A final plea to allow Oxford to expand on to neighbouring Green Belt land is expected to fall on deaf ears at a key meeting on Tuesday. Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet is expected to endorse a policy of building thousands of new homes in Bicester and Didcot.
The housing strategy will then be recommended to the regional assembly Seera for inclusion in the South East Plan soon to be submitted to the Deputy Prime Minister. There was a big vote in favour of building 8,000 new homes on the outskirts of Oxford, in a five-week consultation on where new housing should go. A 370-acre site next to Grenoble Road was put forward by Magdalen College.
At the cabinet meeting, Bicester county councillor Charles Shouler will propose an urban extension of Oxford, to spare Bicester and Didcot from further development. But he said: "I think it is unlikely that I will succeed. At a council meeting looking at what advice to give the cabinet, the proposition to extend on to the Green Belt was clearly defeated." Mr Shouler said the issue of whether Grove should also take a share of the extra homes "remained in the balance".
One small comfort for Bicester and Didcot is that the number of homes on greenfield sites required is put at 7,300 homes in central Oxfordshire and 2,300 in the rest of the county. It had been originally proposed that 8,000 homes would have to be built on green land in central Oxfordshire between 2016 and 2026, as part of the South East Plan.
Bicester county coun- cillors and MP Tony Baldry made a protest over the proposed expansion of the town on Saturday. Mr Baldry and Mr Shouler, Lawrie Stratford, Norman Bolster, Michael Waine gathered in Sheep Street to lobby the county council.
Mr Baldry said: "We want investment and infra- structure before expansion. The Government can't keep putting more and more housing in Bicester without infrastructure and investment. One simply can't expect to keep on building new housing and hope that communities magically occur. It requires recreation facilities and decent trans- port links to Oxford. Huge amounts of money have been spent on new towns like Milton Keynes but very little money has been put aside for growing communities such as Bicester."