Jason Perry: Reclaiming the Broken Windows mission. How Conservatives can restore pride locally and nationally.

Jason Perry is the Executive Mayor of Croydon

When Rudy Giuliani became Mayor of New York, he understood something simple yet profound: if you tackle the issues that degrade a community quickly, consistently, and without compromise, you start to change everything else. This was the essence of the “broken windows” approach. Deal with litter, graffiti, antisocial behaviour, and environmental crime at street level, and you create a virtuous cycle: people feel safer, businesses invest, and pride begins to return.

As Croydon’s first directly elected Mayor – born and bred here, raised in a council house, and running a local family business – I have taken inspiration from that principle. Croydon is going through enormous challenges. Labour bankrupted the council, left residents with crumbling services, and allowed standards to fall. But since 2022, we’ve been working tirelessly to get Croydon back on track – and central to that mission has been a zero-tolerance approach to the “broken windows” that undermine pride and confidence in our borough.

Local people were clear: they were fed up with fly-tipping, abandoned cars, illegal repairs, graffiti, and antisocial behaviour. In the past, council teams would point to gaps in their remit: one team for cars, another for waste, another for highways. That patchwork approach failed.

So we built something new: super enforcement officers empowered to deal with the full range of environmental crimes. One officer can now inspect, report, fine, and escalate – ensuring problems are fixed rather than endlessly passed around the system.

Already, these officers are making a visible impact. In Norbury, after local people complained about nuisance parking and abandoned vehicles, three cars were swiftly removed, CCTV was installed, and a local business received a Community Protection Notice for illegal repairs. In August, a man from Thornton Heath was successfully prosecuted for fly-tipping and ordered to pay £7,951 in penalties. We are sending a clear message: Croydon is no longer a soft touch.

Alongside enforcement, we’ve pioneered blitz cleans – a practical, intensive approach to cleaning up our district centres. Instead of sending different crews piecemeal, we line up all the teams and hit an area hard over several weeks.

It starts with me walking the streets with Council officers, residents, and businesses. We compile a list: broken paving slabs, faded road markings, graffiti, bins, signage, potholes. Then the teams descend together – not in dribs and drabs, but all at once.

The effect is transformative. From top to bottom of the borough, in South Norwood, Purley, Coulsdon, New Addington, and Addiscombe, local people have told me they feel the difference immediately. Shopfronts are cleaner, roads are safer, and people feel prouder of their neighbourhoods. It’s not glamorous work, but it is real, visible action that shows people their council is listening and delivering.

These efforts are already changing perceptions. In just one year, our enforcement team issued hundreds of fixed penalty notices for environmental crimes, with the vast majority paid. We’ve removed fly-tips within 24 hours in 98 per cent of cases. We’ve expanded our compliance team, invested in better street cleaning, and supported residents’ groups to take pride in their own patches through the Love Clean Streets app.

This is about more than tidying up. It’s about tackling antisocial behaviour at its root. A broken window left unfixed signals that nobody cares. But when you fix it – fast – it shows the opposite. It says: we care about this community, and we will defend it. That is how you restore pride.

For me, this isn’t abstract. I grew up here. I know the pressures families face because my own family runs a local business. I’ve seen what happens when standards slip: people feel unsafe, businesses hold back, and communities lose hope. But I’ve also seen the power of local pride – when streets are clean, parks are cared for, and residents feel the place they call home is respected.

That’s why I will do whatever it takes to deliver for Croydon – not just for today, but for the next generation.

And here is where I believe the Conservative Party nationally can learn. People are angry. They are frustrated. They feel like nobody is listening. For some, that frustration is about immigration or national policy. But just as often, it is about what they see every single day outside their front door.

They don’t want excuses. They want action: fix the pothole, clean the graffiti, tackle the fly-tipping, deal with antisocial behaviour. It might sound small to Westminster, but it isn’t small to residents. It is the difference between pride and despair.

If the Conservative Party wants to win back trust, it must rediscover this mission: to be the party that fixes the broken windows. To show people that their concerns matter, that action follows words, and that standards will be raised – not lowered.

That’s what we’re proving in Croydon. One blitz clean, one enforcement action, one repaired street at a time, we are showing that recovery is possible.

It’s not flashy. It’s not complicated. But it’s working. And if Conservatives nationally want to rebuild credibility, they would do well to follow Giuliani’s Mayoral example – and our’s here in Croydon – and start by fixing the broken windows.