'Taller buildings are coming to Oxford'

Council officers are working on ways of allowing taller buildings on the outskirts of Oxford.

The long-running question over how buildings can be taller while protecting the historic views of the centre of the city was debated at Oxford Social on October 17 when David Butler, head of planning and regulatory services at Oxford City Council (pictured seated to the right facing delegates) answered questions.

In a session moderated by UK Property Forums consultant Hugh Blaza, Mr Butler said: “It is the development of those long views, sitting behind the spires is the thing that we end up in a bit of contest with, with developers.

“So we are beginning to carefully release some of that tight regime that we had on that, understanding that we’ve got the statutory and moral duty to hand the city on better, if possible, than we found it ourselves, whilst also allowing the growth we want to see happen.”

He said some bespoke work had gone on with Historic England and Homes England.

He went on: “We are looking at ‘what does more height look like in this space?’ where we can hopefully get our heritage colleagues into a space where they might be able to find lower levels of less than substantial harm to the conservation area, so it’s a really difficult place.

“We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water but we do accept that more height is coming and it’s how we find the right places for that. What we don’t want is a big doughnut of height all around the city, we’ve got to balance those things off.

“What has fundamentally changed over the last five years is the size of the floorplates that are needed in terms of the R&D space coming forward.”

Oxford’s Local Plan was recently rejected by the Planning Inspectorate over the lack of consultation with South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse district councils and Mr Butler said, without those councils taking more homes, the city’s acute affordability issue will increase.

He said: “What will happen is we just won’t have enough homes. The employment growth in Oxford will continue because it’s on already allocated employment land. We will work with people and obviously won’t be refusing things so we will be creating more and more jobs and there simply won’t be the homes being built for them.”

Mr Butler said the council hopes the NPPF revisions will give it powers to increase the number of homes neighbouring authorities have to take to meet the city’s unmet need. Otherwise he predicted serious effects.

He added: “It will force house prices up further, increase the homelessness issue – all the bad things that we need to deal with, so we will be making representations saying ‘there’s not enough growth, clearly we have an unmet need, clearly we are not meeting it, we need to put more homes into our system’. We will see how that goes.”

Earlier, Brendan Hattam, centre director for Westgate Oxford & Castle Quarter, explained the Westgate’s success and answered questions.

He said a retail destination now has to be more than a shopping centre. The Westgate, he said, is normally trading 18 hours a day and has a 24-hour gym.

Addressing the issue of the effect of Oxford’s radical transport measures on the centre, Mr Hattam revealed statistics of customer travelling patterns.

He said: “Only 29 per cent of our visitors come in by car, which is incredibly low for a city centre shopping centre, it’s normally around 75 per cent. It’s about 90 – 95 per cent in out of town shopping centres so 29 per cent is very small. It shows you how we have had to adapt to the traffic situation in Oxford.”

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