PLANS to help stop the creation of “egg box homes” and protect jobs at the same time are set to be introduced across the city.

Members of Oxford City Council’s east area planning committee will meet tomorrow night to vote on implementing a planning tool known as an article four direction.

This would stop developers from being able to turn offices into residential properties without submitting a planning application.

Since the Government changed the law to allow this in May 2013, the council said 17 developments had gone ahead If the change to policy is approved by the council, 40 sites across the city, including Osney Mead Industrial Estate, Nuffield Industrial Estate and the Oxford University Press building in Walton Street, could not be turned into housing without planning permission from the city council.

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East area planning committee chairman Roy Darke said many of the properties were unsuitable for homes.

He said: “We should have due process on these sites. We think that they are the best sites for employment.

“We are not saying you cannot build on these sites; as long as the proposals fit we will not necessarily refuse them.

“What we are seeing in some of these sites is that we are getting small housing units that do not fit in with our policy on housing.

“Some of the flats are about 20 square metres which makes them egg box-type homes and they do not fit with what we want, which is a lifetime development that is suitable for people with disabilities or when they get older.”

The council report on the issue also pointed out that some of the sites which were converted into housing were not suitable for residential properties.

It highlighted some properties built at Grehan House in Garsington Road, Cowley, were close to a roundabout on the Eastern Bypass that serves the Cowley Plant, Oxford Business Park and a Tesco supermarket.

Oxford Mail:

Grehan House in Cowley.

As a result it was claimed residents could experience high levels of noise and air pollution and the homes also had no outdoor space or balconies.

The city council’s housing policy requires a “mixed balance of dwellings” to be built across Oxford but the council’s officers said 75 per cent of homes built in former commercial sites are one-bedroom flats.

Mr Darke said the move was also designed to protect jobs in the city.

He said: “We see these sites as being fit for industrial use and if office space is removed and housing built then jobs could be lost.”