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Typical households will be paying £600 more in Council Tax in the coming year than they did before the Conservative Mayor took office, while yet more services are cut. But part-time Perry and his councillor colleagues did vote themselves a pay rise. By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor
A Town Hall meeting tonight will rubber-stamp Mayor Jason Perry’s decision to increase Council Tax in April by the maximum allowed annually of 4.99%.
It means that Tory Perry will be seeking re-election as Croydon Mayor with the dark legacy of having hiked residents’ Council Tax bills by one-third since 2023.
The latest local tax increase represents a massive political failure for piss-poor Perry and his cabinet member for finance, Jason Cummings. They gambled with the finances of every resident in Croydon by asking special permission from their Conservative colleague, Michael Gove, when he was Secretary of State for local government, to be allowed to increase Council Tax by 15% in April 2023.
Perry and Cummings’ cunning plan was to front-end the pain of Council Tax increases in 2023, in order to freeze Council Tax this year, to hand them a political advantage ahead of the local elections.
Sitting uncomfortably: Tory Perry’s gamble with Council Tax flopped
But Perry’s plan failed when he needed ever greater bail-outs from government with each passing year. It got to the point where Perry could no longer be trusted to manage the borough’s finances, and last year the government sent in Commissioners to take charge.
Even with increased government support for Croydon and new multi-year settlements, the council’s finances are in a grim state.
The hard-working Council Tax-payers of Croydon have been lumbered with the burden of servicing the massive £1.4billion council debt.
In the 2022-2023 financial year, before Perry got his hands on Croydon’s finances, the overall Band D Council Tax bill was £1,965.66 per year.
From this April, those same Band D householders will be paying around
£2,600.11,
as Perry lumps on another increase.
Overall, that’s an increase of more than
£600 per year
since Perry became Croydon’s Mayor.
Things have got so bad that Perry has abandoned the sort of dissembling you’d expect from third-rate politicians. Now, the man who in 2022 promised to “fix the finances” is resorting to outright lies.
“Croydon is back on track,” shout the posters distributed on social media platforms on behalf of Perry in the past few days.
“Under Labour, the council had been bankrupted three times,” Perry claims, deliberately falsely.
Perry seems to have forgotten that the third Section 114 notice of effective bankruptcy issued from Croydon Town Hall was in November 2022 – when he was Mayor.
In fact, one of the few people better off since Jason Perry became Croydon Mayor is… Jason Perry, after he voted through an increase to his own salary, to £84,000 per year.
According to Perry, “Today, Croydon is turning the corner. The 2026 [council] budget shows clear evidence of progress.”
Perry’s ‘progress’: after almost four years of the Tory Mayor, the council’s toxic debt remains almost untouched, its costs continuing to rise
Yet that is far from the case.
Under Perry, spending on interim staff has rocketed from £14million per year to almost £50million per year, including spending £726 PER HOUR on one consultant, hired to advise on… how to cut costs!
“The council has confirmed it will meet its 2025-2026 savings target and reduce its request for government support by £34million next year,” Perry says, forgetting (again) to mention that he still needs almost £100million in government support just to balance his budget this year.
This is on top of another £250million already borrowed on his watch.
Grim overview: council finance chief Conrad Hall was brought in by the Commissioners
Conrad Hall took over as the council’s corporate director of finances in the new year. He was hired by the Commissioners, not by impotent Mayor Perry. Hall’s report to tonight’s council cabinet meeting does not attempt to mislead in the way that the Tory Mayor has done.
“Croydon will continue to rely on the Exceptional Financial Support (EFS) scheme sponsored by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). This is not sustainable,” Hall writes.
“It is of course the case that Croydon’s financial issues are compounded by legacy issues such as previous losses on unsuccessful commercial investments and the substantial accumulated debt in respect of those.
“It is difficult to see a route out of the EFS programme over the medium-term that does not include some sort of government intervention to mitigate the impact of this, but there is much more yet that the council needs to do to manage as closely as possible to the resources available to it.”
Hardly a rousing endorsement of a council that is “on track”, as Perry is trying to claim after four years when he failed to deliver a deal with government, whether under Conservative or Labour control.
And Hall contradicts the Mayor’s public claims. “Overall, the council has a good track record of delivering planned savings, with 86.7% of the 2025-2026 proposals either fully implemented or on track to be implemented by the year-end.
“However, the ‘Future Croydon’ programme has not consistently delivered to its targets to date and the pace of change will need to accelerate in 2026-2027.” Meaning even more cuts to services, as Croydon residents continue to pay more to get less.
Hall confirms that Council Tax will need to increase by 5% in each of the forthcoming three years as well. Perhaps that’s what Perry means when he claims to be “on track”.
In the coming financial year, the council is planning to spend £485.4million, of which £288.9million will come from Council Tax.
Amid all this gloom, has Perry’s council didn’t bother with a budget consultation, as many local authorities do around the end of the year. Although apparently the council’s propaganda bunker did invite Council Tax-payers to email the Mayor with their comments.
Finance forecast: this is hardly the numbers of a council who is ‘on track’ as Perry has tried to claim
At a council scrutiny meeting last night, officials were asked how many responses they got to this poorly publicised appeal.
“Zero,” was the response.
Not that Perry was at the meeting to hear this. Perhaps he believes he is above scrutiny? Part-time Perry was a no-show at the three-hour meeting.
Stuart King, the leader of the Labour group on the council, said tonight, “Jason Perry has hiked Council Tax for residents by a staggering 33%.
“Despite this he has needed permission to borrow more than £350million to balance the books.”
King characterised Perry’s term in office as “disastrous management”, some of the blame for which lies with the former chief exec, Katherine Kerswell, who spent millions in consultancy fees for outside companies to do her job for her.
In this latest council budget, Perry is borrowing twice as much as he did in his first.
Fight for fair funding: Peter Underwood, the Greens’ mayoral candidate
“He has closed libraries, turned Croydon into the flytipping capital of the country and failed so miserably that the government had no choice but to send in Commissioners to fix his failings,” King said.
Peter Underwood, the Green Party’s candidate for Mayor, said, “It’s the same old story. More cuts to everything apart from our taxes and the Mayor and councillors’ allowances.
“Perry’s plan to increase debt every year isn’t fixing the finances and the Labour government’s stingy changes to council funding don’t even cover Croydon’s interest payments.
“We need to keep up the fight for fair funding and, if we have to make cuts, start at the top not force all of the pressure on to people who are already struggling to get by.”
Read more: Council’s agency staff bill includes £726 PER HOUR consultant
Read more: McMahon acts after serious concerns on ‘aspects of leadership’
Read more: Borrowing plan would lead to council’s ‘collapse’ says report
Read more: Children’s services passes Ofsted inspection despite 5 deaths
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