Croydon Council has been declared bankrupt for third time having debts of £1.6bn.
Local libraries, a retail park and community hubs may have to be sold off by the south London council.
Croydon Council said it had to issue a Section 114 notice to declare bankruptcy after it realised it faced a £130m black hole in next year’s budget.
Since the first bankruptcy filing, the council has made about £90m in savings and £50m in asset sales and has proposals to save £44m during the 2023-24 financial year.
It estimated it could raise about £100m by selling off 18 properties it owned in the coming years. But the measures taken have still not been enough to put it on a sustainable financial footing, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) said, as £48m of extra costs needed to be added to next year’s budget.
As well as the retail park, possible sales include libraries, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Centre, Winterbourne Youth Hub, Purley Way pavilions, Davis House and Cemetery Lodge.
Even with government support, the coming years will be incredibly financially challenging for Croydon Council.
Some Hemsworth Town councillors have thought that a plan to engineer a bankruptcy situation was farfetched and only in the minds of what they have called “keyboard warriors” and have been seen defending and actually assisting the chief suspects to avoid detection in this dreadful state of affairs but if this can happen to a very large London Council then it can certainly happen to a Town Council like Hemsworth.
Reckless spending and the continual plundering of reserves would very realistically have led this community to where it needed to sell assets to survive.
We almost saw the Waterpark being put into a “Womersley trust” that could have facilitated its loss to this community without any evidential threat of any kind to it.
Hemsworth Town Councillors need to be mindful of the very real consequences of the financial mismanagement that has plagued Hemsworth Town Council since May 2019 and we have heard that our reserves are at the rock bottom level of acceptance having being regularly used for unbudgeted and unnecessary purchases.
Alan Draper – Clerk, has also recently updated the Councillors that they are overspent by 9% on their budget.
Despite this the Chair of the Town Council Jean Eccles and her predecessor, Jim Kenyon, continually want to spend, spend, and spend.
This would have inevitably resulted in the cashing in of assets to fill the void left.
No one would have wanted that……… or would they?
Perhaps, just maybe perhaps, some of the Hemsworth Town Councillors that need to will open up their eyes and minds to see the reality of what has been going on since May 2019.
Hemsworth Town Council: Have We Done Enough To Dodge The Bullet?
Only just, so far…