Corby has always lit its own fire. It shouldn’t have to do it alone.

One of my earliest memories after moving to Corby years ago was walking down to the boating lake with my daughter in tow, the smell of the bonfire arriving long before you could see it, and athe people of Corby standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark looking up. You do not get many nights like that. Corby has one, and it is free, and it belongs to everybody.

Which is why the last three months have been so hard to watch.

In May we learned, not from a public meeting but from this newspaper, that North Northamptonshire Council intended to stop funding and staffing the Corby Bonfire and Fireworks. In July the council’s executive member for communities told full council that it was not in a position for the event to go ahead this year, citing cost and staffing, and expressed the hope that this would be a “fallow” year while somebody else came forward. The cost, we are told, has risen from around £18,000 in 2022 to over £45,000 last year, driven largely by tougher safety requirements — fencing, security, counter-terrorism training. I do not doubt those figures and I am not going to pretend the money is imaginary.

But I want to say plainly what this event is, because I think it has been filed under the wrong heading.

Corby Borough Council did not start this display in 1975 for entertainment. It started it because the town was covered in unofficial bonfires every autumn, children were being hurt, the fire service was being overwhelmed, and fence panels were disappearing off council houses to feed the flames. The display was a public safety intervention. It was cheaper and kinder to give people one big, safe, properly stewarded fire than to spend the night chasing thirty dangerous small ones. Fifty-one years later, that logic has not changed. Take the official display away and the fires do not stop; they just move into gardens and onto scrubland, unsupervised.

So when this is described as a nice-to-have, a discretionary line in a £400 million budget with a roughly £15m, it’s an unnecessary cut that barely balances the books at NNC. Business have and are coming to the call of Save Corby Fireworks to ensure this tradition stays alive.

What has impressed me most, and what makes the current position ridiculous as it is harsh. Within days of the news breaking, residents of this town had a petition running and the Save Corby Fireworks campaign up and going. Nobody organised that from a council chamber. People did it themselves, because they were not prepared to let something go quietly.

Both councils have said, in effect, that they would like to see a community-led event. Well — here is the community. It has led. It is standing in front of you asking for any shortfall not produced by businesses and ensure expedited decision making.

And this is the part I find genuinely frustrating, because the remaining obstacles are not obstacles the community can remove on its own. You cannot volunteer your way into a road closure order. You cannot crowdfund your way through a Safety Advisory Group. Access to the boating lake site, the licensing, the traffic management, the existing event safety plans, the relationships with the emergency services — these sit with the councils, and only with the councils. NNC has already said it is committed to sharing its knowledge and experience with any group that takes this on. Good. That promise now needs to be converted into a named officer, a date in a diary, and a decision about the site, because a promise of help in the abstract will not survive contact with a November deadline.

I understand Corby Town Council’s position too. It is a town council, not a unitary authority. It does not have NNC’s staff, and it already delivers Pride, the Spirit of Corby awards and Remembrance with a small team. The lead responsibility here sits with NNC, which inherited the event. But CTC can be the convenor and the local champion that gets everyone round one table and refuses to let this drift.

So the ask is simple, and it is not a demand for a blank cheque. Call an open meeting inside a fortnight with the campaign, both councils, the emergency services and potential sponsors, and publish what was agreed. Commit in principle to a single public display at the boating lake on 5th November so the campaign has something real to fundraise around. Offer the support and facilitation to make this community’s undertaking happen. Underwrite the shortfall jointly as a backstop, so volunteers are not carrying all the financial risk in year one. And publish the costings, the safety requirements and the decision record, so residents can judge for themselves what is achievable.

Do that, and I think this town gets its bonfire. Refuse to, and the honest position is not that the fireworks were unaffordable, it is that nobody with the power to save them was willing to spend an afternoon in a room trying.

Corby has always stood up and been counted for when push comes to shove. It built the display itself in the first place for the betterment of the community. Residents have stood up. What we need now is for the two councils to stop describing the problem to each other and start solving it, together, while there is still time to get something into the sky this November.

I would rather stand at the lake in the cold with children again than write another word about it.