Oxford Local Plan

The Submission Draft Oxford Local Plan 2040 is now open for consultation and this will run for an 8 week period until Friday 5 January 2024. Have your say!

This is the “Reg 19” consultation, where our only opportunity is to comment on the “soundness” of the plan, rather than the detail within it.

There is a survey, with the relevant documents at the bottom of the page here:

https://consultation.oxford.gov.uk/planning-services/oxford-local-plan-2040-reg19-consultation/

CPRE Oxfordshire’s key concerns are:

• The Plan carries forward an unsustainably high level of growth, way above Government targets. We think the evidence to support this is deeply flawed – and so do other local authorities and a wide range of civic groups.
• Unfortunately, Oxford City priorities its own sites for employment, rather than housing.  Research by CPRE Oxfordshire looked across four city centre sites and found that ambitions for these were to generate 14,000 jobs but only 700 houses!  (See our findings here.)  This means that Oxford’s Plan will yet again rest on offloading its ‘unmet need’ onto surrounding Districts at the expense of the countryside.
• The Oxford Green Belt is largely ignored in the Plan – we’d like to see it recognised and celebrated as the countryside on the doorstep for local residents. 
• The Plan needs a much more robust brownfield / rooftops first policy for renewables, especially solar energy.

We are working on our full response, as well as a ’10-minute response guide’ to help you navigate the consultation info. We’ll post these documents here as soon as they are available, so please do check back.

Meanwhile, if you have any comments or information that you would like to feed into our response, please do get in touch:

E: campaign@cpreoxon.org.uk

Thank you!