THE huge number of primary school places left empty across Oxfordshire this year, as revealed today, highlights one of the biggest elephants in the room in our county: our falling birth rate.

For years, the Government has pushed on our county an agenda of growth, which includes a special £250m ‘growth deal’ in exchange for our councils allowing 100,000 new homes to be built across Oxfordshire over 30 years.

The Government says that it lets our local councils plan how much housing they will need in their ‘Local Plans’ – but the councils are forced to use a tool called the Strategic Housing Market Assessment, or SHMA, to work out how many new homes will need to be built.

This calculator takes into account all sorts of factors including birth rate and average migration in and out of the area, but crucially it also takes into account the amount of new homes that would be needed if all of the jobs planned for the area were created and filled.

In our county that’s a heck of a lot of jobs, and a heck of a lot of homes.

This is because the Government is backing the creation of thousands of new jobs in our area to create what it sees as the Silicon Valley of the UK: a whole belt of innovation across the South East from Oxford to Cambridge, full of high-tech companies like those we are proud to have at Harwell, Milton Park and Culham.

The 100,000 new homes being built across Oxfordshire aren't for 'us': they are for the workers the Government hopes to bring to the county to work at all these new labs to make the UK at the cutting-edge of technology industries.

Meanwhile, the number of babies that each family who actually live in the county is having is falling every year, and now we are seeing one of the results of that: thousands of school places left empty, with warnings of the dire effects this could have for pupils at those schools.

Where is the strategic planning for this problem?

Answers on a postcard.