As Chair of Harston Parish Council may I welcome you to our website. As you will see in the following paragraphs, we have statutory responsibility for a broad range of issues in Harston Parish. [Harston Parish is larger than Harston Village.]
Based on the population of Harston, we are established for eleven Parish Councillors. Should you be interested in becoming a Harston Parish Councillor, please contact the Parish Clerk, whose contact details are on this website. We are particularly interested in increasing our number of lady Councillors.
Amongst our broad range of responsibilities, I would highlight that we vet all Harston planning applications. We recommend to South Cambridgeshire District Council Planning as to whether an application should be approved or not.
Niall O’Byrne,
Chair Harston Parish Council.
Harston Parish Council works towards improving community well being and providing better services in our village.
The Parish Council has a range of different powers to provide and maintain a variety of important and visible local services including bridleways, burial grounds, bus shelters, commons and open spaces, community transport schemes, community safety and crime reduction measures, events and festivals, footpaths, leisure and sports facilities, litter bins, planning, street cleaning and lighting, traffic calming measures, village greens and youth projects. A full list of parish council Powers and Duties is shown here: parish-council-powers-and-duties.
Harston Parish Council meets the first Thursday of every month in the pavilion on the recreation ground @ 7.30pm.
In the meantime, if you require any information, please contact the parish clerk on contact the clerk.
Parish councils are statutory bodies. Members are volunteers in the main elected for a term of four years (but there are sometimes one or two who are co-opted to fill casual vacancies) and councils are funded principally by an annual precept.
Income and expenditure for the next financial year are calculated in the form of estimates. The net amount (the precept) is added to council tax, collected by the (South Cambridgeshire) District Council (principal authority) and paid to parishes in two six-monthly installments.
Parishes can apply for other funding such as grant and funding awards, but they do not receive funds direct from central government, as principal authorities do.