Dear Mr Groves,
Thank you for your email dated 4 October 2013 to the Prime Minister.I have been asked to reply as a member of the neighbourhood planning team.I can understand the disappointment of the residents of Bloxham regarding recent planning appeals in advance of the emerging neighbourhood and local plans. However, it is vital that local authorities have in place a plan that addresses housing needs for the area and are able to demonstrate a five-year housing land supply.Neighbourhood planning is a vital part of the Government’s reforms to help communities play a much stronger role in shaping their areas.Neighbourhood plans can allocate sites for housing and therefore help local authorities achieve their five-year land supply.

I welcome the hard work that residents of Bloxham have put into producing their neighbourhood plan and would encourage the community to continue their efforts to shape development in the area.
Kind regards,
Billy Roden
Decentralisation and Neighbourhood Planning Team SW1E 5DU

Dear Mr Roden
I am replying to you in a personal capacity rather than as Neighbourhood Plan Coordinator.
We know you are just doing a job – but your email was pretty much exactly what we expected for a reply.Although we already understood it, thank you for mentioning the requirement for a Local Plan and a five-year housing land supply. As that is something over which the village of Bloxham had no local control, being punished for it remains a bit hard to swallow.And, in case you doubt we see the bigger picture, we see it all too well. We know the country needs houses and we’ve seen almost 30% growth in Bloxham in the last 5 years. If people now call for a period of consolidation whilst the infra-structure catches up with previous developments that’s not nimby: that’s rational.
We are the ones who experience electricity cuts at 6x the average rate. We are the village that already has inadequate water pressure and so many cuts in supply that Thames Water refuse to reveal the data to us. We are the village that’s badly flooded twice in recent years with no alleviation measures. We are the village in which the inspector’s report misleadingly states Oxfordshire Highways have a solution to major traffic problems when clearly no such solution exists. We are the village where we are told we are sustainable because we have a primary school – despite the fact it is full and will be able to accommodate almost none of the children from 160 new dwellings and which Oxfordshire CC confirm they will be unable to expand. No – not nimby – just rational!

Persuading residents to continue with a Neighbourhood Plan will be an uphill struggle when central bureaucrats have already imposed ten times as many dwellings as any thoughtful Local Plan would ever pile on top of recent expansion – ruining forever the ‘sense of place’ that is Bloxham no matter what plans we may subsequently formulate?

Most people I’ve spoken to are even more angry about the charade of Localism than about the housing itself. If unwritten government policy is one of central diktat then please can you save us all a lot of time and just implement it without the absurd fairy-tale of a localism agenda when it’s obvious this is deliberately scheduled to leave villages floundering helplessly against the developer onslaught? We fully expect yet another estate soon to be nodded through, irrespective of the above genuine sustainability issues, to complete a developer one-year hat-trick and push our recent growth up to 40%. As NP coordinator I’m increasingly asked, “What will be left to decide? It’s all been decided for us!”

I do not expect a reply to this as I’m sure you must be very busy following your instructions to write similar emails to villages up and down the country that are also being ruined in perpetuity. I have little doubt that the recent article in the Sunday Times about rapacious developers concreting over the countryside is just the start of a growing campaign in the shires that may yet see Messrs Cameron, Pickles and Boles rue the day they decided that total disdain for good people trying to do the right thing was an acceptable price to pay for anticipated electoral advantage. They could turn out to be oh so wrong about that!
Regards
John Groves
Bloxham