Croydon (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Croydon Council chief Katherine Kerswell has warned staff that the local authority’s financial position remains serious despite recent recovery efforts.
As reported by Inside Croydon, with three months without a full meeting at Town Hall and Fisher’s Folly bosses awaiting the next government instruction, the council seems to be sleepwalking into yet another financial disaster.
“We are still in a serious situation,” said the financial chief for Croydon Council.
The remark was made by Jane West, the council’s financial director, during yesterday’s weekly round-robin to council employees. The chief executive of Croydon, Katherine Kerswell, who makes £204,000 a year and typically sends out the all-staff bulletin, is on vacation. Once more.
The public should be deeply concerned that Croydon’s financial status “remains serious” in spite of the most recent £136 million bailout from the central government, which was only given a few weeks ago.
However, Kerswell and Jason Perry, the borough’s part-time mayor, seem committed to controlling the way they are managing Croydon’s basket-case council.
The chiefs of the council have been working on another plan, which West claims is termed a Stabilization Plan. Irony does not seem to be the intended meaning.
Croydon’s financial performance has been at its worst during Perry’s leadership, and the club has needed to borrow more money than ever before—worse even under Tony Newman and his Numpties in 2020.
And that’s after his repeated rises of Council Tax to record heights.
Therefore, it seems beyond the most religious of faith that he and Kerswell, who has been the CEO for nearly five years, can be trusted to rescue the council from the catastrophe they created.
It is difficult to see how this most recent initiative could have a big impact after over five years, a number of unsuccessful ideas and tactics, and paying up to £1,000 a day to individual members of the government-imposed “improvement and assurance” panel.
In particular, the council seems to be sleepwalking into its next catastrophe under its Conservative Mayor, just as they did in 2024.
The politicians on the council became sidetracked during the campaign trail for the London Mayorals and the General Election twelve months ago.
West and Tony McArdle, the chair of the ineffective improvement panel, declared the council’s budgets “unsustainable” by the time they returned for Town Hall business.
It appears that Perry and Kerswell have completely given up on Croydon Council this time around.
There won’t be another important public forum to review any of the council’s actions until late June, when Perry’s underemployed cabinet councillors get together again (for the first time since March), as this Wednesday’s scheduled council cabinet meeting has been postponed in April and has now been cancelled entirely (no one is saying why).
The next full council Town Hall meeting with any important business won’t take place until July 16, which is three months after the last one.
It appears that the increasingly distant Mayor Perry and the council leaders are purposefully avoiding accountability.
As a result, the May 27 scrutiny committee meeting has gained more significance and is a unique turning point in the council’s development. Perry, McArdle, and Kerswell are all waiting impatiently for something to happen.
Up until now, their combined answers have amounted to more of the same: larger and more drastic service cuts, frequently disguised as part of their “Future Croydon,” digital-first strategy. Aside from that, Croydon Council has reached a stage where there aren’t many services left to reduce and not much more to flog off.
West urged all employees to be “engaged and involved with the Future Croydon transformation programme” in her letter to them. That alone implies that few employees are likely “engaged” or “involved” in their council’s ongoing dismantling.
In the staff missive, which has been leaked to Inside Croydon, West wrote, “Right now, we are waiting for final comments on our Stabilisation Plan from the improvement and assurance panel, which is set to be published mid-May, ahead of Scrutiny on 27 May.
It contains accelerated actions from the Future Croydon plan, and the things we are committing to do to make savings over the next year.
We’ll be sharing the plan with you, as well as more updates on the wider transformation programme and the initiatives within it.” Which is nice of them.
Inside Croydon cautioned that the budget being pushed through was unbalanced back in February, when Tory council members voted in favor of Mayor Perry’s most recent Council Tax hike and approved his current fiscal year budget.
The remarks in West and McArdle’s most recent report to the government served as the basis for this.
West’s comments from yesterday seem to support this even more.
“From a financial perspective, our situation remains serious.
As we are now in the new financial year (2025/26), directorate budgets have been reset to take into account the unprecedented demand we saw last year – which continues to grow.”
West mentioned an earlier-in-the-week meeting of the senior administrators of the council. The main takeaway from Tuesday’s meeting is that in order to achieve within their budget, they must all pay closer attention to what other authorities are doing differently.
They must consider what they can do here and what they can learn from others. Have they only recently come up with this brilliant idea?
Because of the difficulties they have encountered in the past, Croydon does not have the funds put aside to absorb overspending from our reserves, unlike some other councils.
And West again described the debt-death spiral that Croydon Council is trapped in.
“What remains unchanged is our reliance on Exceptional Financial Support from the government. Like all authorities, we are waiting to hear the outcome of the government’s spending review (set to be published in June), but we are clear that a cycle of borrowing isn’t a long-term solution for Croydon.”
As our debt increases, so does the level of money we need to sustain it – and in turn the amount of EFS we need grows.
Quite rightly, the government wants assurance that Croydon is doing everything it can to improve its financial sustainability; which is part of the role of our improvement and assurance panel currently.
McArdle – another who dodges public scrutiny and interviews – and his merry little band of commissioners were supposed to have an “exit plan” (yes, another plan) to end their stay in Croydon this July.
“As June approaches,” West wrote, “we’re set to hear about what’s next for Croydon in terms of how we continue to give that assurance and I’ll be sharing that with you as soon as we receive an update from the Secretary of State.”
How is the council planning to use new digital tools to improve processes?
Introducing online, map-based planning systems that facilitate simpler public interaction and speedier decision-making by making planning proposals more interactive and accessible for locals.
This is in line with government-sponsored projects in which municipalities experiment with digital tools to update local planning and expedite the construction of new homes.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to quickly transform handwritten notes, scanned documents, and old paper records into structured digital data. By reducing processing times from hours to seconds, this greatly lessens the administrative load on planning officers, assisting in the clearing of backlogs and freeing up staff members to concentrate on intricate strategic responsibilities.
Utilizing programs such as PlanX and Back Office Planning Systems (BOPS), which offer planners effective document management and applicant user-friendly interfaces. Planning applications can be handled up to 20%, which also increases accuracy and decreases errors.