Harborough District Council votes in favour of new parish council

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At an extraordinary meeting of Harborough District Council (HDC) on Monday, June 8, Councillor Paul Dann said the recent poll undertaken by the council showed a “significant level of support” for establishing a parish council in Market Harborough.

In the poll, HDC noted that from an electorate of 20,544 residents, just 4,935 (24 per cent) took part in the consultation.

Of that, 4,243 voters (86 per cent) opted in favour of the new parish authority.

Cllr Dann said the poll showed “a significant level of support for establishing a parish council in Market Harborough.”

He added: “One of the key themes emerging from consultations has been the likely impact of local government reorganisation. At this stage, we do not know what this will mean.

“Another concern is the cost. That argument will be for an elected parish council.

“Nonetheless, when considering the arguments put forward from a community governance perspective, I recommended to support the creation of a parish council in principle.”

Cllr Dann said that if supported, HDC would begin a “second phase of consultation” on the parish council to establish the numbers of wards, councillors, transition, and precepts required.

“The community review group will meet you in the coming months and bring a final report to council in September,” he said.

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Referring to the outcome of the poll, Cllr Simon Galton said the case for the parish council was “overwhelming”, adding “we could have done this six months ago.”

He said “It is inextricably linked to local government reorganisation and what presumably we’re going to find out in a matter of weeks in terms of the government’s intentions.

“So I am concerned about the delay [the decision] has caused and some of the misleading and inaccurate information that’s been put out by some members.

He added: “I note that the council tax, there was a lot of attention, frankly, to scare people into thinking that it was going to cost a huge amount of money and that this authority was going to impose large amounts of extra council tax, utterly untrue and rubbish.

“It’ll be a matter for the town council if it comes into existence, what they do about that after the first year and it really was in some cases trying to scare people into not supporting it because it might and I think those that did that really do need to take that into account and to apologize.”

Leader of the council, Cllr Simon Whelband said: “I’m not going to repeat the debate we’ve had over whether we should have a town council or a parish council.

“It’s clear from the consultation and from the non-binding poll that there is support for a council at that level.”

However, noting that the turnout was only 24 per cent overall, he said: “That’s three quarters of the town who have not made a view known on whether they want this or not.

“So I do think there is some work that the community governance group has to do to make sure that people are more involved in this process and understand what’s going on, because when it comes to the elections for this new authority in a year’s time, I want those seats to be contested.

“I don’t want it to be the same people standing for the same seats over again, as we’ve seen in other parishes in our district, but we’re not going to stand in the way of this, and we’re going to go through with it to the next stage.”

The meeting voted unanimously in favour of a parish council for Market Harborough.

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