At the Cabinet meeting on Monday evening this week a report was presented with the grand title of ‘Finance, performance and risk performance report’ (yes, really). It is designed to give an update on how the council is doing against its previous performance and also against the targets it has set itself. There is a strong emphasis on the progress being made (or not) against the huge number of actions identified to bring the council back to effective service delivery after the financial collapse caused by reckless borrowing and spending.
The information presented was very worrying. The ‘report summary’ detailed that there was a drop in measures being reported as ‘green’, that the number of financial savings programmes as risk had increased, that cultural transformation is on hold, the revised landlord licensing scheme had been declined by government, empty homes repairs are underperforming along with electrical testing, sick days have continued to rise, freedom of information requests are not being responded to in time and agency staffing costs increased.
We are constantly being told by the Labour Council Leader, Hamida Ali, that things are improving or that they have made great progress. This report demonstrates that this is not the case. More and more we are hearing reports that basic council services are not being provided as they should and resident enquires and issues are not being responded to.
You can read the report for yourself via this link:
Croydon Council went bankrupt due to the reckless actions of local Labour Party politicians who should have been protecting Croydon’s residents not taking poorly thought-out investment risks with their money. It is not fair that on top of having to carry the resulting debt burden and loss of services necessary to rebalance the budgets we are now also getting a substandard performance on what is left.
Croydon deserves better than this.
Don’t just hope for a better Croydon, vote for one!
Cllr Jason Cummings
