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Sunningwell Parish Council Response to SEERA South East Plan Document, 4th April 2005
1. We are a rural parish completely enclosed by Oxford’s Green Belt. There are 740 on the electoral roll, of which seven are parish councillors. Our annual precept is about £14000.
2. There are significant areas of ancient woodland in our parish as well as the Glebe or common. Most of the remainder is high grade agricultural Green Belt land, much of which is owned by one local family. They have plans to build up to 6000 houses here if they gain permission to do so.
3. The parish council has taken a consistent stand against this proposal since reading about it in the local press about 18 months ago. An immediate survey of parishioners revealed overwhelming support for the parish council to continue its opposition.
4. Several public meetings have confirmed the parish’s expectations that the council should actively oppose this and all other proposals with all the energy it could bring to bear on the issue.
5. We are very concerned that the hand over from local strategic planning to regional strategic planning has apparently resulted in an increase of energy on the part of some local carpet bagging developers together with Oxford City Council. This is not helped by the apparent vacillations evident from the Deputy Prime Minister who appears in his public statements to be, at one time, declaring the Green Belt sacrosanct and, at another, musing on the need for it to be breached to accommodate the “perceived” needs of an expanding region.
6. We, therefore, support Spatial Option A which moves growth away from the City of Oxford to the towns of Bicester and Didcot. We believe the maximum total of new dwellings should be 25,500 or less between 2006 and 2026, and we are opposed to any increase on this total.
7. We strongly support the County Council’s Country Towns Policy which resists the centralising pull by Oxford City through moving growth in housing and employment opportunities towards the country towns of Oxfordshire.
8. We regret the absence of a national policy for the regions which could look at regional capacity and the benefits of sharing economic growth more evenly between the regions of Britain as a whole. We believe regionalism exacerbates the problems of the south east and all other regions by setting regions against each other rather than requiring them to cooperate on a national planning strategy. There is no point at all in simply accepting for all time that the south east has to be the economic driver of the whole nation and planning more and more economic growth and housing. This is a national issue and planning should be taking account of the need to spread development more evenly and leaving less to the vagaries of private entrepreneurs and multinationals.
9. We are increasingly concerned about the issue of infrastructure in its widest sense. (i.e. hospitals, surgeries, water supply, energy, schools, shops, jobs etc., as well as roads and transport facilities). We are horrified at the thought that large numbers of houses might be built in our region without the appropriate infrastructure, simply to respond to the whim of a government obsessed by targets and vote getting. There is a distinct lack of appropriate infrastructure now for the current population, so we base our feelings on empirical observation rather than theory. We have been very concerned that some organisations have opted to respond to you by agreeing the current number of planned houses simply because they think that will require the development of infrastructure whilst the lower figure won’t. We don’t believe we should be blackmailed into accepting what we don’t want simply in order to get what we do.
10. Infrastructure development in Oxfordshire is currently far more important than additional housing, and this should be the concern of government planning, not deals done with private developers in exchange for lucrative development permissions.
11. House building in Oxford City has run ahead of targets and the lack of affordable housing is a consequence of the reluctance of builders to construct cheaper dwellings and their skill in subverting relevant planning requirements. Homelessness should be addressed through policies of regeneration carried out within existing communities, rather than in the form of poorly-serviced, distant estates. There is still plenty of land available within the City boundaries to take account of these things.
12. We are opposed to Option B and the idea of urban extensions to Oxford.
13. We strongly support Policy CC9 in the South East Plan which states that Green Belts in the region will be retained and supported and that opportunities will be taken to improve management and access. We also welcome the statement in paragraph 1.17 which states that the Assembly considers there is no case for any strategic review of Green Belt within the region. We believe that, so far as Central Oxfordshire is concerned, only Option A, coupled with the lowest rate of housing growth, is compatible with these aims.
14. We have been dismayed to find that no more than about twenty households in our parish have had “Your Shout” delivered to them by the post office (as at 04.04.05). We have had to arrange to have these questionnaires sent to us and distributed by ourselves in order to allow the many people in this parish with a strong view to express their concerns at your activities. Had it not been for local action almost all our parish would have been disenfranchised from this alleged consultation. Most of our parishioners have found the questions pathetically inadequate for their response needs and have had to add their own comments. Most take a very dim view on all counts of the so called SEERA Consultation process.
15. We do not feel the new arrangements for strategic planning are remotely adequate and regret the passing of the previous means of being able to hold elected local members of local councils accountable through the ballot, personal contact and other well established mechanisms for objections. There are too many assumptions about our environment being made by unelected people a long way away from us with no mandate and no knowledge of our circumstances.
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