Local Plan Sites in OX3

The new Local Plan for Oxford City covering the period 2016 – 2036 has reached the stage called the Submission Draft. This means that the City has consulted on its preferred policy options (this all happened last year) and has now decided on the policies it wants to put forward to the Planning Inspector for approval.

The Submission Draft is open for public consultation until 28 December. The way into all the documentation is the City’s Local Plan web page. There you can download the complete Submission Draft together with as many of the literally dozens of supporting documents as you feel you can handle!

It’s important to realise that at this stage the only comments that will be accepted as valid relate to the ‘soundness’ of the plan. I have cribbed (with permission) this explanation from the Oxford Civic Society’s article on the subject:

For example, it wouldn’t help just to say that you disagree with the policy on car-free developments because your elderly relative wouldn’t be able to visit you if you lived in one. You would need to look at the evidence behind the Council’s decision to adopt the policy and argue that the evidence was flawed, incomplete, or failed in some other way to justify the policy.

Last year’s Preferred Options stage listed dozens of sites for which the council was considering writing policies covering potential development. This list has now become fixed (subject to the Planning Inspector’s approval).

Within the OX3 area there are 20 such sites and two ‘Areas of Change’. I have extracted the relevant parts of the Submission Draft – a preamble and a policy statement for each site – and put them in one complete 18Mb document which you can download here. These sites are:

SP 17 Government Buildings and Harcourt House, Marston Road
SP 18 Headington Hill Hall and Clive Booth Student Village
SP 19 Land surrounding St Clement’s Church
SP 20 Churchill Hospital site
SP 21 Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre
SP 22 Old Road Campus
SP 23 Warneford Hospital
SP 24 Marston Paddock
SP 26 Hill View Farm
SP 27 Land West of Mill Lane
SP 28 Park Farm
SP 42 John Radcliffe Hospital site
SP 48 Nielsen, London Road
SP 51 Oxford Brookes University Marston Road Campus
SP 54 No. 1 Pullens Lane
SP 56 Ruskin College Campus, Dunstan Road
SP 57 Ruskin Field
SP 58 Slade House
SP 62 Valentia Road site
SP 65 Bayards Hill Primary School Part Playing Fields

The two Areas of Change are:

Marston Road Area of Change
Old Road Campus Area of Change

There are links in the downloadable document which take you straight to the relevant sections, and an interactive map covering the whole of Oxford on which the OX3 sites also link to the relevant parts of the text. I hope you find it useful.