – or “luxury apartments” – in tower blocks all along the Wellesley Road, it has been plain that any regeneration project will need to offer something more.
In the past, when asked what her “Plan B” might be, Jo Negrini, the council chief executive and self-proclaimed “regeneration practitioner” has responded, unhelpfully, “We’re not stupid”.
Yet what is about to be formally announced is a scheme which some suggest will prove exactly the opposite of Negrini’s contention. Continue reading
Our demise-of-high-street-retailing correspondent, MT WALLETTE, says that there’s no coming back from the latest hammer blow to the £1.4bn town centre regeneration scheme
Centrale landlords Hammerson refused to give Debenhams five months rent-free
Coronavirus claimed another victim last night: Debenhams in Croydon.
In truth, the department store, which has been a fixture in the town centre for half a century, had been clinging on for dear life for more than a year – a pre-existing condition, if you will.
But the store’s owners announced that their branch in Centrale is one of another five around the country which won’t be re-opening after the covid-19 lockdown is lifted, with the loss of a total of 1,000 jobs.
The deeper significance of the announcement is that the other Debenhams stores never to re-open alongside Croydon’s are at the Bullring in Birmingham, The Oracle in Reading, Highcross in Leicester and Silverburn in Glasgow. All these shopping centres are owned by Hammerson. Continue reading
Rory Stewart, the former Tory leadership candidate who was expelled from the Conservatives at Westminster because of his implacable opposition to Boris Johnson’s stance on Brexit, has withdrawn from the London Mayoral campaign.
Rory Stewart: a non-runner
What do you mean, you didn’t know he was a candidate? What do you mean, “What London Mayoral campaign?”
The vote for the London Mayor and the London Assembly should have been taking place tomorrow, May 7.
But the elections were among the early casualties of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown of so many aspects of public life. Croydon residents greeted that news with some degree of relief since it meant that they would not be getting a knock on the door from the likes of Paul Scott or Mario Creatura for some time.
It also put paid to any remote chance Stewart might have had of being able to afford to run a reasonable Mayoral campaign as an independent. Following the loss of his parliamentary seat, Stewart had looked to somehow raise his political profile in a brief campaigning blitz around the capital, effectively mugging the official Tory candidate, the lamentable Shaun Bailey. Continue reading
Deaths from coronavirus in Croydon’s care homes have reached 127, according to a report going before the council cabinet next Monday.
The figures have been compiled by Public Health England and include all deaths from the disease up to Monday, May 4. Not all the deceased have been tested for the presence of the virus, but their deaths have followed the appearance of covid-19 symptoms.
There are justifiable fears that the death toll in care homes could get much worse: Sean Fitzsimons, the Labour councillor who chairs the Town Hall scrutiny committee, described the borough’s care homes as “a ticking time bomb” during the coronavirus emergency. Continue reading
The Croydon Covid-19 Mutual Aid group has mapped the borough’s foodbanks
The borough’s mutual aid organisation that was set-up at the start of the coronavirus emergency, has now produced an updated map of food banks and soup kitchens which they hope will help “the unsung heroes of this crisis” – the volunteers operating Croydon’s food relief schemes.
The pandemic lockdown has proved challenging for Croydon’s food banks and soup kitchens. The numbers seeking help from these services has increased at exactly the point that goods donations have fallen. A reduction in the number of volunteers due to illness or self-isolation has added further challenges. Continue reading
KEN LEE, our Town Hall reporter, discovers that the council has been less-than-forthcoming over the latest appointment to their loss-making house-builder
Brick by Brick has appointed a new company director, in a move that could signal the council-owned house-builder is about to change its flawed and failing business strategy and look to “sell” more of the homes it builds back to Croydon Council.
A Brick by Brick detailed plan of how they circulate millions of pounds of public money
According to official Companies House records, Julia Pitt was appointed to the board of the troubled Brick by Brick last Friday, May 1.
There has been no announcement of the appointment by the company nor by the propaganda department of the council, which wholly owns Brick by Brick and has borrowed at least £260million to fund its stalled building programme.
And while Brick by Brick is in the midst of a cashflow crisis of its own making, with long-delayed building projects (some more than two years late in completion), and few, if any, buyers for those homes that it has built, hapless chief executive Colm Lacey has turned to someone with no experience whatsoever in the construction industry to try to get them out of their mess.
Pitt, just like Lacey was before he was promoted beyond his abilities, is a member of Croydon Council staff. Continue reading
The majority of local GP surgeries will be open for appointments this Friday, the VE Day Bank Holiday, May 8, as the NHS encourages the public to ensure that they don’t delay in seeking medical help.
The NHS has recorded sharp falls in the number of patients presenting at hospital Accident and Emergency departments and doctors’ surgeries during the coronavirus lockdown.
NHS England has found that 4 in 10 are too concerned about being a burden on the NHS to seek help from their GP. And A&E attendances have dropped by around half in the past two months.
Yet seeking medical help is one of the four reasons that people are allowed to leave home during the lockdown, in line with government guidance linked to measures introduced following the coronavirus outbreak. Continue reading
School in crisis: the Gothic architecture of Virgo Fidelis was built as an independent school in the 19th Century. Now, 170 years on, it is struggling to cope with 21st-century budgets
Education correspondent GENE BRODIE reports on the latest setback suffered by one of the borough’s oldest schools
Virgo Fidelis girls’ convent school in Upper Norwood will start the new school term in September with its fifth headteacher in barely three years, following the resignation last week of Hilary Meyer.
The high turnover of senior staff has come against a backdrop of the biggest school budget deficit in Croydon, the closure of the school’s Sixth Form, and falling rolls.
Virgo Fidelis was listed in a council report in April 2019 as one of three schools in the borough at “high risk” of being forced to close. One of the others, St Andrew’s in Old Town, will lock its school gates for a final time at the end of this summer term. Continue reading
We never appreciate the value of some things until they are gone, which is why amateur naturalist ERIC BROWN says it is important to save Hutchinson’s Bank nature reserve from the threat of intrusive development by Croydon Council’s house-building company
The Glanville fritillary is found at only three sites in the United Kingdom – and Hutchinson’s Bank is one of them
From my Kent home, it takes about an hour negotiating the narrow and often choked south London streets until you finally reach the end of the tramlines at New Addington.
Soon after the tramlines disappear, a left turn takes you into a different world. Houses and bustle recede, trees and fields border the road and the ear-chafing sound of trams, buses and lorries is replaced by birdsong.
A mile or two further and I park in a quiet, narrow lane which ends in a footpath. I walk along the tree-tunnel path and at the end emerge into bright sunlight alongside an information board announcing that I have arrived at Hutchinson’s Bank. Continue reading
Despite the lockdown on business prompted by covid-19, like “Lord” Gavin Barwell, the former Croydon Central Tory MP and author of How To Lose A Marginal Seat.
What a helmet: ‘Lord’ Barwell
In less than six months since being elevated to the House of Lords in Theresa May’s resignation honours, “Barren” Barwell, the ex-PM’s former chief of staff, has already managed to accumulate five potentially lucrative directorships and advisory roles.
Barwell lost his Croydon Central seat in 2017, after he had been promoted beyond his abilities to become housing minister.
Now touting his own company, Gavin Barwell Consulting Ltd, his lordship lists being paid as a “strategic adviser” to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Back in January, his former boss, Theresa Mayhem, banked a cool £96,000 from PwC, apparently for 12 hours’ work. Within days, Barwell’s own juicy appointment at PwC came through.
Continue reading
By STEVEN DOWNES
Tony Newman, the leader of the Labour group on Croydon Council, has tried to have news reports removed from this website with a threat of a libel action which has been robustly rejected by Inside Croydon.
Tony Newman: has resorted to hiring expensive lawyers, with little effect
It is almost six months since Newman instructed solicitors Harbottle and Lewis to send their threat of legal action to Inside Croydon, as the council leader sought to cover-up an earlier cover-up, his own part in the abrupt resignation of Niro Sirisena as a Croydon councillor.
Although Newman has recently been boasting to anyone gullible enough to believe a word he says that he has somehow succeeded in gagging Inside Croydon, the articles remain published and unaltered. This website stands by the accounts as fair and accurate versions of events which some within Croydon Labour consider to be a stain of shame on their party under Newman.
You can see them here:
Council leader delayed reporting violent incident to police;
and here:
Fears that Newman cover-up could impact Jones’s election. Continue reading
Five weeks after the council promised to get grants to businesses ‘within seven days’, more than half of the borough’s firms are still waiting to receive a penny, as MT WALLETTE reports
Priscilla’s Play Café in the Whitgift Centre has been left waiting for their emergency funding
Hundreds of traders in Croydon have been left waiting by the council for more than a month for vital grants that they were promised would be in their bank accounts “within seven days”.
“The stress is unbearable,” according to one business owner in Purley who has received none of the money they were promised, and who have now gone into a new month facing mounting bills without any income to meet them.
Most businesses across the country were ordered to close under the covid-19 lockdown which was imposed on March 23, but they were promised grants of £25,000 or £10,000 to help tide them over. The government handed the cash for the grants to local authorities, such as Croydon, to distribute to registered companies.
But the latest figures published by Whitehall today show that more than half of the £60million allocated to Croydon for emergency business grants has still to be distributed, five weeks after the Town Hall received the cash. Continue reading
The government is moving to ensure that those rough sleepers who have been taken off the streets during the coronavirus crisis have no need to go back once the lockdown is over, announcing at the weekend that Dame Louise Casey will head a task force to work with councils, including Croydon, “on plans to ensure rough sleepers can move into long-term, safe accommodation once the immediate crisis is over”.
Task force task: Dame Louise Casey
The government says they want to ensure, “as few people as possible return to life on the streets”.
Since issuing an order in March to local authorities to use public buildings to provide self-isolating accommodation for rough sleepers during the pandemic, to better restrict the spread of the deadly virus, the government says that 5,400 rough sleepers have been provided with beds – 90 per cent of the number sleeping rough before the pandemic. Continue reading
If nothing else, the coronavirus emergency has demonstrated beyond all doubt that, if the political will exists, there is absolutely no reason for there to be a single person unfortunate enough to be living on the streets.
Emergency measures have been successful in providing a bed for 90% of rough sleepers
At the beginning of the emergency, the government issued an edict to local authorities for them to use public buildings to ensure that all those sleeping on the streets were to be provided with accommodation as a matter of urgency because they had been identified as being particularly vulnerable to covid-19.
In Croydon, rooms for some of the borough’s most vulnerable individuals were found in a local hotel.
According to sources within the voluntary sector, the council’s work to put a roof over the heads of the homeless and to provide them with regular warm meal has been very effective, with only one or two people seen to be still sleeping on the streets of the town centre, instead of the dozen or so who resorted to rough sleeping in the days before the pandemic.
A government announcement at the weekend said that nationally, 5,400 rough sleepers had been found accommodation during the emergency – estimated at being about 90 per cent of those who were sleeping out before the crisis. Continue reading
 | Anthony Miller on The truth is simple: we need t… |
 | Chris Cooke on Council rushes through £200,00… |
| Ein Klavier zwischen… on ‘Professor’ played… | |
 | Ev Quistorff on The truth is simple: we need t… |
 | Alfie Grantham on Council rushes through £200,00… |
 | Jim Bush on The truth is simple: we need t… |
