Delight as judge rejects appeal over Warneford Meadow (From Oxford Mail)

Disgraceful attack on the use of privately owned property to avoid having a few much needed homes. I hope these people are pleased at what they will have now cost the entire community in housing costs. It would be fine if we had land value tax which would automatically adjust to reflect the higher values those with homes adjoining this now protected land will enjoy and would at least compensate the rest of the community for not having that additional housing to take pressure off the city.

Now it is a Town Green can we expect to see all of the protesters merrily prancing about and enjoying their open space. Or is it a case that they will never use it, and are just a bunch of NIMBYS that want to stop anything within a million miles of themselves.

A sad day indeed.

They should be forced to buy it.

The health trust had applied for planning permission to develop the site for student accommodation.

They had applied for several options, all of which contained some housing and some student accommodation. And in fact, even in total, only about half of the meadow in any case.

Take a look at Google maps satellite view, and search for Warneford OX3. You can see just how much land is being used by the hospitals in this very small area along Old Road, including the Warneford, Churchill, Park, Nuffield, Highfield Unit and more. It is bookended to the west by Brookes. Much as housing may be needed, this area would not have made much difference.

The campaigners are scarcely NIMBYs – most land has been developed here, whatever locals may have felt about it, because more buildings for health and education are always needed. This was an attempt to preserve some green space for everyone’s sake. There is precious little left if you look at the satellite view.

Given the noise and pressure on the infrastructure in the area, I would be surprised if high house prices were sustained much longer.

Of course, one can prove almost anything by looking at the aerial view by cherry picking the image centre and resolution (most are in fact aerial rather than "satellite" by the way at the sort of resolution where you can make out individual houses and vehicles).

Nonetheless comparing say bit.ly/aEzQ5b with bit.ly/bbl4CR (same resolution, one image further south) would give the lie to the idea that this is some uniquely overdeveloped part of town.

It also rather depends what you consider would make "much difference". I illustrated here - bit.ly/9AbFQI - two years ago how the costs of holding good development land out of use soon mount up: that on a site of less than and eighth of the Warneford Meadow the "lost" housing would be costing the public purse over a million pounds a year in housing benefit that could have been mitigated by the availability of those extra homes (no, they need not have been all affordable but overall the knock on effect is that it releases more properties elsewhere, compared with *idle land*) and further cost the public purse in lost property tax revenues.

The benefit of retaining such marginal land for what is undoubtedly bound to be rather local recreational uses does need to be set off against the costs imposed elsewhere on the community by not having the alternative uses, in this case housing or student residences, available. Indeed, in the case of such a large site the additional property taxes plus the reduction in housing support costs would not be far off £2.5 million per annum. Maybe you call that "not much difference".

That is where shifting to a land based taxation would have its merits, since those who fight to keep (as is their right to do so) some land free from development that could provide much needed benefits if used as housing, would see, relatively speaking, local land values rise and therefore their tax bill rise. And they would therefore, over time, pay something towards what they have cost the rest of the community who are unlikely to benefit much from this 18 acre recreational facility.

It is the privatisation of the value of such benefits into local property values that is a "privilege" in the real sense of the word - a grant of material advantage by public policy that will tend to adversely affect others who do not directly benefit, that skews our entire property, and capitalist system.

The increased value that has now been granted by a court to the property owners who will benefit most from having this green space and not housing, is no different, in effect, than the Crown granting half of Oxfordshire to a favoured courtier in the early c18th. Except, I suppose, that in Churchill's case the benefit was probably pennies per acre, whereas here it is millions per acre.

The Health Authority is in the same small area, isn't it – Google have mislabelled it as the Warneford (unless they have new buildings there (?). The main Warneford buildings are to the south of Brookes: near the meadow, or development land, depending on your point of view.

Interestingly not everyone in the health service was in favour of development:
http://bit.ly/axOPyg