Oxford East Conservative Association (OECA) is calling for Oxford City Council to recognise the need for new infrastructure to be included in plans for a new estate on Grenoble Road. The proposal, submitted to South Oxfordshire District Council last week, would see 3,500 homes built on the site. While recognising the urgent need to address Oxford’s housing crisis, OECA believes that any proposal must ensure that the surrounding infrastructure is able to cope with the increase in population and through traffic.
OECA Deputy Chairman Daniel Stafford, a Littlemore resident, said: “We must engage constructively with this process. My wife and I are recent first time buyers, and know that we were very fortunate to be able to buy in the city. Many hard working residents are not so fortunate, and have been forced to move not through choice, but because there simply isn’t enough housing stock. While it is clear we need more homes, it is also clear that we cannot simply build the homes and forget about the impact of those homes.
Littlemore and Sandford are wonderful areas of Oxford, but the area is already coming under pressure with quiet residential streets seeing more and more traffic. It’s time for the City Council to demonstrate mature leadership and ensure that any development on the Grenoble site takes into account what it would mean to have more cars, more buses, and more deliveries to south east Oxford. The existing roads and services would be overwhelmed, so doing nothing is not an option.
It is utterly hypocritical for the City Council to quite literally bulldoze their own proposals through with scant regard for residents’ concerns, when several private development projects are blocked for not including social housing. We do of course need more housing of all kinds, but this ideological and prejudiced blocking is only pricing more and more hardworking families out of Oxford by artificially suppressing the housing market. They have forfeited any right to push the blame on to others for the mess they have presided over.”