CAMPAIGNERS fighting city council plans for new homes on green field sites around Oxford have been branded as rich NIMBYs by housing supporters who are are encouraging others to say ‘Yes In My Back Yard’.

Oxford City Council is planning to build at least 29 houses on land in Iffley Village, 12 of which will be social housing. The move is prompted by an acute lack of affordable housing within the city which the council claims means key workers are having to move away.

The city was this month named the second least affordable in the country, after Winchester, and is dealing with a housing crisis, with 2,850 families on the list for council housing.

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The Iffley development plans have been opposed by campaign group Friends of the Field Iffley which argues the development would destroy a nature corridor.

Other Iffley villagers, however, have now come forward in support of the plans, stating that the leafy community, just two miles from the city centre, needs to be more ‘diverse’ and accessible.

Marianne Puxley, who has been a resident in Iffley for the past four years, said the campaign to save the field had “characterised Iffley residents as NIMBYs [Not in My Back Yard objectors] and millionaires”.

She said: “It’s not a medieval village any more. The church is beautiful, but it seems very hypocritical of people like me living in a house built in 1978 and not letting anyone else live here.”

She said places like Iffley Village should help meet the housing needs of those living across the city.

She added: “Building on the horse field, providing it’s done aesthetically and as environmentally friendly as possible, could be an asset to the village. Iffley could do with being more diverse than it is at the moment.”

Iffley householder Chris Rust is also keen to see more affordable housing in the area.

He said: “There is a burning need for housing in Oxford; that is self-evident.

“We know that Oxford is the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house and I do not think that Iffley should escape responsibility for dealing with that shortage.

“It’s not a good look to say that other places can have these houses but not us.”

He added that it was a good thing that the council bought the land, rather than a commercial developer, believing the authority would try to make the homes ‘as green as possible’.

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Alan Whitaker, who has lived in the village for 26 years and works in the village shop, said that in all the years he has lived in the area, there had never been public access to the field.

He said: “It is not a field accessible to the general public. It is not as if it’s a cherished community resource that people are enjoying. A few privileged people are allowed to graze their horses there but apart from that no one gets to use it.

“There is a huge amount of unmet demand for housing, and if you keep pushing affordable housing further and further out of the city, you are

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forcing people into making longer journeys into the city, which they are probably going to make by car.

“If you are in Iffley you can take a 10-minute bus to the centre.”

Mr Whitaker stressed that from his experience of working in the shop, it is not correct to say that everybody in the village is against the development.

He added: “I have no reason to believe the houses will change the village, but communities change – they do develop.”

The council’s homebuilding subsidiary, Oxford City Housing Ltd (OHCL), hopes to submit a planning application for the development by the end of the year.

Lorna Froud, who has lived in the area for 35 years, said she supported the development and hoped the village could come together to make the development a ‘positive one’.

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She said: “We have so many people on the housing list in Oxford, and I don’t think Iffley should be immune from helping with that.

“Everybody living here is fairly well off and privileged and I’m a bit embarrassed that as an area of Oxford we are coming out what really will be small development of affordable and social housing.”

Despite some villagers’ support of development, there is huge opposition to several housing developments being built on greenfield sites across the county.

This week the first set of groundworks began for the Oxford North development, near the Wolvercote roundabout.

The site will see 480 homes – with at least 35 per cent ‘affordable’ – being built on a greenfield site.

Read here: Council spends millions to purchase green fields for 'affordable homes'

Bruce Ross-Smith is a member of pressure group Planning Oxfordshire’s Environment and Transport Sustainably (POETS) and is ‘opposed’ to the Iffley Village development.

He said: “I’ve been campaigning for years against developments on green sites, both in the city and on green fields.

“It is not to say no housing can be planned – but not in the density proposed, it’s what the city council calls an urban extension.

“Brownfield sites are not being used for housing, but for commercial and educational developments.

“Green sites could be spared with more planning.”

David Young, another member of POETS said: “Most of the spaces being built on in Oxfordshire at the moment are either being built on green spaces or green belt.

“The field in Iffley is an important valued local open space, and you can understand why people locally and across Oxford don’t want it built on.”