RESIDENTS are celebrating a council U-turn over parking near Oxford Brookes University.

Oxfordshire County Council has scrapped plans to limit parking in Cheney Lane and Warneford Lane to 24 hours, with no return within eight hours.

Residents feared this would lead to people parking in Divinity Road and Hill Top Road, and other already congested streets in the area.

They believed most cars would belong to students who would leave their vehicles on the road for days on end.

Council highways chiefs told them on Monday that they would not press ahead with the plans.

Plans to alter the parking layoput in Cheney Lane, to tackle car crime, will go ahead.

James Styring, of the Divinity Road Area Residents’ Association, said 130 of the 176 spaces in Cheney Lane and Warneford Lane were used by students.

He said: “This is a victory for common sense. I can’t imagine how the council got to the stage of implementing this change, with no realisation of the problems it would have caused.

“If it had gone ahead it would have been an absolute nightmare.

“But to give credit to the county council they recognised it was a ridiculous idea and changed the plan overnight.”

He said, however, the rethink would make it more difficult for the university to enforce its ban on students living in halls of residence having a car.

It would not be able to check if the cars belonged to students through the DVLA because of data protection laws, he said.

County council spokesman Owen Morton said: “The council has listened to the concerns raised by residents in the Divinity Road area and has agreed the restrictions limiting parking on Warneford Lane and Cheney Lane to 24 hours will not be implemented, although the change to the parking layout in Cheney Lane will still go ahead.

“The initial proposal to restrict parking to 24 hours was to address the issue of long-term parking in Cheney Lane and Warneford Lane – much of which is understood to be the result of student parking.”

The Cheney Lane bays will now be moved to the other side of the road, which is less obscured, in a bid to reduce car crime.

Oxford Brookes spokesman Edward Reed said: “We ban cars for all students in halls and have introduced a 15-strong fleet of BrookesBuses that run between our three campuses.

“The service carried 212,000 passengers in October alone.”