Oxford City Council - Core Strategy 2026 - adopted 14 March 2011
Inspectors from the Planning Inspectorate conducted an Examination of the Core Strategy
in July-September 2009 and September 2010.
Oxford Core Strategy Hearings 2026 - Hearings July 2009
(for information on events in 2010 and 2011, click here)
Core Documents Index
'The Examination Library', the page giving direct links to the main documents referred to during the Examination (update 17th September 2010), is no longer available via Oxford City Council's website.
Inspectors from the Planning Inspectorate conducted an Examination of the Core Strategy
in July-September 2009 and September 2010.
Oxford Core Strategy Hearings 2026 - Hearings July 2009
(for information on events in 2010 and 2011, click here)
Core Documents Index
'The Examination Library', the page giving direct links to the main documents referred to during the Examination (update 17th September 2010), is no longer available via Oxford City Council's website.
The Core Strategy Hearings gave all sides an opportunity to put their case to the Inspector. No decisions were made during the course of these hearings. The first stage started on 14 July 2009 and had finished by the end of the month. Fuelled by excellent chocolate-chip cookies kindly provided by the City Council, representatives of local groups and members of the public made lively contributions, all of which were given a full hearing by the extremely patient Inspector, Mr David Fenton MSc DipTP MRTPI, whom little appeared to faze, except a lack of page numbering, which seemed to him 'a local disease'.
Due to criticism from the Planning Inspectorate, an earlier version of the Core Strategy (submitted by the City Council in November 2008) had to be revised (consultation on the Proposed Changes closed on 15 May 2009) and an amended version was produced for Examination.
The following notes made by Marilyn Cox are just a brief indication of some of the matters discussed during certain sessions.
For Climate Change and the Natural & Built Environment - click here
Matter 5 – Housing (Note 7 only – Student Accommodation Wed, 22 July 2009)
Following the Core Strategy Pre-Hearing, at which the Inspector invited additional comments, several residents' associations in Headington and St Clements submitted a joint statement relating to the development of Oxford Brookes University - click here.
Subsequently representations were made at the Oxford Core Strategy Hearings on behalf of Coordinating Committee of Headington Residents Associations, New Marston Residents’ Association and St Clements Residents’ Association, expressing the widespread concern regarding the continuing expansion of Oxford Brookes University.
During this session, a point raised for discussion by the Inspector in response to the many complaints he had received regarding the effects of a growing student population on the Headington area was whether the Core Strategy should include a policy to control student numbers in view of competing demands on land and the effects of the concentration of students in the community. Should there be an embargo on further growth?
Mr Colin George, representing Oxford University, said that in the academic year 2006-2007 they had 3,221 full-time students who were not living in university-provided accommodation.
During the same period, Oxford Brookes had 3,425 students in private rented accommodation. In addition to this, there are about 6,000 to 10,000 students attending other colleges and language schools in the city, who require accommodation.
Dr Susan Mallett, a resident of New Marston (South), felt that due to a lack of external auditing the figures supplied for Oxford Brookes were unreliable and the Core Strategy consequently unsound in this respect. However, Mr Rex Knight (Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Registrar, Oxford Brookes) was confident that the figures the university had provided were correct and that there had been ‘no obfuscation’.
[See articles relating to a subsequent investigation into student numbers, which appeared in The Oxford Mail on 7 October 2011 and 19 October 2011]
Brookes stated that it envisaged a growth in student numbers of between 1 and 2% per year up to 2026, while the representative for Oxford University, Mr Colin George, said that for the same period Oxford University's target was zero overall growth, with slighter fewer undergraduates. Laurence Reynolds for New Marston (South) Residents' Association challenged the idea of ‘natural growth’ and asked why it should be deemed inevitable that student numbers should rise. Professor Kerry Patterson, representing Headington and St Clements Residents’ Associations, said that in order to have a sustainable community what was needed was not more halls of residents to cater for an increasing number of students but a decrease in student numbers. Ten years ago Brookes and the community had lived more or less in harmony; it was the significant rise in student numbers that had brought problems in Headington, which was also under pressure from extensive development of the hospitals and medical research establishments.
Mr Reynolds asked what, exactly, was justified on the basis of the South East Plan as regards the expansion of the universities – certainly not indefinite growth overall but something that would be compatible with the ‘support of sustainable economic development in the South East region’.
Mr Knight explained that the ‘drivers’ were the conditions imposed by central government, which not only wanted more school-leavers to go to university but had reduced funding per student, so Brookes had to take on more students to keep its finances healthy.
He also said that if the university declined to take on additional students from the NHS, it risked having its contract with the NHS withdrawn.
City Councillor Nuala Young (St Clement’s) also challenged the assumption of continual growth, referring, amongst other things, to problems with maintaining businesses in the Cowley Road during the long vacations, when such a large proportion of them were now dependent on the student community. Like the representatives of Friends of Warneford Meadow and the Council to Protect Rural England, she was concerned also about the threat to green space in Headington from the continued expansion of the institutions.
City Councillor Elise Benjamin (Iffley Fields) said that there was insufficient land available in Oxford to accommodate two universities and that the number of students in rented accommodation was actually higher than what had been quoted, as it did not include part-time students, some of whom moved to live in Oxford for the duration of their course, or those whose homes were in Oxford but chose not to live at home, although they used their home address for the purpose of communications with the university. Mr Knight (Oxford Brookes) said that of the large number of part-time students in the university’s School of Health & Social Care, many were local students updating their skills.
Mr Mark Jaggard (Spatial and Economies Development, Oxford City Council) highlighted the importance of both universities for education, employment and a source of knowledge/expertise for spin-off companies.
Mr John Ashton (West Waddy, for Oxford Brookes,) said that CS26 gave no indication where new student accommodation could be built in the future and that Brookes needed reassurance that land would be available, hence the suggestion that land within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane campus should be designated for this purpose. The Inspector said that in an ideal world all students would live within easy walking distance of the campus, but ‘we don’t have an ideal world’. Would it, he asked, be a problem for students to live a bit further out? Mr Knight said that market research conducted on behalf of Brookes had indicated that students considered proximity to the campus particularly important when choosing accommodation and that units further away from the campus had proved harder (though, he admitted, not substantially harder) to fill. As students were becoming more demanding in their requirements, the university was concerned that the percentage of ‘voids’ in more distant accommodation would rise.
Mr Jaggard (City Council) felt that the determining factor should be what out of the Hospitals, Medical Research establishments and Brookes actually needed to be in the Headington area. The City Council was against giving Brookes priority for any sites that became available. He said that there were good bus connections and a cycle route from Cowley Road to Headington and that once the number of students in a given area had reached a ‘critical mass’, students did not feel that living a bit further away from the campus was a disadvantage as regards their social life. He said that designating land within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane Campus for student accommodation would increase the concentration of student accommodation, which was exactly what residents were complaining about.
Mr Ashton (West Waddy, for Oxford Brookes) replied that although admittedly some of the medical research work needed to be located near the hospitals, other aspects of it could be sited further away, and that the Local Plan stated that the hospitals should not be able to take over all the available land. The Core Strategy now gives priority to the hospitals/medical research and Brookes wants this changed back to what it was before, so that use of the land can be determined at the time of a planning application and ‘residents can have their say’.
Professor Patterson said that Headington residents were likely to prefer available land to go to medical research, rather than to Brookes.
The Inspector asked whether the Core Strategy could do more to attempt to alleviate the problems associated with students, for example, as regards policing and refuse collection, rather than concentrating on land use. Mr Jaggard replied that Oxford Brookes did have arrangements for communicating with residents. Mr Tony Joyce (Chairman, Coordinating Committee of Headington Residents' Associations) said that Brookes and the residents had tried hard to reach agreement on the various points of concern but problems were exacerbated by the high concentration of students in the area. Could Mr Fenton, he asked, suggest any solutions? The Inspector said that he would consider the matter carefully and make any suggestions in his report.
The representative of the Friends of Warneford Meadow said that it was slightly disingenuous of Brookes to say that their development aims would not result in a loss of green space, as the amount of new student accommodation they wished to build within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane campus could not be achieved without such a loss. Mr Ashton (for Oxford Brookes) said that the Warneford Playing Fields [this is a different area from Warneford Meadow] would be developed anyway, whether or not it was Brookes who acquired that land.
As regards the Pullens Lane allotments, Mr Jaggard said the SCHLAA* had emphasised the importance of allotments and that he could not foresee a time when these allotments would become available for development.
*SHLAA = Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment: explains how local authorities and their partners must carry out an assessment of land availability for housing, over a 15-year period, in their areas as outlined in Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing (PPS3).
In response to criticism from Dr Mallett that Brookes was operating more like a property development business than a university, Mr Rex Knight said that the university had been obliged to sell off, for example, part of the Milham Ford site for housing development in order to fund refurbishment of the former school buildings. Furthermore, in doing so, it had contributed to the provision of housing, including affordable housing. Pollock Hall had been too small to retain and renovation of the other accommodation disposed of would not have been a viable option, given the higher standard expected by students today. Dr Mallett referred to policy ED.5 / ED.6 of the current Local Plan, which prevented student accommodation that had been sold being converted into another type of accommodation. She felt that Brookes should be prevented from selling its existing halls of residence only to build alternative student accommodation elsewhere.
Mr Tony Joyce pointed out that about half of the 11 houses that Brookes had put on the market had been bought as buy-to-let properties.
Mrs R Harris and her representative from the John Phillips Planning Consultancy, argued that the two universities should not be given preferential treatment and that, for example, Ruskin College should be able to convert properties to provide accommodation for its students. (Mrs Harris owns a 17-bedroom former nursing home, which she would like to convert to accommodation for students attending the language schools, etc.) Mr Jaggard replied that a serious issue of lack of delivery relating to the Core Strategy’s commitment to providing accommodation for students of the two universities could ensue, if language schools and other private colleges were treated in the same way as the universities. Furthermore, such a change in policy would encourage other language schools to come to Oxford, thereby exacerbating the shortage of student accommodation.
Marston Court
Marston Court, the residential home for the elderly at the corner of Harberton Mead and Marston Road, is identified in SHLAA1 as a potential site for 23 units of accommodation. This was suggested by Oxfordshire County Council as the owner of the property, although the facility is run by The Orders of St John Care Trust.
Mr Laurence Reynolds, representing New Marston (South) Residents' Association, objected that there was no policy preventing the loss of this specialist accommodation and that this should be addressed by item CS24 of the Core Strategy, Mix of housing types and sizes. The inclusion of such a policy, he argued, would be consistent with the observation on demographic trends in paragraph 34 of the Balance of Dwellings SPD, namely that:
‘The largest [percentage] rises are forecast in the middle to older groups […] the 60-84 group by 30%. The oldest age group (85 and over) will increase by some 44%. There is a clear shift towards the middle to older age groups’.
Ms Laura Goddard, one of Oxford City Council’s Principal Planners, disagreed, saying that Oxford’s population was actually getting younger. ‘Perhaps’, quipped the Inspector, ‘because its elderly have nowhere to go’. Mr Jaggard said work on assisted-living retirement accommodation was being done in conjunction with McCarthy & Stone and that many elderly people, in North Oxford for example, preferred to stay in their own home with the help of adaptations to their accommodation and provision of care services. Mr Joyce said that any loss of accommodation for the elderly needed to be made up within the same area and currently protection of accommodation for the elderly was insufficient.
New Marston (South) Residents' Association also pointed out that the identification of Marston Court as a potential site for new housing was premature in advance of the review of Adult Social Care that the County Council was due to conduct in Autumn 2009. One of the issues to be reviewed was the balance between home and residential care
Due to criticism from the Planning Inspectorate, an earlier version of the Core Strategy (submitted by the City Council in November 2008) had to be revised (consultation on the Proposed Changes closed on 15 May 2009) and an amended version was produced for Examination.
The following notes made by Marilyn Cox are just a brief indication of some of the matters discussed during certain sessions.
For Climate Change and the Natural & Built Environment - click here
Matter 5 – Housing (Note 7 only – Student Accommodation Wed, 22 July 2009)
Following the Core Strategy Pre-Hearing, at which the Inspector invited additional comments, several residents' associations in Headington and St Clements submitted a joint statement relating to the development of Oxford Brookes University - click here.
Subsequently representations were made at the Oxford Core Strategy Hearings on behalf of Coordinating Committee of Headington Residents Associations, New Marston Residents’ Association and St Clements Residents’ Association, expressing the widespread concern regarding the continuing expansion of Oxford Brookes University.
During this session, a point raised for discussion by the Inspector in response to the many complaints he had received regarding the effects of a growing student population on the Headington area was whether the Core Strategy should include a policy to control student numbers in view of competing demands on land and the effects of the concentration of students in the community. Should there be an embargo on further growth?
Mr Colin George, representing Oxford University, said that in the academic year 2006-2007 they had 3,221 full-time students who were not living in university-provided accommodation.
During the same period, Oxford Brookes had 3,425 students in private rented accommodation. In addition to this, there are about 6,000 to 10,000 students attending other colleges and language schools in the city, who require accommodation.
Dr Susan Mallett, a resident of New Marston (South), felt that due to a lack of external auditing the figures supplied for Oxford Brookes were unreliable and the Core Strategy consequently unsound in this respect. However, Mr Rex Knight (Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Registrar, Oxford Brookes) was confident that the figures the university had provided were correct and that there had been ‘no obfuscation’.
[See articles relating to a subsequent investigation into student numbers, which appeared in The Oxford Mail on 7 October 2011 and 19 October 2011]
Brookes stated that it envisaged a growth in student numbers of between 1 and 2% per year up to 2026, while the representative for Oxford University, Mr Colin George, said that for the same period Oxford University's target was zero overall growth, with slighter fewer undergraduates. Laurence Reynolds for New Marston (South) Residents' Association challenged the idea of ‘natural growth’ and asked why it should be deemed inevitable that student numbers should rise. Professor Kerry Patterson, representing Headington and St Clements Residents’ Associations, said that in order to have a sustainable community what was needed was not more halls of residents to cater for an increasing number of students but a decrease in student numbers. Ten years ago Brookes and the community had lived more or less in harmony; it was the significant rise in student numbers that had brought problems in Headington, which was also under pressure from extensive development of the hospitals and medical research establishments.
Mr Reynolds asked what, exactly, was justified on the basis of the South East Plan as regards the expansion of the universities – certainly not indefinite growth overall but something that would be compatible with the ‘support of sustainable economic development in the South East region’.
Mr Knight explained that the ‘drivers’ were the conditions imposed by central government, which not only wanted more school-leavers to go to university but had reduced funding per student, so Brookes had to take on more students to keep its finances healthy.
He also said that if the university declined to take on additional students from the NHS, it risked having its contract with the NHS withdrawn.
City Councillor Nuala Young (St Clement’s) also challenged the assumption of continual growth, referring, amongst other things, to problems with maintaining businesses in the Cowley Road during the long vacations, when such a large proportion of them were now dependent on the student community. Like the representatives of Friends of Warneford Meadow and the Council to Protect Rural England, she was concerned also about the threat to green space in Headington from the continued expansion of the institutions.
City Councillor Elise Benjamin (Iffley Fields) said that there was insufficient land available in Oxford to accommodate two universities and that the number of students in rented accommodation was actually higher than what had been quoted, as it did not include part-time students, some of whom moved to live in Oxford for the duration of their course, or those whose homes were in Oxford but chose not to live at home, although they used their home address for the purpose of communications with the university. Mr Knight (Oxford Brookes) said that of the large number of part-time students in the university’s School of Health & Social Care, many were local students updating their skills.
Mr Mark Jaggard (Spatial and Economies Development, Oxford City Council) highlighted the importance of both universities for education, employment and a source of knowledge/expertise for spin-off companies.
Mr John Ashton (West Waddy, for Oxford Brookes,) said that CS26 gave no indication where new student accommodation could be built in the future and that Brookes needed reassurance that land would be available, hence the suggestion that land within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane campus should be designated for this purpose. The Inspector said that in an ideal world all students would live within easy walking distance of the campus, but ‘we don’t have an ideal world’. Would it, he asked, be a problem for students to live a bit further out? Mr Knight said that market research conducted on behalf of Brookes had indicated that students considered proximity to the campus particularly important when choosing accommodation and that units further away from the campus had proved harder (though, he admitted, not substantially harder) to fill. As students were becoming more demanding in their requirements, the university was concerned that the percentage of ‘voids’ in more distant accommodation would rise.
Mr Jaggard (City Council) felt that the determining factor should be what out of the Hospitals, Medical Research establishments and Brookes actually needed to be in the Headington area. The City Council was against giving Brookes priority for any sites that became available. He said that there were good bus connections and a cycle route from Cowley Road to Headington and that once the number of students in a given area had reached a ‘critical mass’, students did not feel that living a bit further away from the campus was a disadvantage as regards their social life. He said that designating land within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane Campus for student accommodation would increase the concentration of student accommodation, which was exactly what residents were complaining about.
Mr Ashton (West Waddy, for Oxford Brookes) replied that although admittedly some of the medical research work needed to be located near the hospitals, other aspects of it could be sited further away, and that the Local Plan stated that the hospitals should not be able to take over all the available land. The Core Strategy now gives priority to the hospitals/medical research and Brookes wants this changed back to what it was before, so that use of the land can be determined at the time of a planning application and ‘residents can have their say’.
Professor Patterson said that Headington residents were likely to prefer available land to go to medical research, rather than to Brookes.
The Inspector asked whether the Core Strategy could do more to attempt to alleviate the problems associated with students, for example, as regards policing and refuse collection, rather than concentrating on land use. Mr Jaggard replied that Oxford Brookes did have arrangements for communicating with residents. Mr Tony Joyce (Chairman, Coordinating Committee of Headington Residents' Associations) said that Brookes and the residents had tried hard to reach agreement on the various points of concern but problems were exacerbated by the high concentration of students in the area. Could Mr Fenton, he asked, suggest any solutions? The Inspector said that he would consider the matter carefully and make any suggestions in his report.
The representative of the Friends of Warneford Meadow said that it was slightly disingenuous of Brookes to say that their development aims would not result in a loss of green space, as the amount of new student accommodation they wished to build within a 1.25 km radius of the Gipsy Lane campus could not be achieved without such a loss. Mr Ashton (for Oxford Brookes) said that the Warneford Playing Fields [this is a different area from Warneford Meadow] would be developed anyway, whether or not it was Brookes who acquired that land.
As regards the Pullens Lane allotments, Mr Jaggard said the SCHLAA* had emphasised the importance of allotments and that he could not foresee a time when these allotments would become available for development.
*SHLAA = Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment: explains how local authorities and their partners must carry out an assessment of land availability for housing, over a 15-year period, in their areas as outlined in Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing (PPS3).
In response to criticism from Dr Mallett that Brookes was operating more like a property development business than a university, Mr Rex Knight said that the university had been obliged to sell off, for example, part of the Milham Ford site for housing development in order to fund refurbishment of the former school buildings. Furthermore, in doing so, it had contributed to the provision of housing, including affordable housing. Pollock Hall had been too small to retain and renovation of the other accommodation disposed of would not have been a viable option, given the higher standard expected by students today. Dr Mallett referred to policy ED.5 / ED.6 of the current Local Plan, which prevented student accommodation that had been sold being converted into another type of accommodation. She felt that Brookes should be prevented from selling its existing halls of residence only to build alternative student accommodation elsewhere.
Mr Tony Joyce pointed out that about half of the 11 houses that Brookes had put on the market had been bought as buy-to-let properties.
Mrs R Harris and her representative from the John Phillips Planning Consultancy, argued that the two universities should not be given preferential treatment and that, for example, Ruskin College should be able to convert properties to provide accommodation for its students. (Mrs Harris owns a 17-bedroom former nursing home, which she would like to convert to accommodation for students attending the language schools, etc.) Mr Jaggard replied that a serious issue of lack of delivery relating to the Core Strategy’s commitment to providing accommodation for students of the two universities could ensue, if language schools and other private colleges were treated in the same way as the universities. Furthermore, such a change in policy would encourage other language schools to come to Oxford, thereby exacerbating the shortage of student accommodation.
Marston Court
Marston Court, the residential home for the elderly at the corner of Harberton Mead and Marston Road, is identified in SHLAA1 as a potential site for 23 units of accommodation. This was suggested by Oxfordshire County Council as the owner of the property, although the facility is run by The Orders of St John Care Trust.
Mr Laurence Reynolds, representing New Marston (South) Residents' Association, objected that there was no policy preventing the loss of this specialist accommodation and that this should be addressed by item CS24 of the Core Strategy, Mix of housing types and sizes. The inclusion of such a policy, he argued, would be consistent with the observation on demographic trends in paragraph 34 of the Balance of Dwellings SPD, namely that:
‘The largest [percentage] rises are forecast in the middle to older groups […] the 60-84 group by 30%. The oldest age group (85 and over) will increase by some 44%. There is a clear shift towards the middle to older age groups’.
Ms Laura Goddard, one of Oxford City Council’s Principal Planners, disagreed, saying that Oxford’s population was actually getting younger. ‘Perhaps’, quipped the Inspector, ‘because its elderly have nowhere to go’. Mr Jaggard said work on assisted-living retirement accommodation was being done in conjunction with McCarthy & Stone and that many elderly people, in North Oxford for example, preferred to stay in their own home with the help of adaptations to their accommodation and provision of care services. Mr Joyce said that any loss of accommodation for the elderly needed to be made up within the same area and currently protection of accommodation for the elderly was insufficient.
New Marston (South) Residents' Association also pointed out that the identification of Marston Court as a potential site for new housing was premature in advance of the review of Adult Social Care that the County Council was due to conduct in Autumn 2009. One of the issues to be reviewed was the balance between home and residential care