The formal start of consultation for outline planning permission for up to 900 homes and 50 retirement homes north of Abingdon is underway. The plans can be found at this link or by searching P17/V0050/O on the Vale Planning Site – where comments can be made.
Start Consultation Period 13th January 2017
End Consultation Period 15th February 2017
Target Decision Date 2nd May 2017
According to the application form, the outline plans also include a local centre, a site for a primary school, a care home comprising 80 beds, children’s nursery, public house / restaurant, retail spaces, open space, and sports pitches (near Peachcroft Farm). There will be accoustic fencing for the A34 noise.
Access would be by 2 junctions onto Dunmore Road, and 2 onto Twelve Acre Drive. The approximate size of the site can be seen on the picture above. Detailed plans would be put forward in due course.
(There is another informal consultation process in progress, from another developer, for 200 additional homes on the circus field by the Wootton Road roundabout.)
I see in the press that money has been pledged to improve the A34 but no mention of money being set aside for the proposed slip road from North Abingdon onto the A34. The houses will be built and all the traffic that wishes to join the Southbound A34 will have to join the Abingdon Ring Road that causes traffic queues on the roundabout by the police station. This leads to a built up of traffic through the town along Ock Street and down the Drayton Road. More traffic build up folks. Also there is no additional doctors surgeries planned so the lists of the surgeries in town will be even more. It takes around 3 weeks to see ones own doctor at the Malthouse Surgery as it is.
Council needs to stop this before it goes any further, the justification for this build is based on the city council and the vales housing need projection, but this is/was based on a different scenario that now exists, I think the quota they were looking to accomplish was around 3/4000 houses? However, since this draft plan was introduced the MOD have announced the disposal of Dalton Barraks which apart from offering up acres of brown field housing land will also offer up around 300 surplus to requirement houses,
Even more relevant was the announcement this week of the city councils plan to build 3000 houses next to Greater Leys,
I would strongly urge everyone to protest most strongly that council puts this project on hold until at least we have a date from the MOD on the release of their site for building and the outcome of the city councils build?
I’m fully aware that councils judgement on such is influenced not by its constituence but more the attraction of increased revenue from an increase in the amount of properties paying council tax!
The VWHDC Local Plan was drawn up to show how they can meet the STATUTORY requirement to provide a certain number of houses per year up to 2031. In particular they had to be able to demonstrate that they had clear plans in place to deliver the numbers required over the next 5 years. Both the North Abingdon sites (and those at Kennington and Radley) were part of that plan. If the plan had not been put into place, the “free-for-all” which has existed for the last two years would have continued with landowners and developers getting together to build on every available field – look at the unhappiness in Drayton, Steventon, Marcham, Sutton Courtenay etc arising from this.
The “windfall” availability of the MOD land (and houses) may help meet the target for the latter part of the period, but not within the next 5 years.
The houses to meet Oxford’s excess need are, as I understand it, additional to the Local Plan figures so the Greater Leys plan won’t affect Abingdon’s current proposals.
Janet’s points about the A34 slips are spot-on. The consultation documents last autumn said that the 900-house proposal was contingent on them being in place – we need to keep pressing to find out what the situation is now. From memory I thought a surgery was included, but haven’t checked.
If only it was that cut and dry Hester, and the “plan”.has not stopped the free for all by speculative builders, the application for 100 houses on the old MG site is a classic example, Also worth investigating is the impact on the projected “need” numbers all the “one off” builds have made? Like 28 in the old lloyds building, 10 above Weatherspoons, 12 in Withyking, 25 at the bottom of the vineyard, the 25 or so still to be finished in the old gaol, the 12 in the Crosd Keys, plus all the garden builds, just look on the vales planning site and see how many one off small builds there are pending ?
Today we had a look at Morland Garden, rows of unsold houses!
This madness policy of build no matter what will inevitably lead to a collapse of the housing market !
I bet that, like in Didcot, the houses will be built before the primary school, putting even more pressure on existing schools.
Interesting to see from the Travel Plan that, for the new primary school, “it can be assumed that approximately 90 of the pupil places available will be filled by pupils living off-site”.
An already ever so slightly bonkers plan therefore appears to be designed to encourage even more cars to come in to the area every morning (Long Furlong Primary School is only a few hundred yards away and, from the number of cars arriving there every morning, already has plenty of pupils living out of catchment). Absolute genius.
I thought, because of all the racist, stupid, poor people, brexit is going to see …. I can’t remember, was it 50,000 (or 500k?) people in the South East losing their jobs and going ‘home to Europe’; so who exactly are all these houses for? Equally, in 2 years and 10 weeks time the bottom is going to fall out of the housing market….so which crazy developer is going to build houses during the biggest housing price crash that the nation will ever see?
None of these crazy plans ever take into account the pressure on the existing road systems round the town as Janet says.Good old Daniel is a bit of a cynic.Wonder if hes right.
Drowning the pitiful resources Abingdon has for example doctors surgeries , lack of town centre parking and poor road network ! Perhaps OCC leader Hudspeth can build them Bladon way or OCC transport minister Nimmo-smith Henley way !!! NOT a chance on there door steps !!! SHAMEFUL !! Also will they sell these houses makes you wonder ?
Can’t even mend the potholes in the roads so gawd knows what these 900 houses (that’s roughly 2 cars per house making it 1800 extra cars) will do to the roads. But of course – we won’t be driving will we as it’ll be quicker to walk.
Yep … doctors. Where will they register?
But hold on …… they’re including a pub and a restaurant in the plans …. because we’re in short supply. Open spaces too – how kind of them. If they didn’t build we’d have lots of lovely open space!!
Madness, sheer madness, to build more houses in an area where roads, surgeries, and hospitals, are already at their limits. This applies to the whole of the Oxford area, not only Abingdon.
There will of course be less need for hospitals in the distant future. Why? Because the present young generation will be dying in their 50s as a result of all the car exhaust pollution.
I really don’t know why its called a consultation.
We all know that since we were sold down the river with the ‘local plan’, that these houses were going to be built, and nothing was going to stop then.
This is just going thro the motions to pretend that any local views are taken into account,
RIP the green belt, and local democracy.
…will the new “local centre” have it’s own free wifi; or will it be piggy backing off of the other local centres’?
More houses more council tax but Oxfordshire budget keeps being reduced ! Does this mean reduced services like bin collections ? Road sweeping and litter picking ? Due to more housing areas to cover ? Makes you wonder !
Slightly off topic but I see the contractors have started on the recreation area putting fencing round the area and machinery on site.
Hester is correct about the south-facing slip roads at Lodge Hill being contingent with this development. The transport analysis included with the EIA for this project assumes these slip roads being in place by 2020! Anyone spotted a benevolent fairy surveying around Lodge Hill lately?