South Oxfordshire Local Plan – Preliminary Conclusions

Given that the Secretary of State insisted that this Local Plan was submitted for examination, it is hardly surprising that one of his Inspectors has found it acceptable.

Inspector Bore’s preliminary conclusions on South Oxfordshire District Council’s Local Plan have now been published. He accepts the housing numbers and accepts all the Strategic sites, including Chalgrove. He wants flexibility on housing density and the number of houses allocated to market towns to be minimal.

At a time when we have all understood the value of green space, it is absurdly wasteful of our scarce land resource not to be pursuing more consistent and ambitious housing density targets.

Together with other Local Plans across Oxfordshire, over 20,000 houses (development equivalent to a third of Oxford City) have now been given the go ahead within the Oxford Green Belt. CPRE Oxfordshire still can not see where the cumulative impact of these plans has been considered.

For South Oxfordshire, where over 70% of the housing and 85% of the strategic allocations are within the Green Belt,  the case of ‘exceptional circumstances’ to justify Green Belt development is laughable when clearly it is being considered the norm.

CPRE Oxfordshire will continue to explore all opportunities to challenge this outcome, including potential legal options.

Download the Inspector’s preliminary conclusions below.

South Oxfordshire Local Plan – IC12 Inspector’s Preliminary Conclusions Letter Aug 20