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** Monthly News from Neil O’Brien MP
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March 2025

Hello,

Welcome to the March edition of my e-newsletter.

County elections to go ahead!

The campaign I ran with neighbouring MP Alicia Kearns to stop Labour cancelling elections has succeeded. Thanks to everyone who signed! County Council elections will take place on Thursday 1st May.

But sadly Angela Rayner is still bent on her top-down drive to abolish all of our local District and Borough Councils - and she will be back. And the push to expand Leicester hasn't gone away either. But we will keep fighting this undemocratic move!

Great Glen flooding update

Following a meeting with the Great Glen flood committee earlier this week - and a visit to see the issues in Burton Overy - I had a useful meeting with the county council flood team.

Amongst other things we talked about the emerging work; the very useful work done by the flood committee in compiling evidence; the timings for Section 19 investigation work; the role of the District's new local plan and the large development nearby, and what we could potentially do as a community.

The drop-in sessions for residents will likely be in late March - with the County Council, Environment Agency, Harborough District and Severn Trent all there.

All these agencies are now going to be having regular meetings about the issues in the area and their ongoing work on it and have pledged to keep residents updated about that.

Supporting farmers

Last month I met with local members of the farming community to discuss rising costs as well as environmental policy.

Our farmers are the heart of our community and one of the key topics we covered was the new tax on family farms. This is having a huge knock-on effect, not only affecting farmers but the rest of rural industry.

From grain merchants to vets, local tractor dealers to livestock farmers, every part of the industry is feeling the pressure. Labour’s tax raid isn’t just a raid on farmers but an attack on this way of life. Farmers are also worried about looming plans to impose a big tax on fertiliser, which their competitors in other countries will not have to pay.

It was a useful but very sobering meeting. I will be continuing to stand up for our farmers not only in my constituency but also down in Westminster.

Meeting with residents on Wigston Meadows

I had a useful meeting recently with residents of the new estate in Wigston Meadows, to talk about some of the problems caused by the developer, Barratt David Wilson Homes.

We also walked around the estate and saw some of the issues. I often press developers to fix shoddy work and also raise this in Parliament too.

In the case of this estate, there's a lot to fix. Residents have paid large sums of money for what should become a nice estate over time - but so far the developer has really let them down.

Problems include:
* recent flooding into one house
* residents marooned by a lake forming in the road
* a large number of drains blocked by the developer's sandbags
* the brook not maintained, and gullies choked with rubbish
* roads not finished with big tyre-damaging holes and sharp ramps
* the estate not adopted or handed over
* two promised playgrounds left unfinished and fenced off
* a large pile of spoil dumped by Cooks Lane
* and more or less non-existent customer service or response to residents

As well as contacting the developer about this poor performance I will also be talking to the Council about what they can do to press the developer to sort this out.

It is also a reminder of why I am fighting the new government's appalling decision to *double* the housing target for Oadby and Wigston, which will doubtless mean more building on floodplains, and more misery for new residents.

Harborough Local Plan - key vote tonight

Harborough District Council has finally published its proposed local plan, originally due out before Christmas. Councillors are voting on whether to put the Plan to public consultation tonight.

The plan will mean MASSIVE changes for our area. There is so much detail in this vast pile of documents that for now I will just give a summary:

Market Harborough will get sites allocated for a further 1,350 homes - on top of 2,009 that have already been allocated and not built, and the 959 that were built between 2020 and 2023. Lots are to be built in some huge sites on the right-hand side if you are driving north from Market Harborough towards the McDonalds Roundabout on the B6047 - they are just west of Great Bowden, and north of the estates that run off Alvington Way. There will be another giant site wrapping around the new Wellington Place estate, filling up the open fields between there and the prison. There is also a proposal to build on the Commons car park in the town centre, with obvious implications for parking.

Great Glen and Stretton Hall will have a new town wrapped around them, which will effectively connect them to Leicester. There will also be a massive development nearby around Scraptoft. There will also be a large development in Glen village, north of Furrow Way and west of Bridgewater Drive. Between them these developments will contain 2,850 new homes - with more to come in the next planning period.

Kibworth is to get 475 further houses south of the railway line and north of Warwick Road (I'm aware of residents' concerns about the queues at the bridge with the traffic lights).

Great Bowden gets a further 100 houses between Dingley Road and the A6, and up to Nether Green (as well as the large development to the west).

Although I have focused on things in our constituency, we will also be affected when travelling by developments in villages like Fleckney, and by the large amount of development around Scraptoft/Thurnby/Bushby/Houghton. These will affect the already bad traffic in and out of the city.

The process that has led to these life-changing proposals has been a very bad one. It has been hopelessly untransparent all the way. Ordinary Councillors have had no input into which sites were chosen. The leadership of the council has drawn up the plans and sought to avoid public discussion about choices between different sites. The process started with a bad decision to take on extra overspill houses from Leicester, and has seen every deadline missed. This has been part of a deliberate strategy to minimise public discussion about these controversial choices.

You might think that this will really change the character of our community, and you would be right. You might also feel like we have done our bit in recent years. In the Harborough District there are over a third more houses than there were in 2001. That’s a much faster rate of growth than the national average, and twice the rate of neighbouring Leicester. But despite all this, the Labour government has decided to increase our housing target by 42% - even as it cuts the target for London by 11%, and cuts the target for Leicester by 36%. This means when our plan is revised in a couple of years, the council will have to find even *more* sites to allocate for housing. Normally as soon as a plan is agreed, council officials start work on the next plan.

Where is all this demand coming from? According to the most recent population projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), *all* of the increase in our population in the coming decades is expected to come from immigration. The population would otherwise be stable. There are pros and cons of migration, but a big unavoidable downside is the huge pressure it puts on housing. The ONS project that migration is to remain at unprecedented levels under this government – that is something I am campaigning to change.

A lot of people will have views on the choices the council have made here, and on particular sites.

We will not see any major improvements to our infrastructure as part of this plan: all this new housing won't come with the GP surgeries, roads or leisure facilities we already need for existing residents.

Why? Partly because the huge sums that are to be raised from developers under this plan are to be spent by the council on a new pledge (on page 100 of the plan) to make 40% of all new homes in these new estates council housing ('affordable housing' in today's jargon).

While we need some of this housing, the balance is all wrong. Rather than so much of the money raised going on homes for people who may not currently live here, more of the money needs to be going on services for existing residents, who have already seen our infrastructure strained by explosive growth - and seen nothing in return.

Please do have your say – when the consultation opens I will post the link here. I am happy to meet groups of residents to talk about the plan.

Visit to Helping Hands in Wigston

It was great to meet with the team at Helping Hands in Wigston who do such great work. We talked about all kinds of issues, including PIP assessments and the awful impact that the National Insurance increase is having on local charities and voluntary groups.

Keep in touch

As ever, you can follow the work I am doing on my Facebook page ([link removed]) . Please do consider forwarding this to anyone living locally, and if I can be of any help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

With best wishes,

Neil O’Brien

Member of Parliament for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston

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