How Covid-19 pushed Croydon over the edge into bankruptcy

The London borough had financial problems for years, the pandemic just made them worse

As beleaguered Croydon council declared effective bankruptcy on Wednesday afternoon its interim chief executive, Kathryn Kerswell, sent an ominous wake-up-call memo to staff: “Too many of us are still operating like business as usual,” she warned, “and are not facing up to our new reality that we are actually in a financial crisis.”

The methodical drip-drip erosion of council budgets in recent years had maybe inured some to the scale of the challenge now facing the south London borough. Bankruptcy came suddenly, but the origins of the council’s woes go back years, driven by heady dreams of making Croydon a major housing developer, and hampered by a culture of lax financial controls and poor governance.

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