Croydon (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Croydon Mayor Jason Perry faces criticism for using taxpayer-funded lawyer to suppress reporting on £50,000 pay-off to departing chief executive Katherine Kerswell.
Yesterday, Tory Jason Perry’s only objective was a late attempt at news management and to salvage his own political career after wreaking havoc on the residents of Croydon during his catastrophic three-and-a-half years in office as the borough’s first elected mayor.
“When’s a pay-off not a pay-off?”
a more than slightly peeved Katharine Street source told last night, as the news that Katherine Kerswell had resigned her job as the borough’s chief executive began to be fully absorbed.
“When it’s 50 grand of Council Tax-payers’ money,”
they said.
When Inside Croydon broke the huge news from Fisher’s Folly first once more, the pushback was clear and repeated: “It’s not a pay-off,” as other Conservative sources attempted to argue, but failed to do so convincingly.
In a final act of deceit and cover-up funded by the public, Perry (and most likely Kerswell as well) sent a sniffy email to Inside Croydon Towers late on Friday, using the unfortunate Borough Solicitor, Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense.
“The suggestions that the chief executive Katherine Kerswell is receiving a substantial pay-off, comparable to the payments to Jo Negrini, is simply false and misleading,”
Lawrence-Orumwense wrote.
Croydon’s director of legal services and monitoring officer, himself a Kerswell appointee, wanted Inside Croydon to remove or amend our reports of Kerswell’s scrambled exit, helped on her way by what we now understand to be around £50,000 of public cash.
Lawrence-Orumwense has previously tried to get Inside Croydon to take our thoroughly thorough and well-founded reports down from the public eye, perhaps with Kerswell’s knowledge if not outright encouragement.
During Kerswell’s five years as council CEO, there were numerous instances of incompetence, and this one happened in 2022 when we released private legal communication that the council had already posted on its own website.
The council and its top lawyer had a bad ending to that saga when a High Court judge denied the council’s ridiculous attempt to obtain an injunction against this website, giving him his ass on a plate.
“It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,”
Mr Justice Nicklin said to a junior barrister hired by the council.
In an attempt to hide a council error and repair some reputational harm, that case cost our financially constrained council an estimated £20,000.
After six weeks on the council’s own website, we published legal reports regarding the council’s potential to recoup a portion of the £437,000 golden handshake that Kerswell’s predecessor, Jo Negrini, received.
Three years later, Lawrence-Orumwense is hammering home his point once more, this time about Kerswell’s reputation. He claims that it is “extremely damaging to reputation” to announce that the council CEO is going to get a payoff of tens of thousands of pounds of public funds. which, of course, is debatable. The same is true for Kerswell’s reputation.
Kerswell does have some notoriety in local government circles for cashing in on her departures from senior jobs: in 2011, she scored a Negrini-esque £420,000 pay-out after 16 months at Kent County Council. In April 2019, it is understood that Newham secured her departure as interim head of service with a more modest pay-off after barely nine months in the role.
One useful thing did emerge from Lawrence-Orumwense’s latest little billet-doux, however.
“For the avoidance of any doubt, the chief executive contract notice period is three months,”
the Monitoring Officer advised.
Three months’ salary for someone on £204,000 per year amounts to a handy £51,000. There will be pension top-ups, too. Which means that over the course of her career in public service, Kerswell will have received a cool half-a-million quid in settlement pay-offs from at least three local authorities.
The point, as various employment experts have emphasised in the past 24 hours or so, is that,
“If Kerswell resigned, as everyone seems to agree that she did, then the council didn’t have to pay her a penny. She could, perhaps should, have worked her notice,”
one sage counsel said.
“Now, all they are doing is paying her not to work.”
They pointed to Jane West, the council’s finance director, who gave eight months’ notice of her intention to leave the council, and is working through that period, without ever a hint of any pay-off.
“Public bodies only make payments in lieu of notice if they want someone gone quickly, like when they’ve been sacked.”
However, they have been informed that Kerswell resigned. As a result, neither the council nor Mayor Jason Perry ever had to pay Kerswell anything.
And that brings us to the issue of the harm to Croydon’s part-time mayor Perry’s reputation, which Lawrence-Orumwense has really been used to try to prevent.
With just over six months to go until local elections, Perry has already paid out to another departing CEO after failing to recover some of the excessive payout to Negrini. As the Conservatives anticipate an electoral catastrophe in May, it will not sit well with prospective Reform UK supporters in Shirley, New Addington, and Coulsdon.
There is still no information regarding the departure of the council’s top official on its own website, one day after Kerswell’s resignation became known. Perry’s weekly online self-congratulation post, which is published every Friday, didn’t even name Kerswell.
Perry and his council seem to be attempting to act as though nothing has occurred.
However, as everyone is already aware, it has. Attempting to stop coverage of Kerswell’s disgraceful exit won’t help her council’s well-earned reputation for dishonesty, secrecy, and cover-ups.
What legal steps did the borough solicitor take to block reporting?
They filed a formal legal letter or notice addressed to the media outlet or journalists to dispute the veracity or issuance of the payout information, citing confidentiality provisions or contractual non-disclosure.
The solicitor presented legal grounds on the basis of data protection, employment confidentiality, or defamation risks in an effort to prevent the disclosure of the payout. They may have threatened legal action, guided by seeking an injunction or applying significant pressure to retract or alter any damaging or misleading article.
The strategy was for the public purse to fund top-tier legal counsel and damage control for the council executive.
This legal remedy is intended to limit scrutiny and public knowledge of the payout, raising concerns about transparency, accountability, and governance.