CROYDON IN CRISIS: Mayor Jason Perry promised a seamless transition and no job cuts – but now two senior managers at the Croydon Carers’ Support Centre have been told they are to be made redundant.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
No clear plans: Carers First took over the Croydon contract in April, but are still re-setting the service
Carers First, the council’s new service providers, have started making staff redundant at the Croydon Carers’ Centre on George Street – just weeks after Mayor Jason Perry promised “there will be no loss of service” and saying that there would be “a seamless transition”.
The Tory Mayor was forced into making a rapid U-turn when confronted with angry protests over the possible closure of the Carers’ Centre. Kent-based Carers First, the new service providers, took a financial hit to keep the centre open (for now: the lease on the building expires in 18 months) and spare Mayor Perry some flak, but they are now looking to trim the additional costs they have incurred. Continue reading
Brightening the future with heritage from the past: Crystal Palace Park Trust is making important progress in updating the 170-year-old, Grade I-listed park
Multi-million-pound major works to restore and improve Crystal Palace Park will be starting on May 19. They are expected to last until August 2026.
The works are part of an ambitious, £52million park-wide regeneration plan being co-delivered Crystal Palace Park Trust and Bromley Council.
During the works, the park will remain open to all visitors, “however you are likely to notice a difference to your typical visits, with footpath redirections, gate and car park closures”, the Trust advised today. Continue reading
According to an insider at a Harris academy in south London, ‘a significant number of mainstream teachers’ have already received letters of potential redundancy, as NASUWT accuses Foundation’s £520,000 pa CEO of ‘underhand tactics’. By our education correspondent, GENE BRODIE
State-funded schools that are administered by the Harris Federation have initiated a formal “consultation” process aimed at making dozens of teachers redundant, a move which has attracted the condemnation of a teachers’ union.
Job losses: Harris City Academy in Crystal Palace is one of six of the federation’s schools in Croydon
There are three Harris primary “academies” in Croydon and three secondaries. The Harris Federation is a massive education business which has 44,000 children in its 55 schools around London and Essex. It was founded by a carpet salesman from Peckham, a prominent donor to the Conservative Party.
The Harris Federation now operates from offices on Wellesley Road, in Croydon town centre, where its chief executive, Sir Dan Moynihan, pockets a salary of close to £520,000, making him the highest paid academy boss in the country.
And now they are looking to shed around 45 teaching jobs. Continue reading
The minimum age for train drivers is to be lowered to 18, as the government and rail operators seek to avoid staff shortages prompted by a looming retirement crisis.
On the right track: most rail operators recruit drivers from the age of 21. Unions have welcomed the move to lower the entry age for train drivers
According to official data, 87% of rail service cancellations in March this year were as a result of staff shortages.
And according to the National Skills Academy for Rail’s projections, the average age of a train driver is 48; almost half of the industry’s drivers are over 50 while just 3% are under 30. It is projected that almost one-third of rail drivers will reach retirement age by 2029.
“Getting young people in work and improving rail services will help boost the economy as part of the Plan for Change,” the Department for Transport said this morning.
The age change will open up work and apprenticeship opportunities three years sooner than is currently allowed, putting “more school and college leavers on track to step straight into work”.
Thousands of jobs and apprenticeships will be made available as early as December, “offering skilled roles, valuable experience and long-term career opportunities while keeping our country moving”, the DfT said. Continue reading
Prize winner: ‘Foxes’ by Chris Wardell picked up one of the RSPCA Young Photographer awards in 2024
The 2025 RSPCA Young Photographer Awards has now opened for entries.
Last year, more than 4,000 children and young people with a passion for photography, animals and nature entered the competition.
Now, budding photographers aged 18 years and under are being asked to submit their photos capturing the animal kingdom on a camera or mobile device.
Ellie Rothnie, award-winning photographer, will once again be part of the judging panel: “The RSPCA’s Young Photographer Awards is the ultimate celebration of young creative talent.
“Every year, the entries are astounding, and indeed many winners from this competition have become immensely successful professional photographers. I am truly honoured to be a judge again, I can’t wait to see this year’s entries.” Continue reading
New owners of The Dog and Bull market pub have yet to submit a licensing application to stay open into the early hours every night.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Under construction: work was still going on in The Dog and Bull’s beer garden last week
Residents living in flats near Croydon’s oldest pub, The Dog and Bull on Surrey Street, have reacted with outrage at proposals for the boozer to have extended licensing hours, to 3am some mornings, as part of its “refreshed” offer under new owners Laine.
“There are too many flats in the area and it seems they have not thought about the residents here,” one neighbour of the pub told Inside Croydon.
Brighton-based Laine, part of the Punch Pubs pubco empire, have already drawn the anger of the pub’s regulars, with a name change to “The Dog” as part of a £125,000 refurbishment that has focused mostly on the beer garden – or what they have decided to call “The Wilderness”.
The refurbishment has been going on for five weeks, with what Laine has described as a “soft launch” planned for this Friday, May 9. Continue reading
Builders’ target: Ashen Grove, and its badger setts, are about to be auctioned for a second time in a few weeks
Alarm bells are sounding among concerned residents in Selsdon, after a patch of public open space that sold at auction last month for more than five times its guide price has now been put straight back on the market – accompanied by carefully compiled computer images of dozens of new houses.
The estate agents handling the latest sale make direct reference to the market pressures created by the Labour government’s house-building targets.
Ashen Grove is a small patch of woodland in Selsdon which has been used as a public open space for decades. It is a Grade 2 Site of Importance for Nature Conservation and locals suggest that it might be classified as “semi-ancient woodland”, having survived development of most kinds since Medieval times. Continue reading
INSIDE SUTTON: The conflicting demands of being constituency MPs and ward councillors are beginning to take a toll, reports ROSE HILL
Wrong priorities: distrusted by some council colleagues, MP Luke Taylor has been devoting much of his time to campaigning for his party
Residents in Sutton are beginning to ask whether the borough’s two recently elected MPs are serving the public interest, or instead choosing to serve the interests of their political party – and themselves.
Liberal Democrats Luke Taylor and Bobby Dean were elected as MPs at the General Election last July, supposedly to represent Sutton and Cheam and Carshalton and Wallington respectively. Both were already councillors, Taylor for Sutton West and East Cheam, Dean for The Wrythe.
And both remain as councillors, each entitled to £12,600 in councillor allowances in addition to their £91,000 per year MP’s salary. All of it funded, of course, by the tax-payer.
Yet those two potentially demanding roles are not enough to keep Taylor and Dean fully occupied, it would seem.
According to his own declaration of members’ interests, not content with his Sutton and Westminster salaries, until October Taylor was also being paid £71,440 per year for a third job, by a firm of aviation consultants. Quite the high-flyer!
Essex-born Dean, meanwhile, listed two additional outlets for his seemingly boundless energies, in addition to his full-time role as an MP and his responsibilities as a ward councillor. On becoming an MP, Dean stopped taking his councillor allowances. But until the start of April, he was registered as the sole director of a public relations company called Speak Change Ltd, based at Otter Drive, Carshalton. He also claims to be a “producer” for the charity, Save the Children. Continue reading
On the run: there’s a new social running group in Coulsdon
If you were inspired by last week’s London Marathon (and with 1.1million people registering in hope of running the 2026 race, there’s a good chance that you were), then a new group called Run Talk Run Coulsdon might be just for you as you take a next step on getting out there and running.
Run Talk Run Coulsdon is free of charge.
They meet once a week, on Fridays at 6.30pm outside The Fox public house on Coulsdon Common – so there’s a good chance their meetings combine two popular social activities…
“We are a social running club, with the aim to improve both mental and physical health,” they say in welcoming new members. Continue reading
Walk tall: the 1903 publicity stunt for Mademoiselle Florence saw her ‘globe walk’ all the way from London to Brighton, despite the often difficult conditions on the Edwardian roads
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Walk from London to Brighton, you say? And do it on top of a huge globe, you say? Why not, said circus performer ‘Mademoiselle Florence’, as DAVID MORGAN recounts the story of an extraordinary stunt from the early 20th Century
It was a busy night for the Croydon constabulary that June evening in 1903, with 80 officers required to keep the road clear around the Greyhound Hotel on the High Street.
The crowds were huge, and growing, awaiting the arrival of “Mademoiselle Florence”. This former performer in the famous circus of PT Barnum eventually appeared not long after 8 o’clock in the evening, exhausted from her efforts. She had set off earlier in the day from central London, almost 10 miles away, as part of an epic attempt to travel all the way from Westminster Bridge to Brighton, all the while balancing atop a 26-inch diameter globe.
Croydon was one of her planned stops. Continue reading
The South West London Law Centre has closed its office in Croydon town centre.
SWLLC has announced that they will be continuing to operate in the borough, but are moving to a new office, away from Davis House, the council-owned office block off Croydon High Street.
“We’re in the process of relocating our Croydon office, with the move expected to be completed by May 19,” SWLLC announced ahead of the Bank Holiday weekend.
“While we finalise a few last details, the doors at Davis House are now temporarily closed, and we aim to reopen at the new location by the end of May.” Continue reading
CROYDON IN CRISIS: The council appears to be sleepwalking into another financial crisis, without a full meeting at the Town Hall for three months, while bosses at Fisher’s Folly waiting for the next government directive. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Waiting for orders: council bosses appear impotent to act without direction from Whitehall
“Our situation remains serious”, according to Croydon Council’s finance chief.
Jane West, the council’s finance director, made the comment in yesterday’s weekly round-robin to council staff. Katherine Kerswell, Croydon’s £204,000 per year chief executive who would usually issue the all-staff bulletin, is away on holiday. Again.
That Croydon’s financial situation “remains serious”, despite the latest £136million bail-out from central government that was granted just weeks ago, ought to be a matter of grave public concern.
Yet between them, Kerswell and the borough’s part-time Mayor, Jason Perry, appear determined to keep a lid on exactly how they are running Croydon’s basket-case council.
According to West, the council chiefs have been working on another plan (yes!), this one called a Stabilisation Plan. It does not appear to be meant ironically. Continue reading
Our arts correspondent, BELLA BARTOCK, can never resist if invited out for a slap-up meal, so when offered the chance of revisiting one of the old haunts of her youth…
Fresh look: the refurb has retained the dining room’s charm, but offers a modern setting at Coombe Wood House
It would take a person with a very strong constitution – with real guts, or balls of steel, if you want to be coarse about it – to go into the restaurant trade in 2025. Inflation, National Insurance increases, local council red tape, there’s more obstacles for the budding restaurateur than in the Grand National.
Dreams have been shattered, fortunes whittled away, by countless best-intention attempts to do something new, different, properly. It is not only Gordon Ramsay who has kitchen nightmares.
But to do so in Croydon, run-down, down-at-heel, rotten borough Croydon, in the current trading environment for the hospitality trade, that must take a special kind of fortitude. I mean, look at Selsdon Park Hotel. If even Wetherspoons start closing their pubs – three of them in Croydon, last time I counted – things must be grim.
Undaunted, that’s what the people behind Coombe Wood House Restaurant are trying to do. Continue reading
ANDREW FISHER has had a busy couple of days, as the clip from LBC above demonstrates, as he has been keeping close watch on the local election results. Here, he considers what they might mean for Croydon
The overnight local election results from across England only told us something that the opinion polls have been telling us for months: voters are unhappy with the Labour government they elected less than a year ago, and they are even less enamoured with the Conservative opposition.
Jolly poor show: Croydon Labour had a bit of a jolly to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough yesterday. Not that it did the candidate, Anna Smith, much good
It could have been even worse for the Conservatives if more county council elections had gone ahead. Several were postponed while negotiations take place over the establishment of new unitary authorities.
One of the places spared electoral delights yesterday was neighbouring Surrey. As at the general election in July 2024, had the scheduled county council and district council elections gone ahead in Surrey, the Conservatives would have been under threat from both the Liberal Democrats and Reform. Continue reading
May 7 UPDATE: This reader offer is now closed. Thank you to all those who have subscribed or upgraded their subscription. The T-shirts are on their way!!
To help celebrate Crystal Palace reaching this year’s FA Cup final, Inside Croydon is offering a free T-shirt to new subscribers who sign up as annual patrons supporting this website.
The T-shirts are being made-to-order by a fans group who have been behind some of the fantastic (pun intended) supporters’ displays at Selhurst Park this season and at the Wembley semi-final against Aston Villa last month.
Ahead of the FA Cup final clash with Manchester City on May 17, the Holmesdale Fanatics have raised £36,000 in a crowd-funder for their match displays – meaning that Wembley is about to encounter a fan experience like nothing it has ever seen before.
And for readers who want to share in a small part of that euphoria, and to encourage you to support the journalism of Inside Croydon, we are offering all new annual subscribers a free T-shirt, usual price £17.99. Continue reading
Binmageddon: Birmingham-scale piles of black bin bags went uncollected by Veolia – and there has not even been a strike in Croydon. Pic: Litter Free Norbury
BINMAGEDDON: Residents are complaining of streets ‘littered with dumped rubbish, overflowing recycling and a persistent smell of decay’. And we are only one month into a new £40m bins contract.
By our Town Hall correspondent, KEN LEE
Just one month into Croydon Mayor Jason Perry’s new, £40million, eight-year contract with rubbish contractors Veolia – the same firm that was sacked two years ago for poor performance – and one of the borough’s MPs has had to step in over continuing problems with missed bin collections.
Deep concern: Croydon East MP Natasha Irons
Natasha Irons, the MP for Croydon East, said yesterday, “I’ve raised concerns with Mayor Perry regarding the growing number of complaints I’ve received from constituents about missed bin collections.
“It’s crucial that the council ensures Veolia is fulfilling its contractual obligations and meeting their agreed levels of service.”
It may be “crucial”, but since Veolia appear to have picked up just where they left off under their previous deal, no one should really be surprised at the continuing issues with their non-delivery of service.
Veolia was incapable even of providing a “smooth” transition of service from themselves, as many residents and businesses related issues with non-collection of refuse in the first half of April, as the contractor changed the regular collection day for some areas around the borough. Continue reading
‘Vulture capitalism’: the new paint job on the historic market pub this week, with a stained glass window missing from the Grade II-listed building
There’s a growing row down Surrey Street, where the centuries-old market pub, a Grade II-listed building, has yet to submit a licensing application for planned raves in the beer garden until 3 in the morning.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Vanished heritage: the fate of this stained glass window from the Grade II-listed Dog and Bull pub is uncertain
The pubco that has taken over Croydon’s oldest pub, the Dog and Bull on Surrey Street, has been accused of “cultural vandalism” and “vulture capitalism”, and has been reported to the authorities for altering the building’s protected Grade II-listed frontage.
A market pub has been on the site for 750 years. But this week, the more traditional Dog and Bull pub sign hanging out across the street market was taken down, replaced by an amorphous, unrecognisable abstract of “The Dog”.
Locals have expressed concerns about the fate of Victorian stained glass in the front window – which reference the pub’s heritage dating back to Surrey Street market’s medieval roots.
said that they prefer the long-standing Dog and Bull name to the pointless and unnecessary alteration dreamt up by some business executive at Laine, the Brighton-based pubco off-shoot of Punch Pubs. Continue reading
Victim: Leon Anderson
The police have named the man killed in a stabbing at his home in Maple Close, Mitcham, on Monday night as Leon Anderson. He was 39.
The man charged with his murder, Kemuel Gambicky-Forbes, 24, of Deer Park Gardens, appeared in custody at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court yesterday, where he was also charged with possession of a blade in a public place.
Gambicky-Forbes had handed himself in at a south London police station on Tuesday, where he was arrested.
The incident occurred at around 7.30pm on Monday, when police were called to an address in Maple Close. Neighbours on the normally quiet suburban street off Oakleigh Way, Eastfields, said that they had heard shouting and arguing before cries from the victim. Continue reading
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