Great Article by Peter Jay. In response to the proposed WODC draft plan. Clearly articulates local concerns and aligns the national need requires real thought, NOT quick fixes. Do you support the proposed Local Plan housing target of at least 9,450 homes to be provided in West Oxfordshire over the period 2011 – 2029 (525 per annum)? If you do not agree with the proposed target, please explain why and identify which alternative target you consider should be used. Agree [ ] Disagree [ Selected ] Observation [ ] Please enter any additional comments The basic fault lies, I suggest, in the uncritical acceptance of its major premise, namely that even in an area such as West Oxfordshire there is something desirable and legitimate, or at least inevitable, about ‘development’ and that therefore the only arguments should be about how much and where. This is entirely wrong. West Oxfordshire is and for a long time been an area of extraordinary and precious natural beauty. ‘Development’ commonly and normally destroys that beauty, crushing it under blankets of concrete, tarmac, stone, bricks and overhead cabling. It has been said that the beauty of West Oxfordshire must yield to national imperatives for more housing to accommodate a rising population. This is pure nonsense. National arithmetic applies to the nation as a whole. West Oxfordshire represents an infinitesimal fraction of that land area. There is no law of God or man that says ‘development’ must be uniformly spread across the face of Britain. It never has been and there is no reason to import so ridiculous an idea now. If there is a national shortage of housing, as there probably is, it is the role of national government to address it – and to address it sensibly, probably by creating a number of garden cities in suitable places which are neither exceptionally beautiful nor inaccessibly remote. It is also the role of national government, though shamefully ignored since at least the 1970s, to implement regional policies which distribute jobs and investment where the existing population needs them and where housing is less scarce and which combat the ever greater concentration of economic activity in the south-east, Distributing national housing targets in the kind of way suggested in the draft local plan - on the apparent basis that the pain of unwanted ‘development’ must be evenly spread everywhere - is absurd. Not all areas are equally beautiful, nor anything like it. It is not NIMBYism to say Not In West Oxfordshire. It is manifest common-sense to be a NIWO, defending our long heritage of rural beauty and quiet communities from the horrible threat of the ‘developers’. The threat is wicked and ugly. We have a developer in Woodstock, a corporation of financial professionals and allied entrepreneurial types based far away in the financial district of some remote metropolis. Their duty, quite lawfully, is to maximise and accelerate profit for their shareholders. They have no recognised stake in our community, nor any apparent knowledge or undeadening of - or interest in - our needs and priorities. We are urged by some simple-minded souls in our town to “engage” with these enemies of our environment and community. This is so that we can extract the odd thousand pounds or so by way of Section 106 grants for, e.g., a playground or, worse still an unwanted roadway which can then be cited as a pretext for yet more ‘infilling’ ‘development’. We are asked to do this in exchange for betraying into the hands of the ‘developers’ swathes of our neighbourhood worth to them tens, nay hundreds, of millions of pounds. This is both stupid and corrupt, corruption on an institutionalised scale, not the bribery of individual councillors, but the wholesale buying of the council itself. It will be asked why should not private land-owners do what they choose with their own property. They need to be reminded that the rights and joys of private property rest on and depend largely on a collective framework of law administered at public expense. That law has long recognised that communities and societies have a large and important stake in how land is used. Nowhere is that more evidently necessary than in West Oxfordshire where we who live here have the right to call upon our elected representatives to bestir themselves on our behalves to defend us from the ‘developers’ rather than, as in your draft local plan, to join in with the ‘planner-developer complex’ in betraying our heritage to those who would destroy it.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 09:51:55 +0000
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