A RADICAL new approach to how the council works is being promised by its new chief executive.
Nathan Elvery, who was confirmed in the post this week, said he and the new Labour administration would be working together to ensure the council's hard-pressed finances would be spent delivering the best possible services for all the people of Croydon.
Mr Elvery has been serving as interim chief executive for the past 16 months since former council boss Jon Rouse left for a position within the NHS.
The decision to offer him the permanent post was taken unanimously by the council's cross-party appointments sub-committee on Tuesday.
That decision will be formally ratified at a meeting of the full council on July 15.
Council leader Tony Newman said Mr Elvery had done an excellent job as interim chief executive and he was delighted he received cross-party support this week.
He said: "Under him we have a re-invigorated and re-engaged council workforce."
And this, he said, had enabled the new council to start implementing its Ambitious for Croydon manifesto from day one.
Mr Elvery said he envisaged many of the changes in the way the council worked would come on the back of the administration's Fairness Commission.
He said the job of the commission would be to ensure resources were being targeted where they were most needed.
Mr Elvery said: "The business of a local authority is improving the outcomes for all the residents of the borough.
"On a large scale that means housing, education, jobs and reducing crime."
On top of this, over the next four years and into the next decade, there was also a need to take full advantage of opportunities to transform the borough.
Mr Elvery accepted problems of Croydon being under-funded by the Government were likely to continue.
But that did not mean radical changes could not be made.
He said: "We have been distracted in previous years by making our organisation more efficient.
"There is nothing wrong with that but it is a distraction from what we can do if we are trying to change the outcome."
That outcome, he said, would be to aim to deliver services where they were needed more effectively for less cost. And using money more effectively also meant new initiatives could be introduced without necessarily ending up with a bigger bill.
Mr Elvery said: "All the ingredients are there but it is like baking a cake. If you put the ingredients in the mixture in the wrong way you are going to get something that doesn't taste very nice."
The key to avoiding that would be getting everyone together and facing in the same direction to get the message of a Croydon for everyone across, he added.
