WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, on another missed opportunity for the benighted borough
All in line: students at Imperial College show London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan how to play Tetris… Jason Perry didn’t quite make it into the picture
A strange thing happened on Thursday morning in a lecture theatre at Imperial College in central London.
There, in the audience for the launch of London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan’s London Growth Plan, together with leaders of most of the capital’s boroughs and a junior government minister, was one of the people who bankrupted Croydon, and the person who has hiked Council Tax in the borough to record levels and somehow managed to make the council’s finances even worse.
Jason Perry has failed to mention if he sidled up to Jo Negrini to ask her to repay her £430,000 golden handshake, so the occasion will be put down as another missed opportunity for the Mayor of Croydon to deliver on one of his many broken promises.
Having survived the turmoil of the previous night’s council Budget meeting at the Town Hall, Perry was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the London Mayor’s latest launch, although he can afford to be, since London Councils, the city’s umbrella organisation for the 32 boroughs, pays him £10,000 for the benefit of his singular genius. Continue reading
After a year-long freeze on public transport fares in the capital, Transport for London is increasing fares from tomorrow, March 2, in line with national rail fare increases, for both pay-as-you-go fares or Travelcards.
Hold tight please: bus fares and tram fares remain unchanged, as Tube and train prices go up by 4.6% tomorrow
But bus and tram fares will remain unchanged at £1.75, the cheapest in the country. This will be the sixth year that bus and tram fares have remained unchanged.
Prices on the Tube, the London Overground (such as the Windrush line from West Croydon), the Elizabeth line and Docklands Light Railway, together with National Rail fares will rise by an average of an above-inflation 4.6%.
It means that a single Tube journey within Zone 1 will increase from £2.80 to £2.90 at peak times, and from £2.70 to £2.80 off peak.
Peak fares apply on weekdays between 6.30am and 9.30am and from 4pm to 7pm. Continue reading
Wharton’s back: the Palace midfielder’s return from injury has coincided with some of the Eagles’ best performances of the season
It is sometimes said that football, when it’s played properly, at its fluid best, is like a form of physical poetry.
Well now, the National Literacy Trust and Arts Council England have launched A Poem for Your Club to try to help inspire the community to explore creative writing through their football club and boost literacy levels.
Crystal Palace – in FA Cup action against Millwall at lunchtime today – are one of five clubs across England to have a professional resident poet who will work with children, young and Eagles fans to create a collaborative poem for the club. Continue reading
Croydon is taking on significant risks by granting planning permission for 220 ‘later-living’ homes in Purley, a councillor warned a Town Hall meeting last night. By our housing correspondent, BARRATT HOLMES
Big guns: Croydon Tories called up the London Assembly Member, Neil Garratt, to support the dodgy scheme
The majority of members of Croydon Council’s planning committee last night voted to ignore the London Plan and the borough’s own Local Plan and granted permission for Polaska Assets Ltd’s £60million scheme to build a vast retirement complex in four blocks of flats in Purley town centre.
And in so doing, they also signed a blank cheque from the cash-strapped council to use public money to subsidise the private developer’s scheme in the incidental delivery of a leisure centre and swimming pool.
No one could be certain how much the subsidy might be, as the professional planners’ calculations were based on hopeful guesses and hefty assumptions – including generously ascribing zero value to the disused supermarket property which makes up a significant part of the site.
As one member of the planning committee, Sean Fitzsimons, warned, there could be further multi-million-pound liabilities for the local authority down the track, with the council being expected to pick up the running costs of the “Integrated Retirement Community”, should the company that operates it, for whatever reason, go out of business. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Mayor forced to change cost-cutting plans after just a fortnight, following his confrontation on Katharine Street, a choral protest at the Town Hall and more than 2,000 signatures on a petition.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Under new management: the council says that the Carers’ Centre on George Street will remain open, to be used by their new service provider
The Croydon Carers’ Centre on George Street is to remain open after all.
Mayor Jason Perry “has been spooked into a U-turn”, according to Katharine Street sources, with the council’s new service provider, Carers First, now expected to move in to the premises in the town centre that have been providing reassurance, advice and, above all, care, for the past 12 years. Continue reading
The London Fire Brigade’s longest-serving fire investigation dog, Sherlock, has officially retired after a what the LFB called today “a distinguished 12-year career”.
Ready for retirement: fire investigation dog Sherlock and his handler Paul Osborne
Working cocker spaniel Sherlock, born in 2012, joined the Brigade at just 10 weeks old, and immediately showed a natural aptitude for his future role. In 2013, Sherlock became a fully certified fire investigation dog, working alongside his handler, Group Commander Paul Osborne.
Sherlock is the Brigade’s longest-serving dog and has had an esteemed career. From attending hundreds of incidents and meeting royalty to earning an Animal Hero Award and even having his own book published, Sherlock’s achievements are nothing short of extraordinary. In recent years, he transitioned into the role of Brigade ambassador, actively promoting fire safety and prevention at community events.
TOWN HALL SKETCH: Things don’t sound too good in the Chamber these days, and it is not just because the council has hired a cheaper contractor for its audio system. As tempers frayed at the most important meeting of the year, WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, turned the volume up to try to hear how Mayor Perry thinks he can get away with his cash-strapped council borrowing yet another £1bn
There was a rainbow over Croydon just around dusk last night, to the south of the Town Hall. Alas, there was no pot of gold to be found on the Town Hall steps, which might have made the next three hours a little less fraught.
Genteel: the Carers’ Centre Choir protesting outside the Town Hall last night
Instead, there was the Carers’ Centre Choir, singing sweetly (though disappointingly, not the obvious We Shall Overcome) about the latest service to be axed, the latest victim of council cuts.
As Town Hall demos go, it was a good deal less well-attended, or loud, than in 2023, when Mayor Jason Perry was putting up Council Tax by 15%. A 5% increase this time must be less objectionable to the people of Croydon, because so few turned up to object. As David Bowie almost said, it was so very Croydon.
But that was as genteel as the evening got, as inside the Chamber, our elected representatives had turned up for the most important council meeting of the year, the annual Budget and Council Tax-setting meeting. Continue reading
Energy prices up, transport fares up, water bills up, Council Tax up… ANDREW FISHER says that the government’s failure to tackle the cost-of-living crisis could have lasting political impact
In December last year, Keir Starmer set out his “Plan for Change”, one of the now regular relaunches of his flagging premiership. The Prime Minister set out six “milestones”, the first of which was “raising living standards in every part of the UK”.
The prospects of achieving that do not look good in 2025. Continue reading
Murder scene: Surrey Street market on the evening of April 12 last year, after Rijkaard Siafa had been attacked and killed in Fellmonger’s Yard
Late on a sunny April afternoon last year, David Walcott and Rammon Mali, together with a third man, strolled down Surrey Street, still busy at the end of the market day, then crossed Croydon High Street and popped into the Spread Eagle pub, where they went to the bar and ordered three pints of Guinness. They paid with a £20 note.
As they started their stouts, they phoned for a taxi, but they walked out of the pub on to Katharine Street, leaving their drinks unfinished, when bar staff asked them to remove their hats, as it was against house rules.
It was the only time Walcott and Mali obeyed any rules that afternoon, as just a few minutes earlier they had left Rijkaard Siafa bleeding to death after attacking him viciously with a machete and knives on Fellmongers Yard, just off Croydon’s ancient street market.
Siafa was just 22 when he was killed.
The details of the murderers’ callous disregard for their victim in the minutes after their attack on Siafa emerged during their five-week trial at the Old Bailey, which ended yesterday with Walcott and Mali found guilty by a unanimous jury verdict. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Ahead of tonight’s Council Tax-setting meeting, an exec director says the authority cannot continue by borrowing more, with overspends likely to rise to more than £200m by 2028. By our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE
Jason “Fix the Finances” Perry will tonight present his third council Budget since becoming Mayor of Croydon, with the council’s debts still rising, with overspends at record levels and with the local government minister and the council’s finance director agreeing that his plans for coming years are completely unsustainable.
Tonight’s Town Hall Budget meeting will be staged with Perry, his chief exec Katherine Kerswell, and cabinet member for finance, Jason Cummings, all safe in the knowledge that the government has agreed to their request for an extraordinary £136million in “capitalisation directions”, the second-highest granted in the country.
Yet even with the 5% Council Tax hike Perry wants to impose on residents from April – bringing the total increase in CTax levels under the Mayor since 2023 to 27% – and the latest government bail-out, even some of the Town Hall’s most senior officials are now admitting publicly that there is no way out of the black hole that the council’s finances have fallen into.
Given Croydon Council’s position shows no real improvement since it issued its first Section 114 notice in November 2020, which prompted the government to parachute in its “improvement and assurance board”, there are growing doubts on Katharine Street that £1,000-per-day Tony McArdle and his motley crew of improvement panel “experts” will be able to complete their “exit strategy” by this summer as was planned. Continue reading
Proposals buried in a planners’ report show that a vast development of retirement homes to be built by private developers are to have Croydon’s cash-strapped council picking up some of their construction costs for a swimming pool and leisure centre.
EXCLUSIVE By STEVEN DOWNES
Timeline of deceit: Jason Perry failed to re-open Purley Pool, and his promised free replacement will see his cash-strapped council subsidising private developers
A private developer’s £60million scheme to build 220 expensive “later living” flats on the site of the former Purley leisure centre now includes provision for cash-strapped Croydon Council to “subsidise” the cost of providing a new pool and leisure centre.
This vital detail has been buried in the planning report which is to go before the council’s planning committee tomorrow night.
The provision for a subsidy would completely contradict everything that has been said by Croydon’s Tory Mayor Jason Perry and Chris Philp, the Conservative MP for Croydon South, since they offered their support for the proposals by Polaska Assets, a subsidary of a company based in the British Virgin Islands dodgy tax haven.
Neither Perry, a part-time Mayor and full-time plastic guttering salesman, nor Philp, a millionaire entrepreneur who finances overseas development companies, have ever answered questions about who the beneficial owners are behind Polaska Assets BVI.
But in a timeline of deceit, this is what they have said over the past four years about how the new pool in Purley town centre would not be paid for by Croydon’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers: Continue reading
A pride of Johns?: most of the cast of Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ‘n Roll, which features Johnson Willis as Wilko (left), Jon House as Lee Brilleaux, Georgina Field as Sparko (right) and David John as Big Figure (on drums)
KEN TOWL reviews a new play with music about the enigmatic but brusque, uxorious and faithless John Wilkinson, and his band of other Johns
Collective nouns. They’re great, aren’t they?
“An embarrassment of riches”. “A murder of crows”. But what about Johns? What is the collective noun for Johns?
This appears to have been determined in 1971, when guitarist John Wilkinson fell in with bassist John B Sparks, drummer John Martin and singer and harmonica player Lee John Collinson. Collectively, they became Dr Feelgood and, individually, to avoid confusion, Wilko Johnson, Sparko, The Big Figure and Lee Brilleaux.
Why does this matter? Continue reading
Steve Reed OBE, the “townie” environment minister, was exposed as being out of his depth once again when he tried to give a speech to the annual conference of the National Farmers’ Union held in Westminster yesterday.
Out of his depth: Streatham and Croydon North MP facing protests from farmers in Westminster yesterday
The Labour MP for Streatham and Croydon North, local party members will say, has spent much of his first 12 years in Parliament dodging difficult questions and any scrutiny of his conduct.
Yesterday, there was no hiding place for Reed.
Farmers disrupted Reed’s speech, with loud horns from tractors parked outside the hall and protesters unfurling banners in front of him. Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Senior council official tells meeting held in George Street that he and his staff ‘had no knowledge about the closure of the centre or new service provider’.
PLUS: Protests planned for Wednesday night against more service cuts and the latest Council Tax hike
Confrontation on Katharine Street: Mayor Perry (right, in his Mitcham Belle drivers’ pack-a-mac) left the group of carers unconvinced with his answers
There’s growing frustration and fury among Croydon’s carers, who feel ignored and by-passed by their council over the sudden decision to switch the provider of a key part of the local authority’s services, forcing the closure of the Croydon Carers’ Centre on George Street.
The council’s latest cost-cutting measure has seen Mayor Jason Perry upbraided in the middle of Katharine Street by an angry group of carers who were seeking urgent answers to their questions over the lack of proper consultation and the council’s failure to conduct proper equality or health impact assessments, as the local authority is required to do by law.
And savvy carers who have learned not to accept anything that Perry’s council says at face value have begun to ask why the new contractors, Carers First, have not had their contracts renewed elsewhere in London.
Now, even senior council staff have admitted that they knew nothing about the changes to service provider or the closure of the Croydon Carers’ Centre. Continue reading
For our latest exclusive prize competition, Inside Croydon has teamed up with the lovely people at Southwark Playhouse Borough to offer two pairs of tickets to see the “stonking” new play with live music: Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
In 2012, rock star Wilko Johnson, the founder of seminal R&B group Dr Feelgood, was told he had inoperable cancer and a year to live.
Refusing all treatment, he decided to spend his last months living meaningfully: seeing the people, places and things which meant most to him during his remarkable life.
Then, a miracle happened… Continue reading
The David Lean Cinema in Croydon Clocktower will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next Monday with a suitably classic film screening and some special guests.
Croydon’s much-loved independent cinema will be marking the occasion with a classic David Lean film. Tickets are now available for the Oscar-winning director’s 1945 adaptation of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit, starring Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings (7.30pm on March 3).
In the audience will be Sally Beard, a trustee of The David Lean Foundation, plus a couple of hangers-on from the council, and everyone will be invited to enjoy a complimentary glass of bubbly to toast the celebrations. Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: As local resident LUCIA BRIAULT explains, retirement housing complexes as proposed for ‘Purley Pool Towers’ offer sky-high living but at sky-high prices
Later living blockage: developer Polaska’s proposals are for four blocks of up to 12 storeys where Purley leisure centre and multi-storey car park now stands
I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of flats.
I guess the main reason is a lack of control: you can’t control the state other people leave the communal areas in, you can’t control the noises and smells that assail your senses, you can’t control the temperature because heat rises from the flats below you.
But most of all, a leasehold tenure means you can’t control the timing and cost of repairs and maintenance. Social media is filled with complaints about local landlords not doing what they are supposed to do, in the public and private sector. Residents pay monthly service charges but the management company can still invoice residents if anything “major” needs doing. These problems often arise not just in flats but in “planned estates”, too – those new developments where the roads are unadopted by the council and residents have to pay towards the upkeep of the public realm or even “basic” services such as waste collection.
But “later living” developments, like the one proposed for the Purley leisure centre site, take management fees, service charges and add-ons to a whole new level.
Before we consider those service charges, let’s start with the price tag. Whether you want to buy or rent, later living developments carry a significant premium. Continue reading
The new owners of what was once Croham Hurst Primary are BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, who want to use the site for educational purposes, while making it available for community use, as GENE BRODIE, our education correspondent, reports
The Whitgift Foundation has announced that it has completed a £7.5million property sale in South Croydon, with the former site of its Old Palace pre-school and primary on Melville Avenue being bought by a Neasden-based Hindu organisation.
Final days: Old Palace prep closed last year, and the site has now been sold for £7.5m
The deal will provide a bit of relief to the financially-stretched commercial landowner, who has been forced to close down its girls’ independent school.
The Old Palace prep school closed its gates last July, while the senior school, in the historic listed buildings of the home of Elizabethan Archbishops of Canterbury in Croydon Old Town, is due to deliver its final lessons at the end of summer term this year. The Old Palace senior school is now being offered for sale.
The sale of the prep school and grounds for educational purposes will also come as a huge relief to neighbours in South Croydon, who feared that some part of the site might be bought by property developers to build flats.
The Melville Avenue school – once Croham Hurst Primary – has been bought by BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, one of the largest and most active Hindu communities in the country. Continue reading
How should we counter the rise of the far-right? As KEN TOWL found out when he arrived on time at the Croydon School of Philosophy, by offering some truth and understanding
In the School of Philosophy on Addiscombe Grove, not far from East Croydon Station, Yunis Smith, ex-Royal Marine and currently “immigrants’ champion” on Hastings Council, wears a green hat and drinks from a green water bottle. He sits in front of the opening slide of his PowerPoint slideshow, which features a union flag next to a depiction of Tower Bridge, coloured green.
Mussolini got the trains to run on time: Croydon Greens’ meeting in the Croydon School of Philosophy eventually began at 3.30pm…
When you are a member of a party with a colour for its name, branding is pretty straightforward.
Smith is councillor for Baird ward (named for John Logie Baird, who invented the television in Hastings), and part of the minority Green administration on Hastings Borough Council, and was the Croydon Green Party’s “special guest speaker” at the weekend.
Traditionally, Hastings has had a Labour council. Perhaps reflecting this, Smith’s neighbouring ward is Tressel, named for the author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, the classic semi-autobiographical novel beloved by many in the Labour movement. Continue reading
Firefighters have issued a smoking safety reminder following a fire at a shop with flats on Brighton Road in Coulsdon yesterday.
Half of the roof of the building was damaged by fire. Three people left the property uninjured.
The fire is believed to have been accidental and caused, according to the London Fire Brigade, by “the unsafe disposal of smoking materials”.
A LFB spokesperson said: “This incident serves as a reminder for smokers to fully extinguish their cigarettes before disposing of them. Continue reading
Since Croydon’s Conservative Mayor Jason Perry was elected in 2022, there have been just four successful prosecutions brought by the council for criminal fly-tipping in the borough.
Scourge of Croydon: there was a time when the council brought prosecutions for fly-tips such as this
That’s according to a Freedom of Information response to an enquiry submitted by Tony Hooker of the Litter-Free Norbury campaign.
This latest discovery will torpedo the Croydon Mayor’s claims to be serious about cleaning up the borough and making fly-tippers pay for their crimes. Continue reading
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