Inside Croydon

Croydon will be plying beer to international property speculators in Cannes next week. Again

KEN LEE, our foreign travel on someone else’s budget correspondent, reports on the proliferation of consultants who are getting their expense accounts paid for out of Croydon Council Tax at MIPIM’s junket next week

Senior officials from Croydon Council and their wholly owned house-building company Brick by Brick will be heading off to the South of France next week for the “booze and hookerfest” that is MIPIM, where they will be  accompanied not by one firm of consultants… not by two sets of sharp suits… but with executives in tow from at least three agencies.

In fact, if you include the role played at the event by Develop Croydon, the business lobby group (membership fee: a cool £1,250 per year) which exerts undue, undemocratic influence over the running of the council, then you could say that there will be four agencies working with the council at the event in Cannes.

In effect, Croydon Council is using Council Tax-payers’ cash to help fund the expense accounts of an unspecified number of PR flunkies to spend two or three days at MIPIM, the world’s largest property speculator conference.

MIPIM is what Croydon Labour’s council leader Tony Newman once described as a “junket”. But that was in his time as opposition leader, so those sort of scruples don’t appear to apply to Big Tone any longer.

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