BOOSTING district centres around Oxford is now a key part of city council policy after a planning report was passed.

The council said it wants to boost Cowley, Summertown and Headington as district centres in its Local Plan until 2036.

They are big enough to support their communities and be used more so residents do not always need to travel into the city centre.

A clampdown on building new housing developments with car parking if sites are on transport routes and near shops will help to boost that.

The council said the Local Plan will ‘shape the homes, jobs, community facilities and new transport infrastructure of the next 20 years’.

Alex Hollingsworth, the council’s executive board member for planning and transport, said: “A Local Plan needs to respect the city of previous generations while shaping the city of the generations to come.

“That is what this Local Plan aims to achieve. We can’t treat the city like an artefact; it would be easy to wrap up the historical core in aspic and turn our home into a monument to the past. Oxford’s not about that: we are a future-looking city, and we have to meet that challenge head-on.”

But many of the homes it needs to build to accommodate demand in the city will built across Oxfordshire rather than in Oxford.

That is because the council says it lacks the space within the city to accommodate its considerable ‘housing need’.

On Wednesday, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group, Andrew Gant, said the plan is ‘proportionate and sensible’ but not one his party would have submitted.

He has continually supported ditching some employment land in favour of using it for housing as part of the plan, which outlines where new building should take place until 2036.

But council leader Susan Brown said: “It’s very easy to sit and say, why do we need more jobs? We do not know what’s coming around the corner.”

Oxford’s Local Plan will be sent out for a final round of consultation ahead of approval from a planning inspector.

To help with the city council’s housing need, Cherwell District Council has already accepted a proposal to contain 4,400 new homes on the Green Belt between Kidlington, Begbroke and Yarnton.

Whether that plan is ‘sound’ will be decided by a planning inspector later this month.

Critics complain Cherwell’s Local Plan will turn that area into an ‘urban sprawl’.

Oxfordshire councils have said they will take on 13,100 new homes in their districts originally meant for Oxford.