A PROPOSED housing development in my estate illustrates some basic problems in our planning system. Proposal 16/00968/FUL which can be found on the Oxford City Council website suggests the creation of four four-bedroom houses on a very steep slope of the Lye Valley, adjoining Town Furze. 

It should not have been possible to put forward this planning application. 
There is no social benefit to the City since the primary housing needs in the City are for social housing and key worker projects such as part rent, part buy housing and this proposal does not provide for these needs.

There is no need to build next to the Lye Valley Site of Special Scientific Interest and risk changing its water conditions and killing off its rare plants which are in fact one third of the rarest plants in the County in a single, urban enclosed site. There is no justification in subjecting the children who live in the area to greater risk of car accidents in this very quiet neighbourhood where no informal or formal play area exists.

Lye Valley and Town Furze are effectively ‘play streets’ under present conditions given little through traffic, and should stay that way. 

This site should not be developed. The city council should resist the planning application on all the grounds which it can. Then, before other proposals arise, it should re-zone the site in question as an addition to the neighbouring Nature Reserve and seek to maintain it as a green and open site in perpetuity. 


DR HAZEL DAWE
Oxfordshire Green Party
Bulan Road
Oxford