S114 speech
People who have done something outstandingly stupid hate being reminded of that by people saying ‘told you so’.
But today it is difficult to avoid saying ‘told you so’. The saddest thing about the report in the public interest is that there was nothing in it which people outside the council leadership had not been saying for years. That’s a few of its own back-benchers, all the members of the opposition, the trade unions, staff and local bloggers. All saying it, all ignored.
Croydon Labour has a lot of soul searching to do to understand how it got things so wrong and, most seriously, how it failed to heed any of the dissenting voices.
In 2014 we were told that the new administration would be the most open and transparent ever. Yet over the following months we saw the increasing use of delegation so that many decisions could be taken in secret.
Nowhere is this more true than in the decision to set up Brick By Brick and its associated charities. As a so-called independent company it could dodge scrutiny and refuse to answer questions. Its money-go-round has been rightly compared to a Ponzi and it has failed by every single metric. It was a manifesto pledge of the Conservatives in 2018 that it should be closed down, and how I wish we had been given the opportunity to do that.
The excessive use of delegations is illustrated in the purchase of Croydon Park Hotel, where we were given 24 hours notice of a decision to sign the deal the next day. It was clearly high risk, entering the council into a world where it had no expertise or credibility. Good enough reasons for the council to perhaps slow down and do its due diligence in a very public way, its assumptions tested by experts? No, not in the mad world of Croydon Labour. Banged through on the nod with barely a second thought, in spite of the protests of the opposition and a few brave souls on its back benches.
The finances were made much worse by the setting of hopelessly naïve social care budgets, a practice which went on year after year. These budgets were massively overspent within weeks of being set. Year after year we were told that the council had learned, and was now setting a realistic budget which could be reliably stuck to. And yet every year it was wrong.
I listened with interest to the new Leader’s car-crash interview with Vanessa Feltz. She was pressed repeatedly to tell listeners what she felt responsibility for in this financial catastrophe. Three times she couldn’t say. But I can. Cllr Ali was one tenth of the cabinet which approved every single one of these catastrophic decisions. As far as we can see she disagreed with none of it. So why should we now trust her to sort the mess out?
We have been forecasting that the council was heading for a S114 for over a year. This summer Labour’s line was that this was all because of COVID. But that is clearly untrue. The front door was rotten, COVID was just the boot that finally kicked it in.
I agree with most of the recommendations in the report and can only hope that Labour has the humility to rethink its entire approach to the governance of the town, in the 18 months left before the residents get the chance to replace them with a competent Conservative administration.
