Four town and parish councils take on 13.4 acres of open space for £1 each, including Lutterworth's recreation ground. Cabinet decides on Thursday.

Harborough District Council is about to give away its parks, and it is asking £1 for each one.

On Thursday, Cabinet will be asked to approve the freehold transfer of 13.44 acres of open space across ten registered titles to four town and parish councils. The council’s own valuer puts the land at £167,251 as open space. The price in each case is a pound.

The four are Kibworth Beauchamp Parish Council, Kibworth Harcourt Parish Council, Lutterworth Town Council and Thurnby and Bushby Parish Council. None of the land is in Market Harborough itself.

What is changing hands

The two large ones are the ones people use.

Lutterworth Town Council takes the recreation ground and allotment site west of Crescent Road, 4.94 acres, valued at £60,000 as open space. The town council already holds it on a lease, at a rent of £30 a year for 28 years from 1 April 2000, and the valuation assumes that lease would have been renewed in 2028 on similar terms. The land under the public highway stays with the district council. Lutterworth is about eleven miles west of Market Harborough.

Thurnby and Bushby Parish Council takes five parcels, the largest being 5.55 acres at Uppingham Road and Grange Lane, valued at £72,000. That one is not bare grass. The report says it is recreation ground with a MUGA, a café and a community building, and it is the only site in the batch that carries buildings. Thurnby and Bushby sit about eleven miles north-west of Market Harborough, on the edge of Leicester.

The rest are the small green spaces inside housing estates:

  • Kibworth Beauchamp: land on the north side of St Wilfrid’s Close, land on the south side of Folley Road, and six parcels at Brookfield Way, Larkswood and Rookery Close, 0.87 acres in all, valued at £10,550
  • Kibworth Harcourt: Jubilee Green, 0.42 acres at the junction of Albert Street and Main Street, grassed open space with a play area and a war memorial, valued at £5,000
  • Thurnby and Bushby, besides the Uppingham Road site: land east of Court Road and south of St Luke’s Church; two small strips at Randles Close; land east of Somerby Road and north-west of Leas Close; and a triangle north of Scrivener Close and Devenports Hill where public access is already restricted by badger setts

Why a pound, and what stops it being sold on

The £1 is described in the valuation as a notional sum, there to provide consideration in the transfer. The real consideration is that the receiving council takes on the cost of managing and maintaining the land.

Two protections come with it:

  • Restrictive covenants for the benefit of the district council and its successor authority, requiring the land to stay in use as public open space
  • Overage provisions, so that if the land is later sold or developed for a more valuable use, the district council or its successor takes a share of the uplift

That second one matters, because the valuations are for existing use only. The report says plainly that land sold on the open market with planning permission for a change of use would likely fetch a higher development value. The £167,251 is what the sites are worth as fields and greens, not as building land.

The legal route is the General Disposal Consent 2003 under section 123 of the Local Government Act 1972, which lets a council dispose of land below market value without asking the Secretary of State, provided the undervalue does not exceed £2m and the disposal helps the economic, social or environmental wellbeing of the area. The largest single undervalue here is £59,999, at Lutterworth.

Nobody objected

Because this is open space, the council had to advertise its intention to dispose of it under section 123(2A) of the same Act. The notices ran in the Harborough Mail for two consecutive weeks, on 31 July and 6 August, and the consultation closed on 29 August 2026.

No objections were received. The report states the council has met its statutory duty and can proceed.

The reorganisation behind it

This is not a one-off tidy-up. Cabinet agreed the process in September 2025, and the report links it directly to the abolition of the district council.

The Secretary of State’s September announcement has left the timing of local government reorganisation unclear, the report says, but the government remains committed to it. The council’s stated intent is to let town and parish councils take control of the most local spaces before that happens, so they can set the quality and the byelaws and respond to residents faster than a larger authority would.

Six councils have asked for land so far. Alongside the four in Thursday’s report, Broughton Astley and Fleckney parish councils made requests in the original round, and Misterton and Walcote Parish Council is at what the report calls very early discussions. Their sites are not in this batch.

The legal costs come out of a £260,000 budget agreed by Cabinet and full Council on 27 July 2026.

What it means for you

If you use the recreation ground or the allotments off Crescent Road in Lutterworth, your landlord changes from the district council to the town council. The covenants mean it has to stay open space, and the maintenance bill moves to the town council with it.

If you use the pavilion, café or MUGA at Uppingham Road in Thurnby, the same applies, and the existing leases carry on: the report values the site partly on two ground rents, £150 a year for the MUGA and £250 a year for the pavilion.

If you live on one of the Kibworth estates named above, the grass outside will be cut by your parish council rather than by the district, and your parish precept is where that cost will show up.

The decision is made at 6pm on Thursday 24 September in the Council Chamber at the Symington Building, Adam and Eve Street, Market Harborough. The meeting is open to the public and broadcast live from the council’s website. The same meeting decides 37 community grant applications worth £285,332.83.

Our planning page tracks the district’s other land decisions.

Sources

The acreage and valuation totals on this page are our own additions of the figures in the council’s Appendix B. No transfer has been approved yet: Cabinet decides on 24 September.