Is Thame in danger of becoming ‘another Bicester’?

THAME Town Councillors have criticised a proposal to, as one councillor put it, ‘dump’ an additional 565 new homes on Thame.

The new figures feature in a draft of South Oxfordshire District Council’s Local Plan 2032, due to go out for consultation next month. The district council has identified a supply of 12,300 dwellings already in the pipeline to the year 2032, from a calculated total need of 19,500 homes, leaving a shortfall of 7,200. These, SODC propoposes, should be distributed as follows:

Thame 565
Wallingford 400
Larger villages 1,690
Smaller villages 760
Major strategic housing allocation 3,500
Brownfield – OBU Wheatley 300
Brownfield – Culham 500

Cllr David Dodds described the draft report as ‘very disappointing’ and criticised the district council for not deducting ‘windfall’ sites from Thame’s proposed extra allocation – 400 homes that have already gone successfully through the planning process. Instead, SODC have included Thame’s windfall sites in the district’s over-all, total windfall numbers.

“We do not want Thame to become another Bicester,” he added. Cllr Helena Fickling suggested that perhaps Thame Town Council would be better encouraging the building of a completely new town nearer the area where thousands of new jobs are to be provided, at the Science Vale Oxford.

Cllr Mike Dyer told fellow councillors at Tuesday’s meeting of the Thame Neighbourhood Continuity Committee: “This is just the first skirmish.”

Reporting to fellow committee members on a recent meeting with Thame’s MP John Howell, Cllr Dyer said that John Howell had agreed that windfalls should be ‘bottom sliced’ (counted locally). Cllr Dyer added that although the MP has said that he supported the view that owners of Neighbourhood Plans should be able to appeal against planning decisions contrary to their Neighbourhood Plans, Mr Howell had in fact voted against a House of Lords’ Amendment to the Housing and Planning Bill, which included proposals to allow councils local discretion over Starter Homes requirements – and to introduce a neighbourhood right of appeal.

In a passionate outburst against the ‘continous amendments’ to ‘so-called localism’, new planning laws meted out by government and changes in housing numbers, Cllr Peter Lambert said: “It feels as though the goal-posts are being moved wider and wider apart! How are local councils supposed to cope?”

NOTE: The complete SODC report can be read HERE