Croydon (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Katherine Kerswell’s 30-year career in local government is marred by controversy over her £500k payoffs from councils, including Croydon, sparking outrage and scrutiny.
The three Section 114 notifications that were issued during Kerswell’s tenure as the head of Croydon Council, which she departed last Friday with little fanfare, likely need more attention.
Since no other council leader has chaired more than one S114, Kerswell’s “hat-trick” of acknowledging Croydon’s financial failure is an accomplishment that is unlikely to be surpassed. It’s definitely nothing to be proud of.
Given her involvement in Nottingham City Council’s December 2021 notice, which followed her brief tenure as temporary CEO there in 2020, just before she was parachuted into Croydon, Kerswell most likely even has a claim to a fourth S114 notice of effective insolvency.
Additionally, she oversaw Northamptonshire County Council for three years. This council later gained notoriety for being the first in England to issue an S114 notice this century. That ultimately resulted in the council’s dissolution in the case of Northants.
Under her leadership, Croydon Council blew its budget by almost £30 million in 2024–2025 and required another yearly bailout, this time a record £136 million. Kerswell just avoided additional S114s last year and this one as well. Someone in Whitehall, which is currently led by a Labour administration, decided that occasionally triggering civic distress alarms without taking decisive financial action was not a viable solution.
The Commissioners were then dispatched to Croydon.
Early in the 1980s, Kathy Kerswell’s peers at Leicester University recall her as a very ambitious young woman who was heavily involved with NOLS, the National Organization of Labour Students.
They claim that aside from the occasion she decided to give a thorough explanation of how to use yoghurt to cure vaginal thrush to a group of pupils, both male and female, she was not especially noteworthy.
By 1995, Kerswell was in her mid-thirties and a senior policy officer at Leicester City Council, when she unintentionally contributed to the fall of the council’s Labour leader, Stewart Foster.
According to the council assessment, the relationship “posed a risk of maladministration.”
Kerswell took a 12-month leave of absence from her council position to pursue an MBA at De Montfort University; however, she refuted claims that the authority had funded the study.
Despite losing his job as Labour leader in a vote of confidence, Foster and Kerswell maintained a connection for a while.
Kerswell’s ambition and her quest for “top jobs” in the public sector seem unaffected by any of this.
Before relocating to accept the top position in Northants two years later, she was the CEO of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council in the Midlands by 2005.
“I’m surprised she had any time left to take off,”
one council insider told Inside Croydon.
“After all, Katherine had a very long summer break, at least three weeks, while attending her son’s wedding in America.”
Kerswell’s son, from her first marriage, Callum Kerswell-Reid, had been a “soccer scholar” in the United States.
Because Kerswell, the misguided CEO of the council, was so worried about how this website was exposing the ineptitude and poor management of her council, she personally directed her IT team to prevent staff computers from accessing Inside Croydon.
As soon as she got to Croydon, Kerswell knew she had a loser. Following a disagreement with her political boss, Tony Newman, Jo Negrini, her predecessor, had fled, buoyed by her own enormous payout.
Many others were unaware of this, including members of the council cabinet at the time, but Negrini had been sitting on a significant financial warning from the council’s auditors for six months without anyone being informed or taking any action. It appears that delusions are not unusual among leaders of local authorities.
How do local residents and councillors respond to these settlements?
Residents and councillors have replied with strong review and frustration to the large severance agreements entered by Katherine Kerswell, especially amid severe financial problems faced by councils like Croydon.
Residents express frustration over public democrats being paid out to directors they associate with mismanagement and austerity measures that led to cutbacks in services and community rigors. The perception is that these payouts price failure rather than responsibility, and distrust in the government.
Councillors, particularly from opposition parties, have intimately condemned the pay- offs as illegal and immorally questionable. They argue that similar agreements punctuate systemic problems in council governance and fiscal oversight, calling for reforms to limit inordinate exit payments to elderly officers.