Sir – Forty thousand people commuting into central Oxford each day surely show that the ‘Greater Oxford’ of your headline (April 10) is not just inevitable, but has already been in place for some time.

The rural idyll of horse-based transport is past, followed in too many cases by village shops, banks and post offices, and replaced by car-based commuting and weekend cottages, which are a poor way to maintain a community.

The national Government’s creation of a ‘Science Arc’ stretching from Harwell to Bicester should surely be the opportunity for the creation of a Science Arc Development Corporation to cover the same area, perhaps along the lines of last century’s New Town Development Corporations.

These would provide coherent development policies, proper infrastructure and high architectural quality throughout the area, rather than the developer-led, minimum-cost, random small-scale developments that ignore wider issues and too often increase the demands on an already inadequate transport and other infrastructure.

It would replace the creeping uncontrolled development that the National Planning Policy Framework is in practice supporting, as we see here in North Hinksey and elsewhere. The administrative basis for such a Corporation already exists in embryo as the Local Enterprise Partnership. A strong team of planners would be required to support it, and it would work together with the LEP.

With the income from the proposed Science Arc businesses predicted to be in the tens of billions of pounds, it should not be impossible to find some way for central government to fund the Corporation.

Local expertise from county, district, town and city councils would make important contributions in working together with it, and implementing its recommendations.

Dr Andrew Pritchard, North Hinksey