Green Party candidate for Mayor of Croydon, Peter Underwood, gives his verdict on the latest episode in the long history of failures at Croydon Council.
The people of Croydon have been let down by a bunch of failures. We have been left in a mess, and we now need big changes to get us out of it.
The biggest failure is Jason Perry. He has said his “top priority has always been to fix the Council’s finances” and it’s clear he has completely failed. Even worse than that, Perry and his Conservative Cabinet haven’t even managed to get the most basic financial management systems in place. They don’t know where the money is being spent so how can they claim that they know what they are doing?
They have put up our Council tax by 27% in three years, sold off our assets on the cheap, slashed public services, and still failed to do the biggest thing they promised before the election.
Perry is claiming that bringing in Government Commissioners is just a political attack. He says that if the Government wanted them to do more they should have said. Surely any sensible person would have realised that if you are continuing to fail then you shouldn’t have to wait for someone else to tell you do something about it.
Also, if Perry had actually read the panel’s report, he would see that it was the Improvement Panel appointed by his Conservative Government who have said he has failed. They were the ones recommending that Commissioners need to be brought in. The Labour Minister has just followed their advice.
Labour in Croydon are trying to turn this into a political attack, but they have no right claim they are any better. Their own record in charge of the Council shows they were equally incompetent and for the last three years Labour Councillors have all failed to provide any sensible opposition. They have sat on their hands and let the illegal and farcical Conservative budgets pass, instead of joining the Greens and voting against them. The Labour Mayoral candidate was even chair of the scrutiny committee who were in charge of examining Jason Perry’s budgets and yet she still didn’t vote against them. Yet another political failure.
The second area where there has been a complete failure is at Senior Officer level in the Council. There are clearly questions about the competence of Senior Officers if they don’t even know what’s happening in the areas they are supposed to manage. Since the start of the financial crisis the number of Senior Officers and their pay levels have gone up while the number of frontline staff has gone down. This is the opposite of what should be happening.
Third is the failure of the Improvement Panel. Their report is littered with inconsistences and excuses and contains the wonderfully damming sentence “we reported via a factual update letter the continuing positive progress against the Exit Strategy, with the exception of a significant deterioration in the Council’s financial position.” In other words, the panel thought the plan they agreed was going wonderfully well apart from the fact that it was failing to solve the problem and things were actually getting worse.
It does lead you to question what insight and expertise the panel were bringing if they agreed an improvement plan for the finances that didn’t lead to any improvement in the finances. The next question is why were we paying them so much money for the privilege?
The fourth area of failure is the Government itself. The most obvious failure of the Labour Government is that they have refused to restore the funding to Councils that was cut by the Conservatives over the previous 14 years. Labour have just continued the Conservative lies about everything being solved through mythical efficiency savings.
Councils across the country now don’t have enough funding to deliver the services they are legally obliged to. Croydon has faced increased pressure compared to many others and yet Government funding has still not been returned to anywhere near the level that Councils need. Croydon is also still the victim of the unfair allocation system that means we get far less per person than many other London Councils. The failure to fund Croydon fairly is yet another failure to add to the list.
So, having listed just some of the failures, the important question is what happens next?
On the political level it doesn’t look like Jason Perry or any of his cabinet will have the decency to resign. That means we will have to wait until next May to vote all of them out. I am a candidate for Mayor of Croydon and my business qualifications and years of management experience in the public and not-for-profit sectors is helping convince more and more people that I am the best option to replace Perry. I’m not promising miracles but I am promising to do the job that the Executive Mayor should be doing.
At Senior Officer level there surely has to be a clear-out. There are just too many Senior Officers being paid far too much, and this report implies that they are not up to the job. As Mayor I would be looking to restructure the Council to make it less top-heavy, review which of the Senior Offices we wanted to keep, and aim to attract ambitious new people to these senior positions who relish the opportunity to show they can really fix the problems. Working at Croydon Council needs to be turned into a badge of honour, not a stain on your CV.
With regards to the new Commissioners, we don’t yet know exactly what powers they will have and what their main areas of focus will be, but we do need to keep a very careful eye on them. We will need to take a stand against more cuts to services, more selling off of our useful assets, or more of our money being wasted on consultants and the Commissioners themselves.
At Government level we need to keep up the pressure on the Government to end Conservative attitudes to public spending. As Mayor I would work with other Councils and MPs to collectively apply more pressure and increase the public demand for fair funding.
Judgement day has happened, and too many people have been found to have failed us. There is hope, but we need to change a lot at Croydon Council. I hope you will join me in working to make that happen.