Inspector Rejects Draft Oxford City Local Plan, Creating Opportunity to Save the Green Belt

The draft Oxford City Local Plan, proposing highly inflated housing numbers to be largely offloaded to surrounding districts and the Green Belt, has been rejected by the Planning Inspector.

The Plan, which prioritised its own city centre brownfield sites for employment rather than homes, used housing numbers based on the methodology of the highly criticised Housing and Economic Need (HENA) report and proposed 1,322 homes a year up to 2040, with 841 of these proposed outside the city boundaries in neighbouring districts and potentially on the Green Belt. This is in place of the Government’s advised use of a “Standard Methodology”, unless there are “exceptional circumstances”, and would have given 762 homes a year: an increase of 560 homes a year.  

The approach was strongly challenged by CPRE Oxfordshire, Need not Greed and South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse and West Oxfordshire District councils throughout the development of this Plan. All these groups put forward their views with detailed evidence to support them at the Inspector’s hearings in June this year. The Inspector has now fed back his views, rejecting the Plan and concluding that:

• Oxford City council did not meet their “Duty to cooperate” with neighbouring councils in the preparation of this Plan, and that,
• There is no clear justification in this case for departing from the standard method, exceptional circumstances do not exist.

CPRE Oxfordshire fully supports the Inspector’s findings. We hope the plan is able to proceed using the Standard methodology endorsed by the Inspector but appreciate that with the plan now “going back to the drawing board”, it may need to be rewritten in the light of the proposed new National Planning policy Framework (NPPF) and the housing targets this proposes, which are 1,051 homes a year for Oxford City; a figure still lower than this draft. We will be closely analysing the impact on housing numbers for neighbouring districts as their plans proceed. 

CPRE Oxfordshire welcomes the opportunity to revisit this Plan, and we will continue to positively contribute to its refinement. We remain supportive of the urgent need to address the requirement for homes which are genuinely affordable, including social housing, but continue to call for these to be built at high density levels on brownfield sites within the city, where residents want to live and there is the infrastructure, services and facilities to support their lifestyle.

In addition to revisiting the housing numbers, we hope we can now also review other areas of the Plan, and call for:

• A robust brownfield first policy to renewable energy that includes a spatial strategy maximising the potential for renewable energy within the city on industrial sites, shopping centres, car parks and even the city’s road network.
• A clear policy on the positive enhancement of the Green Belt.
• A less restrictive policy on Employment land , removing unnecessary barriers in the way of developing these sites for housing.
• A more ambitious policy on Biodiversity Net Gain, where we seek a minimum 20% Net Gain.