Labour’s mayoral candidate has made an extraordinary and deeply irresponsible proposal: she wants Croydon Council to use compulsory purchase powers to seize the St George’s Walk site in the heart of Croydon, at a reported potential cost of £150 million to £200 million of public money - your money.
This is not bold leadership. It is economic illiteracy on steroids.
At a time when Croydon is still clawing its way back from Labour-induced bankruptcy, Labour’s candidate is proposing that the council once again stake vast sums of taxpayer money on a single, highly risky property play. This is exactly the mindset that wrecked the borough’s finances in the first place. Making large scale property developments work is a highly specialised skillset, one that local Labour politicians do not possess, something they demonstrated last time.
A compulsory purchase order on this scale is not a clever workaround. It is a high-risk, high-cost intervention that exposes residents to enormous legal, financial and market risk long before a single home is built or a single job is created. Compensation costs, litigation, borrowing, holding costs and market volatility all land squarely on the council’s balance sheet.
In other words, it is Monopoly economics: roll the dice, borrow heavily, and hope the numbers somehow come good.
Croydon residents know where that approach leads, because they have already lived through it. The last time Labour ran this borough, they treated property speculation as a shortcut to prosperity. They borrowed recklessly, piled up unsustainable debt, and ignored repeated warnings that the sums did not add up.
The result was catastrophic. Croydon issued a Section 114 notice and effectively went bankrupt - three times. At the peak of Labour’s mismanagement, the council was borrowing the equivalent of £15,000 every single hour just to stay afloat.
Brick by Brick stands as the clearest symbol of that failure: a Labour-backed development vehicle showered with public loans, shielded from scrutiny, and ultimately synonymous with weak governance, missed targets and massive financial exposure. It did not save Croydon. It helped sink it.
Now Labour’s mayoral candidate is proposing another eye-watering intervention, on an even bigger scale, using exactly the same logic: borrow more, take more risk, and let residents carry the downside if it goes wrong.
They have not learned.
They have not changed.
They cannot be trusted.
The reality Labour won’t admit - and why their answer is the wrong one
Labour want voters to believe that the St George’s Walk site is stalled because the council has not been “bold” enough. That claim simply does not stand up.
What is actually holding back development
Large-scale regeneration projects across the country are struggling because Labour’s national economic record has made them harder to deliver.
Growth has stagnated. Business confidence has drained away. Unemployment has risen. And on top of that, Labour has imposed eye-watering tax rises on jobs and investment, including increases to Employers’ National Insurance that directly squeeze cashflow and margins.
For major developments, viability is everything. When costs rise, finance tightens and returns are squeezed, projects pause. That is not ideology. It is basic economics.
Labour’s response to the consequences of its own policies is not to fix the climate for investment, but to dump the risk onto the public sector. Instead of asking why investors are pulling back, they want Croydon Council to step in, borrow hundreds of millions of pounds, and hope for the best.
That is not leadership, it’s a con.
Why a £200m CPO is the wrong answer
A compulsory purchase does not magically make a stalled scheme viable. It simply transfers the risk from private developers to local taxpayers.
Once the council owns the site, it owns every problem that comes with it: the purchase price, the legal battles, the holding costs, the market risk and the delivery risk. All of this would sit on the balance sheet of a borough that is still recovering from bankruptcy caused by Labour’s last experiment in property speculation.
We know exactly how this story ends, because Croydon has already lived it last time Labour were in charge.
What Mayor Jason Perry is doing to get the site moving
Unlike Labour’s rhetoric, Mayor Jason Perry has been doing the serious, practical work required to unlock a highly complex site within the constraints of reality.
He has been meeting regularly with the site’s owners and engaging directly with multiple new investors who have expressed interest in the site, with plans now in development. This is about creating the right conditions for delivery, not grabbing headlines.
At the same time, the Mayor is working closely with Homes England and the Greater London Authority to carry out proper viability assessments and explore realistic ways to support regeneration that stand up financially and legally.
This approach recognises a basic fact Labour ignores: you cannot simply wave a CPO around and wish a development into existence. A compulsory purchase requires a viable scheme, planning certainty, funding, and a delivery partner willing to take on the risk. Labour has none of these in place.
Talking about CPOs without the money, without a plan, and without a developer is not serious policy. It is hot air.
The choice facing Croydon
Croydon does need regeneration. It needs investment, jobs and a thriving town centre. That is already happening. After years of stagnation under Labour, Westfield is back at the table and it’s moving forward again. We’ve seen £1.2 billion onward investment since 2022, creating jobs for local people. So many stalled projects are now unlocked and in development.
Regeneration needs to be delivered with discipline, credibility and hard-headed competence, not Labour grandstanding and fantasy finance.
Fair or unfair, the stakes are clear. A vote for anyone other than Mayor Jason Perry and the Local Conservatives risks letting Labour back in.
Croydon simply can’t afford Labour’s delinquent approach to finances.
