PLANS for thousands of new homes to be built in the Green Belt outside Oxford have been thrown out.
Protesters labelled the plan to allow 3,000 homes just south of Grenoble Road a "smash and grab raid" and urged county councillors to reject the proposal at the authority's annual meeting yesterday.
As previously reported in the Oxford Mail, a consortium aims to build 3,000 houses on land owned jointly by Magdalen College and Thames Water. The county council's draft Structure Plan, debated yesterday, originally allowed for 1,000 homes there. After a public consultation, which generated about 3,000 complaints, the county council's executive proposed scrapping the Grenoble Road plan and instead sharing the 1,000 houses across the other districts.
But Didcot Manor councillor Terry Joslin argued that instead of being abandoned, the proposed development should be increased to 3,000 homes. He said: "There are 6,000 unfortunate families in Oxford desperate for somewhere decent to live." The council rejected the scheme, but agreed with Green councillor Craig Simmons's proposal to look for brownfield sites in Oxford for 800 homes.