Viewed from above, Oxford is a strikingly green city, its medieval cruciform shape still clearly discernible among peripheral estates added over the last couple of centuries. But the verdant patchwork traces a pattern of privilege and creates challenges for development.
Where to build?
Low-lying areas are off-limits because of regular flooding, as the River Thames drains its huge catchment to the west. Many smaller enclaves are private gardens or playing fields, behind the high walls of wealthy university colleges and fee-paying schools. Others, in public hands, are now in play themselves: as potential building sites for Labour’s target of 1.5m new homes in the next five years.
Children enjoying the swings, roundabout, and climbing frame on Bertie Park in the suburb of New Hinksey, are blissfully oblivious to this threat. But last month the city council decided to appropriate the land to build 31 social housing units on it.
Campaigners are mounting a legal challenge, buoyed by a personal message from Angela Rayner. Spokesperson for the campaign, Kaddy Beck, told West England Bylines that the Deputy Prime Minister responded to their query by “assur[ing] us that the government has no plans to review the use of recreation grounds for construction, but that ‘planning policies should be based on robust and up-to-date assessments of the need for recreation facilities’.”
However, “Oxford City Council’s problems stem from the fact that Bertie Park clearly is needed,” Ms Beck added.
Somehow, the city will need to find locations for as many as 1,051 homes per year, up from the 762 provided for in its Local Plan of 2023, drawn up before Ms Rayner took command. Some will be placed in surrounding districts, but the pressure is on to identify urban sites too. The government has specified Oxford as an “area central to driving [economic] growth, thus requiring “a big rise in ambition” when it comes to housebuilding.
An alternative site
New Hinksey lies on the main radial route to the south. Along its westbound equivalent, Botley Road, the predominant colours on that same aerial photograph are not shades of green but instead a palette of grey, pink and beige. These are the roofs of giant retail sheds, now being knocked down to allow rebuilding.
About a mile from the main railway station, with its two regular services into central London, the trading estate occupies somewhere between 12 and 15 hectares of prime development land – enough to accommodate up to 500 new homes at approved densities.
The business models of yesteryear are being rapidly outmoded, of course. Shoppers seeking specialist goods are more likely to order them online for home delivery, rather than drive to a showroom. So the outlet stores, with their generously sized car parks, are a fading economic force. The opportunity to capitalise on a change of use to meet Oxford’s housing target seems obvious.
It was outside the goods delivery entrance of one such store, Carpetright, that I met John, a homeless man in his 60s, reduced to living in his car. Reflective foil panels fixed inside the windows of a green Audi estate gave him a minimum of privacy. He’d found a nook of unrestricted parking space and moved in.
Fed up with the insecurity of life in charity-run hostels and shared housing, his ideal was to get his own one-bedroom apartment. On the private market, such properties are prohibitively priced, with Oxford tenants reckoned to spend as much as 59% of their income on rent: the highest outside London.
Carpetright ceased trading in July, its Botley Road store one of 200 to close down. Already the redundant building is being demolished. Many locals, apprised of the city’s predicament and the housing crisis, have been dismayed to learn that the land will not be used to increase the supply of one-bedroom flats, or indeed any other kind of residential accommodation.
Instead the premises and several others in the retail park are to make way for a multi-million-pound scheme for new offices. According to the Oxford Mail, “They will be used for a wide variety of research and development work, from life sciences to tech and manufacturing.”
Susanna Pressel, the Labour city and county councillor for the area (and something of a local legend for personally chasing down a burglar… on her bicycle), put her finger on the problem:
“Some people are saying that these sites should be used for housing, and I agree – though unfortunately that is very unlikely, because these are all on private land and the city council can’t tell the landowners what to do with their land.”
Labour under new management
My interview with car-dwelling John came for a Byline Times assignment on Labour’s prospects leading up to the General Election of 2019. Back then, of course, the party was under different management.
Current defence secretary, John Healey, was shadowing the housing brief under Jeremy Corbyn. He planned to create a Sovereign Land Trust to buy up land on the edge of cities and parcel it out for development.
The policy has now acquired the added dimension of targeting the green belt – designated after World War 2 to prevent urban sprawl, and covering over 6,000 sq miles, about 13% of England’s total area. A consultation by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government aims to get agreement from landowners on “fair but not excessive” value by withholding planning permission until the land is in public hands. If such agreement is not forthcoming, Homes England could instead use compulsory purchase powers.
Keir Starmer has spoken of redesignating as “grey belt” areas that are of little environmental value, thus exempting them from the existing restrictions. Playing fields are unlikely to be affected, since the areas in question are mostly in agricultural use. But amenity values for walkers and dog-owners would be under threat, thus risking further local rows and challenges.
Private profit before public good
With no power to direct the use of privately held land within cities, local authorities must draw up a so-called Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment (HELAA). This means counting their own reserves along with privately-owned land whose owners might be persuaded to sell for housebuilding – at prices swollen by existing planning permission.
An application is now before Oxford City Council to raze the rest of Botley Road’s retail park for a ‘science quarter’ comprising still more offices and laboratories. It comes from The Mary Street Estate, a division of British Land plc.
The company’s latest results, released last month, showed a rise in half-year profits to £143m. A statement from Chief Executive Simon Carter identified “campuses [with] amenities, excellent transport connectivity, engaging public realm and high quality, sustainable buildings for business” as a key to future earnings growth.
He went on to name Oxford as one point of a “golden triangle” with London and Cambridge, where new technologies in such fields as artificial intelligence and life sciences would generate continuing high demand. Nowhere does the report presage selling the company’s land to ease the housing crisis.
Providing office space for business in cutting-edge tech sectors would no doubt help in realising Labour’s other well-canvassed goal to increase Britain’s GDP growth.
But it means scarce urban building land being used to generate private profit along one axis of the city, while children’s play space is threatened on another. Kaddy Beck told West England Bylines the Council is expected to indicate soon whether it will contest campaigners’ application for judicial review of the Bertie Park decision, and on what basis:
“They are tying themselves in knots. They have to say that they are going to meet the current need for recreation facilities on a tiny fraction of the land. And that the community will be compensated with the construction of a nature trail on land that Thames Valley Police say is unsafe for unaccompanied children, and to which we already have access.”
Opposition to Rayner’s housebuilding drive is often called out as selfishness. Chris Worrall of the Labour Housing Group recently counterposed his party’s commitment to “fairness, ambition, and homes for all” with “vocal local opponents of development” whom the Starmer government should face down with a catch-cry of “Yes, In My Back Yard.”
Politically, promising to put the keys of a new home in over a million hands should mean ministers are pushing at an open door. Large majorities tell opinion pollsters both that housing is in crisis and that government needs to fix it.
In Oxford, however, the policy risks being soured in the public mind not by NIMBYism, but by perceptions of injustice in the allocation of pain and gain. And, if replicated in towns and cities across the country, that might bring trouble to Labour’s doorstep.
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