Could there be any more damning indictment of Croydon Labour’s mismanagement of the Council than the refurbishment of the Fairfield Halls?
If there was one project that had to be got right for Croydon it was this. Yet Croydon Labour awarded the project to their own creation, Brick by Brick, which in true Croydon Labour style was a developer with no experience whatsoever. What could possibly go wrong? With Labour in charge, same old story, pretty much everything.
Right from the start Labour’s hallmark incompetence was to the fore when the plan to include the Croydon College site in a wider redevelopment fell apart. The CEO of Croydon College who was “thrilled to be at the heart of proposed developments” must have got rather less thrilled because the College sold the site to someone else.
The Halls closed anyway in the Summer of 2016 for what was supposed to be a two-year refurbishment. The budget was £30 million with Labour’s promise that it would re-open in time for the panto season in 2018. Labour’s promise on the Fairfield Halls was worth as much as all the rest of them, so it was no surprise that both the money and the timing began to look shaky.
In what has become a pattern the self-proclaimed open and transparent council did their best to keep the facts hidden. My Freedom of Information request eventually revealed in February 2019 that the cost had by then escalated to around £41 million. Tellingly the Council gratuitously included the phrase that “this additional investment is being met by Brick by Brick as the developers of the scheme”.
This is yet another illustration, as if one were needed, of Croydon Labour’s failure to understand anything to do with money, especially when spending Croydon residents’ money. As recently as February 2020 Councillor Oliver Lewis, Labour’s Cabinet Member for Culture, Leisure and Sport when challenged on costs, by then £42.6 million, referred to this as having no cost to the Council or the Croydon taxpayer because the money had been found by ‘releasing the value of the land’.
What this fails to mention is that Brick by Brick was and still is wholly owned by the Council. Every penny overspend was money borrowed from the Council which the Council had to borrow from, and must one day pay back to, central government. Worse still, every penny overspend was a penny less that Brick by Brick would pay back to the Council. Every penny of that money will instead have to be found by Croydon residents. Labour's idea of no cost to the Croydon taxpayer appears to mean costs that they can hide somewhere where they think we won't notice.
When the catastrophic failure of Croydon Labour’s financial management came to light, with Brick by Brick perhaps its biggest failure, the Fairfield Halls refurbishment came back to my mind. Previous questions at Council and Freedom of Information requests such as this one in May 2019 had failed to elicit where the overspends had occurred. The Council again, despite being the owner of both the building and Brick by Brick, hid behind that it was not a party to the construction contract.
Ever the dogged digger for data, at the recent Scrutiny and Overview committee on 21st December I asked a question on the Fairfield Halls affair. For once there was a pleasant surprise in that the new Chief Executive announced that an audit investigation by accountants Grant Thornton into the Fairfield Halls refurbishment will start in the new year. We may now, at last, learn the truth about the whole sorry affair.