Councillors are the elected representatives who are closest to their communities. If there is a local problem, the elected Ward Members will probably be first to learn about it.
For this reason, Northants County Council (NCC) introduced “Empowerment Funds”. They were small budgets that councillors could use to help support the local community within their Ward, without the red tape of a formal council grant, or all the accompanying paperwork and officer time to support it.
A good example was “The Hedges Radio Shadow”.
A steel-sided warehouse was built on the eastern edge of Rushden. The steel sides of the warehouse blocked radio signals from the Sandy Heath transmitter. As a result, over 100 homes in and around The Hedges lost their TV reception.
Apparently, the problem was caused by an oversight in planning. The planners had not considered the impact of the steel sides when they granted planning consent for the warehouse.
The problem was fixed by Cllr. Andy Mercer, the local NCC councillor, using an Empowering Fund grant. The grant paid for each home in the radio shadow to have a satellite dish installed, which reinstated TV reception for those houses.
On another occasion, a housing developer went bust before laying the final surface on a new estate road. A vulnerable individual fell and was taken to A&E because of the unfinished road surface. An Empowering Fund grant allowed this road to be fixed.. A final layer of tarmac was provided, so that the road surface became safe to cross.
Given the history of the good work provided by the Funding, when North Northants Council (NNC) was formed in 2021, it decided to retain the Empowerment scheme.
This year, the new Reform-led administration at NNC have made changes to the scheme and are now considering reducing the funding by half.
If the proposal was agreed, it would save around £68,000 out of a budget of approximately £405.5m, i.e. roughly 0.00017%.
In addition, Empowerment grants would only be available for 3 months of the year. In the case of the unfinished road surface, it would have meant that the road would have remained dangerous until the next year.
Due to concerns about this, the topic was reviewed by NNC’s Corporate Scrutiny Committee on 27th April and will be brought back to the NNC Executive for a decision on 12th May 2026.