With the next council elections and probably the general election over a year away, the borough is hardly gripped by voting fever.

But to give Labour opposition leader Tony Newman his due he is not calendar watching.

Instead, he is starting now to give more than just a little taster of what his party will be fighting for as it attempts to wrest control of the council from the Tories next May.

His logic is fairly simple - if you are going to hit the electorate with some big ideas it is best to sound people out well in advance, rather than just landing them with a glossy, difficult to digest manifesto a couple of weeks before polling day.

Top of the list of Labour's promises is the abandonment of the Tories' Urban Regeneration Vehicle (URV), the deal with developers John Laing aimed at regenerating parts of the town centre.

Central to this is the demolition of the council's Taberner House HQ, in Park Lane, its replacement by a new development, largely made up of housing, and the building of spanking new headquarters across the way in Fell Road.

Councillor Newman believes the whole URV is a gamble with council taxpayers' assets.

He suggests the council talking about building itself a new home is something of a PR own goal when everyone is suffering hard times.

Labour wants council services brought closer to home by opening neighbourhood offices in areas like New Addington, Purley and Thornton Heath.

It also wants to see Fairfield Halls rebuilt on its existing site, the grant to the Warehouse Theatre restored and plans to close Purley pool dropped.

All this is going to take money but Labour believes the schemes can be financed by savings from doing away with the URV, cutting the £500,000 a year being spent on consultants and reducing what it claims is an expanding PR base.

All very fine except the sums will not fall into place as easily as all that.

And quite how giving up the URV is going to be achieved is not so clear with Labour mutterings being restricted a bit at present to the simplistic "if you can get into a contract, you can get out of it."

Cllr Newman says floating ideas now will enable - through consultation with the residents of Croydon - honing to take place.

It seems there may be a need for a lot of honing before polling day.