Rugby councillors vote on 23 September on a Houlton GP petition. Council minutes tie the permanent surgery to 3,100 homes occupied; about 1,500 are built.

Update, 28 September 2026: Full Council agreed an amended motion on 23 September. The NHS has since moved a Houlton health centre for up to 12,000 patients to full business case, with Clifton Road Surgery chosen to run it. Read the follow-up.

A petition signed by 293 Houlton residents goes to Rugby Borough Council tonight, asking for the neighbourhood’s promised GP surgery to be delivered earlier than the legal agreement requires.

The motion is item 8(a) on the agenda for Full Council on 23 September 2026. It is proposed by Councillor Kedward and seconded by Councillor Daly. The meeting starts at 7pm in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall and is streamed live.

The number that explains why the petition exists is not in the motion. It is in the council’s own minutes from ten years ago.

What the council was told in 2016

Rugby’s Brooke Overview and Scrutiny Committee took evidence on GP provision across the borough on 13 October 2016. NHS England and Public Health Warwickshire both attended. Asked when Houlton would get a surgery, the minutes record the answer in one line:

A temporary facility at Houlton will be looked at when 450 properties are occupied (anticipated in 2019). The permanent facility will be set up when 3,100 properties are occupied.

The same minutes place the temporary facility at Dollman Farm and the permanent one “in the centre of the development around C Station”. Ten years on, neither has been built. The 450-home trigger was expected to be reached in 2019.

Where the building count stands

Houlton’s master developer, Urban&Civic, still lists the health centre as something to come. Its own community site says the neighbourhood will in future have “a District Centre with shops, a GP-led Health Centre and additional sports and community facilities”. The same page puts the finished scheme at “up to 6,200 homes” and, in a passage about tree planting, says “almost 1,500 new homes built”.

The council’s planning evidence gives a second reading. Its Five Year Housing Land Supply Position Statement 2025-2030 says building started at Houlton in the 2017-18 monitoring year and that there have been completions across eight monitoring years to 2024-25 “at an average annual rate of 239 dwellings per annum”. Eight years at that rate is about 1,900 homes finished by the end of March 2025.

The two figures are measuring different things and neither is a count of occupied homes, which is what the 2016 trigger was expressed in. What both show is the same shape:

  • 450 homes, the temporary facility trigger, was passed years ago
  • around 1,500 to 1,900 homes built, on the developer’s and the council’s own figures
  • 3,100 homes occupied, the permanent surgery trigger, is roughly double that
  • 6,200 homes is the full allocation, under outline permission R11/0699 granted on 21 May 2014

At 239 homes a year, the gap between today and 3,100 is another five to seven years.

Scale of Houlton's build-out from zero to 6,200 homes, marking the 450-home temporary facility trigger, about 1,500 to 1,900 homes built so far, and the 3,100-home trigger for the permanent GP surgery

What the motion actually asks for

The motion does not ask the council to build anything. Rugby Borough Council does not commission GP services; that is the job of the NHS Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board. What it asks for is pressure and a timetable. If passed, the council would:

  • formally receive the Houlton GP Surgery Petition and its supporting evidence
  • write to Urban&Civic, in the names of the Leader and the Leader of the Opposition, asking whether the identified land can be released earlier than the Section 106 agreement provides for
  • write to the Integrated Care Board asking for the current status, the anticipated timetable for commissioning, construction and opening, and details of any funding, workforce or contractual barriers
  • ask Cabinet to instruct officers to bring the council, Urban&Civic and NHS partners together
  • require a written progress update to all councillors within six months

The motion states that the petition and its supporting analysis show 293 signatures and that residents “travel an average of 5 miles to reach their registered GP practice”. Those figures come from the petition, not from an NHS source. We could find no published statement from the Integrated Care Board about a Houlton surgery, which is part of what the motion is asking it to supply.

Why a motion and not a petition debate

There is a second reason this is reaching the chamber as a motion rather than as a petition.

Rugby Borough Council’s petition scheme sets two thresholds. A petition with at least 500 valid signatures gets a senior council officer to give evidence at a public Overview and Scrutiny meeting. A petition with more than 1,500 valid signatures “will be debated by the full Council”.

At 293 names, the Houlton petition clears neither. Two councillors putting it on the agenda as a motion is the route that gets it heard.

What it means for you

If you live at Houlton, the practical position is unchanged tonight. No surgery is being commissioned and no date is being set. What a vote in favour would produce is two letters and a promise of a written update to councillors within six months, which is the first dated checkpoint anyone has attached to this.

If you want to watch, the meeting is at 7pm on Wednesday 23 September in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall, Evreux Way, and the livestream is linked from the meeting page.

One thing worth knowing if you plan to follow the land release itself. From 31 October, a new national scheme of delegation changes how Section 106 matters are handled in Rugby. Applications to discharge a Section 106 obligation will all be decided by officers, and a modification only reaches the Planning Committee in exceptional circumstances. The Houlton health land sits inside that agreement.

We will report the result of tonight’s vote, and we will come back to the six-month update. More on how the borough’s development pipeline is running is in our Rugby planning news page, and the wider picture of what is being built is in our Rugby house prices tracker.

Sources: Public agenda, Rugby Borough Council, 23 September 2026; Brooke Overview and Scrutiny Committee minutes, 13 October 2016; Five Year Housing Land Supply Position Statement 2025-2030; About Houlton, Urban&Civic; Rugby Borough Council petition scheme.