​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.

​Mersea Life April 2025
Dr Martin Parsons
Colchester City Councillor for Mersea and Pyefleet
This month it’s been a bit like that well known supermarket offer ‘two-for-the-price-of-one’ – we had two council meetings!
First was the annual budget setting meeting, which is the most political meeting of the year, so I will try to be as factual and balanced as possible!
The council is what is called a ‘minority-administration’, which means that although one party –the Lib-Dems - leads the council, they don’t have an overall majority and are not in a formal coalition with any other party.  The council currently consists of 19 Conservatives, 14 Lib-Dems, 14 Labour, 3 Greens and 1 independent. So, the council’s budget meeting shows who is supporting who - and at what price!
The Lib-Dems proposed their budget. Both Conservatives and Labour then proposed budget amendments, all of which have to be costed in advance by the council’s finance officer to ensure the council sets a balanced budget.
The Conservatives proposed 3 budget amendments including one to re-allocate £100,000 from the council’s “sustainability” (i.e. climate change) budget and use it for sea defence. This and all the other Conservative amendments were voted down – although one brave Lib-Dem councillor representing Wivenhoe did defy the whip and vote for the sea defence amendment.
Labour proposed their budget amendment, which was immediately accepted by the Lib-Dems.
However, before that was voted on, the Greens who didn’t propose any budget amendments of their own raised some concerns about the Labour budget amendment! They pointed out that part of what had just been agreed between Labour and the Lib-Dems involved taking £100,000 from the council’s reserves and giving it to a community project in Greenstead –a ward represented by 3 Labour councillors, one of whose husband ran the project. It was a fair point particularly given the amount of money involved. But as the Labour councillor concerned had already declared a personal interest – although not saying what it was - and left the council chamber, there was no actual breach of the rules.
I did say this was the most political meeting of the year!
The second council meeting was to approve the leader of the Council, Councillor David King, negotiating with other councils in Essex as to what to suggest to the government as to how many councils there should be in Essex. Unlike the budget this was an almost entirely non-party political discussion (it does happen!).