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On this page, East Farndon Parish Council re-posts selected latest news items from the Police, Fire and Neighbourhood Watch services and the office of the Northamptonshire Police, Fire & Crime Commissioner (PFCC)

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Monthly Newsletters

May 2026 Northants Police Newsletter

April 2026 Police, Fire & Crime Commissioner Newsletter

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Latest News Articles

July 8th 2026 – Residents and farmers urged to take extra care after busy day for fire crews in Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service is asking people across the county to take extra care following a busy day of incidents for fire crews yesterday (July 7). Resources are being stretched with fire crews committed around the county attending incidents that have started in very dry conditions due to the warm weather. Yesterday, crews were called to 48 incidents, including several field fires caused by farm machinery. Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Services is asking residents and farmers for their support to help prevent fires that where they can. People are being asked not to hold bonfires on their properties; and take extra care if using barbecues in gardens to avoid flames spreading to fences or hedges. Some of the bigger incidents yesterday included:·  Four crews, including one from Leicestershire, attended a large fire on farmland on Sulby Hall Old Drive in Sulby, at around 12:40pm (pictured above). Firefighters used hose-reel jets, beaters and wildfire backpacks to put out the fire that had damaged a combine harvester and spread to 15 acres of land.·  Shortly after 2pm we were called to an agricultural building fire at a farm on Raunds Road in Chelveston.Crews from Earls Barton, Wellingborough, Mereway, Kettering and Irthlingborough attended and found manure alight inside a barn. Firefighters used four appliance pumps and hose reel jets to tackle the fire, working alongside the farmer.·  Just before 4pm, we were called to reports of a combine harvester and large amount of hedgerow and crops involved in a field fire near Yelvertoft. Crews from Daventry, Rothwell, Mereway and Kettering used hose reel jets to extinguish the fire, which is believed to have started accidentally. An after-fire inspection is taking place today and hotspots continue to be monitored.·  Firefighters tackled a large field fire in Church Stowe after a hay baler had overheated and caught fire. Two crews attended the incident just after 5pm and used hose reel jets, wildfire backpacks and beaters to put the fire out, which had spread to two fields across 10 acres of land.·  Crews attended a fire in a commercial premises on West Street in Moulton, shortly after 5pm, which had started in the kitchen and spread to the roof. Five fire crews attended the incident and wore breathing apparatus and used water jets to put it out.·  Shortly after 9pm, crews from Desborough and Mereway attended a house fire in Newton Road, Northampton. Firefighters extinguished a fire in a front bedroom. The fire caused significant damage to the room and smoke affected the property. The cause was found to be an accidental electrical fault. Group Manager Neil Sadler said: “Although we were very busy yesterday, we were able to sufficiently cover all parts of the county safely throughout the day. As well as our own incidents, we deployed a large number of resources to assist other emergency services, including at a railway incident in Bugbrooke and supporting police in St Andrew’s Road in Northampton after the discovery of a suspicious device.“However we had several fires yesterday that could have been prevented, and that potentially diverts resources away from critical incidents. So we would ask residents to remain alert and follow the safety advice that we are putting out on our social media feeds to try and prevent any further incidents that may stretch our resources.“Please ensure that any cigarettes or barbecues are safely disposed of, and ensure you stay safe in and around the water. Please only call 999 if it’s a genuine emergency, as our Fire Control operators are extremely busy taking calls and deploying resources to these incidents.“We would also ask the farming community to take extra care, as overheated machinery can cause field fires that require many fire crews to attend and prevent the flames from spreading further.”

Nov 10th 2025 – The Forcer Protocol – Safeguarding for Military Veterans

The Forcer Protocol

Northamptonshire Police is encouraging military veterans and their families to sign up to a potentially life-saving safeguarding scheme called the Forcer Protocol.  The Forcer Protocol was founded by Claire Lilly and is named after her former husband Lance Corporal Alan Forcer, a veteran who suffered with depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following service in Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Tragically he died by suicide in 2020 after going missing. The Forcer Protocol enables police to ensure key information is available to them when searching for military veterans who are lost or reported missing.   The service is free and run independently from police with the provider Safe and Found Online.   Veterans, their families and carers can complete an online form and provide a variety of information which is held digitally on a secure platform, including photographs, a physical description, any medical conditions, mobile phone numbers of the veteran and friends, vehicle details, whether they have gone missing before, and whether they pose a risk to themselves. The information entered into the personal profile is completely confidential. Police can only access the profile, if the person featured is reported missing.   Register now on the Forcer Protocol pages of the Safe and Found website: safeandfoundonline.co.uk/register.php .

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Sept 8th 2025 – Protect Your Pension From Fraud

Warning to #Protect Your Pension from fraud.

Savers and those reaching retirement age are being warned to protect their pensions and look out for criminals trying to catch people out of their life savings, with Action Fraud revealing a total annual loss of £17,567,249. This equates to roughly £48,129 lost to this type of fraud per day in 2024. Data reveals there were 519 reports of pension fraud in total and £17,567,249 lost in 2024, with an average loss of £33,848 per person.Action Fraud, with support from the Pension Scams Action Group (PSAG), launched a pension fraud awareness campaign, warning people to take extra measures to protect their pension scheme accounts and to be cautious of investment opportunity offers from criminals that could be targeting them How can you protect yourself against Pension fraud?  Secure your online pension account: the account you use to manage your pension should have a different password to all of your other accounts. Use three random words to create a strong and memorable password, and enable 2-step verification (2SV). Ignore unsolicited calls about your pension: cold calling about pensions is illegal and likely a sign of a scam. If you’re thinking about changing your pension arrangements, you should get financial guidance or advice beforehand. Investment opportunities: don’t be rushed into making an investment. Remember, legitimate organisations will never pressure you into investing on the spot. You should treat investment opportunities with extreme caution if there’s: Pressure to invest (for example: time-limited offers), Downplayed risk of losing your money, Promised returns that sound too good to be true, Remember to Stop! Think Fraud and find more information on how to protect yourself from fraud here: Stop! Think Fraud – How to stay safe from scams What can you do if you have been a victim of pension fraud? Report pension scams: if you’re worried about a potential pension scam or you think you may have been contacted by a criminal, report it to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk or by calling 0300 123 2040. If you have made a payment: inform your bank or pension provider as soon as possible, they can help you prevent any further losses. Monitor your bank and pension statements regularly for any unusual activity.

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July 25th 2025 – Speaking up about domestic abuse

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July 25th 2025 – CCTV Guidance with survey of where systems are

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Our next Coffee Morning get together at the East Farndon Village Hall will be on Friday 31st July 2026, from 10.30am to 12.00 midday. You are very welcome to join us to enjoy a cup of coffee or tea, plus toasted tea cakes, a selection of books and a raffle. All money raised is donated to village charities / causes or other local charities. Everyone is welcome and entry is free. Many thanks for your ongoing support.

On Tuesday 30th June 2026, representatives from East Farndon, Clipston and Eydon Parish Councils, along with Stuart Andrew MP, met with senior representatives from Anglian Water to discuss the ongoing water supply issues. A detailed written update from this meeting, along with a full list attendees, is shown below, or click this link to view a pdf version. If you have any questions or comments, please use this link to email our Parish Clerk, Sarah Gresly.

Disruption to water supplies is likely to continue until the end of August 2026

Background

Water to East Farndon (and surrounding villages) is usually pumped and supplied from a reservoir/storage facility in Sibbertoft which itself is supplied from Rothwell. Water is usually pumped between Rothwell and Sibbertoft overnight or as and when needed to keep the Sibbertoft reservoir topped up.

As part of scheduled maintenance, Sibbertoft reservoir was taken out of service in February 2026, a usually low usage period on the water network, with remedial work intended to be completed by April. This facility in Sibbertoft is a sealed unit and cannot be accessed until drained so the scale of issues facing Anglian Engineers was not known until being opened and was far greater than anticipated.

With this reservoir offline, increased pressure has been placed on the Rothwell plant to supply water directly to the far corners of the water network including East Farndon, and the pumps in Rothwell are working harder than intended to meet demand. When demand increases considerably, particularly during warmer weather, the Rothwell plant cannot cope. To mitigate this, Anglian Water are using large water bowsers to inject water further along the network to meet the demand based on data received from various water sensors in the pipelines. However, this remedial action is often after customers have started to experience supply issues. 

In addition to this, Kelmarsh Hall had purchased very large water storage containers which they had been slowly filling up in the lead up to the May Bank Holiday with equally large volumes of water. This put further pressure on the already struggling Rothwell plant as Anglian were not aware of this practice until after the event and are currently in talks with them to agree alternative supplies, including the use of water bowsers instead of taking directly from the water network for the upcoming Shambala event. 

Unable to cope with the huge demands being placed on them, one of the pumps in Rothwell failed completely and had to be replaced. Spare parts were not available for an immediate fix over the May Bank holiday and so a catastrophic failure occurred which primarily affected the villages at the far end of the network including East Farndon.

Anglian Water accept they have fallen short of their obligations, have agreed the service customers have received is not good enough and have promised to make changes to their network in the future to ensure this does not happen again. Their immediate priority however is to complete the work at Sibbertoft and get that back online.

As a result of the continuing and anticipated future issues, Anglian has put East Farndon and nearby villages on “special watch”, which means that water pressures are being monitored more closely and a response team is on standby should any issues occur.

Alternative supplies

The issue of bottled water not being supplied during recent outages was raised and Anglian Water explained they normally use an external contractor to distribute bottled water, however, both this contractor and Anglian Water were short‑staffed during the May bank holiday outage. As a result, they were unable to provide bottled water as expected. They apologised for this and accepted that customers deserve better.  

Concerns were also raised regarding the Priority Services Register (PSR). Anglian Water again apologised that residents on the register were missed and are investigating why this occurred to prevent a repeat of this failure.

Compensation

Several residents have received compensation for the supply failures over the May bank holiday. These payments have not been issued because the customer complained or is on their priority list, or because they reported a problem with their supply, but because sensors in the supply pipes said the water was off for those properties over a given 12 or 24 hour period.

When the fault initially got raised at the start of the BH weekend, it was reported at the same time by the sensors that low pressure was occurring in East Farndon. This led Anglian Water to believe that a main had burst in the Village and a job ticket was created. All subsequent calls from residents were logged under that job ticket and the clock started for an outage/no water supply.

Upon discovering the fault was, in fact, a failed pump in Rothwell, a new job ticket was created and the original burst main job closed down – this meant that the outage/no water clock for affected residents was reset or wiped. Subsequent calls by residents were logged under the ‘new’ pump failure job ticket which attracted a new start time.

However, because during that time the sensors reported some pressure/flow had returned, albeit intermittently, over the following few days, the timer recording how long people were without water entirely, reset and restarted several times. 

This has been raised with Anglian by the Parish Council, along with Clipston PC and our MP as being grossly unfair to all the communities that had issues and continue to do so. 

Anglian Water explained they are led by the data in terms of compensation payouts, but accept that resident’s actual experience is likely to be very different to the data the sensors report.

To that end, they have taken this issue away to speak internally and will report back in the coming weeks. There is no guarantee that further compensation will be paid out at this stage, but we will lobby them along with our MP to ensure this does happen. 

Next steps

It has been agreed that all parties will meet again in around two weeks’ time, to receive further updates from Anglian Water including progress on the Sibbertoft site, timescales and compensation considerations. We will also press very hard along with support from our MP to ensure Shambala does not impact water supplies during the lead up to the August BH weekend.  

Following that meeting, a summary update like this one will be published.

East Farndon Parish Council will continue to engage with Anglian Water and Stuart Andrew MP to ensure a satisfactory outcome.

Attendees:

Ian Rule – Director of Water Services, Anglian Water

Grant Tuffs – Senior Policy and Public Affairs Lead, Corporate Affairs, Anglian Water

Emily Linsdell – Policy and Public Affairs Lead, Corporate Affairs, Anglian Water

Bernie Fallon – Chair, East Farndon Parish Council

Sarah Gresly – Parish Clerk, East Farndon Parish Council

Ian May – Chair, Clipston Parish Council

Clare Valentine – Clerk, Clipston Parish Council

Keith Simmons – Chair, Eydon Parish Council

Claire Tester – Caseworker for Stuart Andrew MP

Stuart Andrew MP

Many thanks for attending our “Play Your Cards Right” games evening on Friday 12th June 2026. The event was a sell out and raised the fantastic total of £752 for critical repairs to the East Farndon church. Huge thanks to Steve & Holly, they did an amazing job as games hosts, the Village Hall Committee, the PCC, and brilliant volunteers, who organised such a great event, and the many village residents who donated raffle prizes. The time that our volunteers give and the generosity of support from our village residents are very much appreciated. Please click this link to view photos from this event. ♠️♦️♣️♥️

The East Farndon Parish Council has been approached by the Welland Valley Neighbourhood Forum in Market Harborough to see if there is any appetite for a Harborough bus service to be extended into East Farndon. For a request to be considered by the operators, we would need to have concrete data on how many East Farndon residents would use the bus, what times of day and how often. Please can you give us your views by using this link that will take you to a short survey that expires on July 7th 2026.

Many thanks,

Mervyn Curtis & Manoj Parmar, on behalf of East Farndon Parish Council