​A WEEK IS A LONG TIME IN POLITICS....
And even longer is the gap between penning a magazine article and it arriving through people's letterboxes....
This situation has now been resolved by an emergency council meeting on 3 June (I had to come back from a family holiday for it!) which led to a Conservative led coalition with the Lib-Dems running Colchester City Council.
However, no-one should be in any doubt that the reason we ended up with the worst crisis on Colchester Council in living memory was that newly elected Reform councillors and 3 councillors who had fallen out with the Labour party voted against BOTH proposals for leader of the council without putting forward any positive alternative of their own. That meant BOTH candidates were voted down. The Labour councillors knew what they were doing. The newly elected Reform councillors were warned in advance of the likely consequences of their actions - and recklessly went ahead anyway....
Anyway - read the article and see how close we came to staring over the cliff edge as your local council because of their actions...

​Mersea Life November 2025
Dr Martin Parsons
Colchester City Councillor for Mersea and Pyefleet
At October’s council meeting – we managed to get a motion passed demanding an inquiry into how the leader of the council proposed to a government commission a new town should be built next to Colchester – and failed to even inform the full cabinet, chief executive or those of us on the local plan committee. Our own Councillor Robert Davidson, himself a former leader of the council, called the council leader’s action “shameful”.
In October I had a minor success – persuading the council’s Environment panel to recommend to cabinet that the council’s climate change plan should address LOCAL impacts of climate change, including increased risk of flooding, coastal erosion and wildfires.  A step in the right direction but don’t hold your breath!
On 10 November the local plan committee meets to decide whether to start the public consultation on proposed housing allocations. As I’ll explain below, it’s something of a ‘bad’ or ‘even worse’ choice.
The government sees housebuilding as its main engine to create jobs and its manifesto promised 1.5 million new houses before the next election. To do this they have moved the goalposts by changing the planning law. They have also imposed compulsory housebuilding targets on councils – and increased Colchester’s, previously voluntary target, by 40%.
So, Colchester Council now has to demonstrate by February it has enough sites for the next five years to deliver 1,300 new houses annually. If it doesn’t – two things will happen. First, the government will increase our target by a further 20% i.e. 260 more houses a year. Secondly, if developers apply to build large estates ANYWHERE in the Colchester area, then even if Colchester Council refuses planning permission, the government planning inspector is likely to approve them. The phrase “over a barrel” comes to mind…
As local councillors, we have spent the last year flagging up all sorts of local issues, we wrote to the Health Secretary about lack of GP access on Mersea, we’ve raised concerns about water and sewage. In February a few of us on the local plan committee successfully demanded that before the proposed sites went to public consultation, there should be an infrastructure audit to say what extra roads, water, schools etc would be needed. That has now shown that only half of the necessary infrastructure could be funded by developer contributions…
As I said, the government – and developers – have now got us all over a barrel.