The executive Mayor of beleaguered Croydon has suggested the Government’s new local government watchdog could play a role in strengthening accountability in the sector.

In the wake of the ‘financial collapse’ of Croydon - which left ‘significantly reduced services, £1.6bn of unsustainable debt and a dramatic breakdown in resident trust in the council’ - Mayor Jason Perry called for local government secretary Michael Gove to ‘urgently review councils’ powers to hold individuals to account after they have left the organisation’.