The draft local plan, written in 2013, is having to be revamped to include 7,430 more houses in the Vale area. The Vale of White Horse District Council had an exhibition in the Abingdon Guildhall to start the consultation on these additional proposals. Unfortunately there was some mix up and the Vale planning department had to use the Cloakroom for the exhibition.
The Vale and South Oxfordshire area is predicted to have lots of new jobs and so more houses will be needed.
80% of the houses could go in the South East Vale area: that is Harwell, Milton Heights, and the outskirts of Didcot. 8% could be built in Abingdon.
410 of those could be in North Abingdon.
A further 200 could be in North West Abingdon. This housing would be so close to the A34 they will need noise mitigation measures.
There followed a public meeting. Unfortunately the Roysse Room, was over capacity, and so people had to be turned away. I could not get in so will be interested in comments about the meeting.
There is more information about this consultation at VWHDC Local Plan Part One. You can provide your comments on the updated proposals there until 4pm on 4 April 2014.
I couldn’t get in either – given that they are proposing somewhere around 2000 additional houses in the area around Abingdon I find it hard to believe they thought the Roysse Room would be big enough!
Having said that, there are some complex and important issues at stake here so i hope everyone will take time to look at the (quite readable) information on the vale website and submit their comments….
Surely, one day mass house building will have to stop … there’ll be no more land left!! Standing room only! Either that or the peasants will revolt……..
Keep adding rubbish to a bin and one day it will overflow and cause a stink.
i’m pretty sure that Britain as a whole is actually only around 10% built on despite what scaremongers say.
unless you plan a cull of the population/enforced chastity belts/a ban on anything bar 50 storey tower blocks from now on then houses will continue to be built.
Well that 10% must in Abingdon then 😉
Many thousands of new houses are being built all over the country. Apparently because of mass immigration the UK will need 6 new towns the size of Birmingham. Where are all these predicted new jobs coming from? In Devon they are building large housing estates miles from any centers of employment. The deserted new housing estates in Ireland come to mind. Mass housing destroys communities to say nothing of the traffic problems, if, as has been the case, providing new infrastructure has been ignored.
As Alastair says it would be good to hear from some of the lucky 90 who did get in to the meeting – the proposals are all available on the Vale website, but the questions and answers would have been interesting.
PS I see the exhibition will be in Abingdon (Bury Street) again on Sat 22 and I imagine there will be people there to explain it…
I do not have the figures in front of me, but I think the greatest driver for demand for housing is not immigration but family breakdown and longer life expectancy. With just on 120,000 divorces a year, there is increased demand for housing stock, and also increased under-occupancy, as you find more individuals living in larger houses “for when the children come to stay”. A lot of children I know have two bedrooms – one at mum’s and one at dad’s. Also longer life expectancy prevents housing coming on to the market.
As I said – I do not have all the figures in front of me, but both these factors are also driving the demand for housing.
There are some more answers here with pictures of the madness
http://www.abingdon-first.btck.co.uk/LatestNews
As davidofluton saya there are a number of different reasons for the growth in both the population and the number of households.
The biggest driver in Oxfordshire is employment growth, with significant increases in employment planned at Milton Park, Culham, Harwell, as well as at several sites around Oxford.
In the County Council budget debate the Lib Dem group proposed that a full junction at Lodge Hill and the reopening of Grove station should be added to the County Council’s list of capital projects. In response the Conservative Leader of the Council, Ian Hudspeth, specifically opposed Lodge Hill on the grounds that there was no significant house building proposed for North Abingdon!
Personally I can’t see how the local road infrastructure will cope with the amount of development proposed and we need to press for investment in our local roads as well as investment in local rail routes, tying in with the City Deal proposals to improve transport links to the major science and research sites.
I wonder what the ‘contributions’ to area school capacity will be exactly? Property developers must be loving the new spirit of planning openness.
Who are AbingdonFirst? Their website speaks a lot about the need for “openness” “transparency” and “accountability”, but they will only identify themselves as “a group of like-minded individuals.”
I am intrigued as to who they might be.
What’s “Abingdon First”?
It’s the group behind the website cited in post 8
The Planners need to require the Lodge Hill full interchange as a PRE-condition of any such development – not an add on later in the scheme. Without that, the area around Tescos will be gridlocked. I bet the “in-hope” pelican crossing will be overwhelmed and totally ineffective in promoting traffic flow !!
Expansion is probably inevitable. If the Abingdon Branch Line cannot be reinstated, it is time that plans were executed to increase the A34 to (at least) three lanes between Harwell and Bicester before it is renamed the Oxford Circulatory Carpark.
Well said David
Janet – there is somewhat of a pattern to your posts
Abingdon will just become a suburb of Oxford day I’m sure.
According to reliable statistics The latest Eurostat population figures show that there were 392,600 more people in Britain in 2012 compared to the previous year, putting the total population of the UK at 63,888,000.
More than a third of the increase, 38 per cent or 148,700 people, was accounted for by immigration with the rest accounted for by “natural change”, the fact that 243,900 more babies were born than people that died. Partially caused because of younger women coming into the country and having babies. We have to go by research and published statistics.
Spike S – I think it is unlikely that the Abingdon Branch line could be reinstated, primarily because large chunks of its route, including the station, have all been built on.
However what should be looked at is a significant increase in capacity of the rail service between Swindon and Oxford including the reopening of Grove station (which the current electrification programme is taking account of), the potential for a branch station at Milton Park and the proposal by the East-West rail consortium to upgrade Culham station to an Abingdon Parkway.
Between them these could provide for a very significant increase in rail capacity and ease the pressure on the road network as they would link up several of the major sites designated for employment and housing growth.
AbingdonFirst want a name for the room booking – so that they can have someone to blame, but don’t name themselves. That seems to me to be the vigilante mentality, which justifies itself along these lines:
We are right and we will find someone to carry the
can; we are doing this in the public interest.
But vigilantes always mask themselves from being held to account.
My name is Paul Sheppy.
AbingdonFirst, I challenge you to name yourselves openly.
You have good points to make; but if I were an elected councillor or a paid official, I would be unlikely to respond until you emerged from the anonymity of your brand name.
Neil, With all due respect, have you travelled to or from Culham at peak times recently? It can take 40 minutes to get from the Waggon & Horses/Sutton Courtenay turn into Abingdon in the evening! Likewise in the mornings, you also have the European School to contend with! I’m sure commuters wouldn’t want to spend almost the same time again as their train journey, sitting in their cars trying to complete the last mile of their commute? A far better idea would be to consider putting an actual Abingdon station somewhere off Audlett Drive, preferably on a branch line so that it’s closer, or worst case scenario on the existing line, with good access to the town via buses/cars. This would also alleviate a lot of the traffic problems.
There is only one solution – all together now…
monorail, monorail, monorail!
I wish there was a LIKE button as Facebook have, so we could ‘like’ someone’s comment 🙂
Like
Neil we could try Flattening Waitrose? 🙂
Julian – I’m certainly not suggesting it would work with the existing road network as it is. There are a number of options including a new station with a link to Audlett Drive, expanding at the current Culham site with a second river crossing linking up to east Abingdon, or expanding the station at Radley.
The suggestion of Culham comes from the longer term ideas put forward by the East-West Rail Consortium who, along with Chiltern trains but unlike FGW, do seem to want to see longer term development of the network. it also fits with the part of the City Deal around improving transport links with the science centres.
The least likely options are any that would mean a stub line coming into Abingdon – too much capital cost for too little long term return.
Some previous contributors are missing a very important point. Whether we like it or not, and it appears that many of us don’t, the Vale of White Horse District Council has to deliver 7430 additional houses between now and 2031. If the Vale don’t have a plan to do this, then it will be done willy-nilly by developers wherever they can get hold of land which does not have a flood risk. We have already had an example of that at Drayton Road.
This is national policy as there is a desperate shortage of housing, particularly in this area. That is why house prices are ridiculously high and young (and not so young) people cannot afford to buy or rent their own home. There are many reasons for this – people are living longer in better health and so are staying in their own homes, there is an increase in single-person households, people are moving from elsewhere in the country to work in the Vale and the Oxford area generally, and others are commuting to London where they work but cannot afford to live. As for blaming ‘the immigrants’ – we are all immigrants. I wonder how many people who have contributed to this thread were born in Abingdon and have lived there all their lives.
Yes, the proposals will result in major traffic problems and this must be addressed by the County and the Vale – it cannot be left to the developers to provide the funding. That’s the battle we should be fighting.
So being a native i can say what i like? In that case I’m blaming you immigrants. All you bloody scientists coming round here drinking our beer, taking our women and building your own housing estates! Now your taking over our town with a weekend long science festival. If you want to do that sort of thing go back to where you came from and do it! Bloody foreigners!
I was present at the Public Meeting. The repeated message was ‘there are no good options, only least bad’, and that a local plan must be ‘rushed through quickly to prevent more developments like Drayton Road.’ We will all have to live with the long term affects of this, is the ‘least bad quickly’ really the best approach?
Equally, when pressed regarding improved infrastructure the answer was, this will looked at only after a local plan has been adopted to what is required and what funding is available. My concern is that as moving a pedestrian crossing is the proposed traffic mitigation solution for Drayton Road development, will the results be of similar ilk.
Finally they also stated that a number of the proposed locations have been strategically selected to deliver 200 houses or more in locations that can deliver the new homes within the next 5 years because no additional infrastructure is needed, and building can commence as soon as the planning process is complete.
I believe our local infrastructure be it local roads,the A34, town centre, Schools, and leisure centre all appear to operating at capacity now, and that with the additional homes to Abingdon and the surrounding area a major investment would be needed. I just doubt that the funding will be available.
Max – I fully agree.
It is impossible to make a reasoned response to the consultation on housing development sites without knowing what infrastructure is proposed to go with them.