Cherwell Heights Housing Action Group

History

In spite of 10,000 objections to the first public consultation and over 15,000 to the second, the council presses on with the plan with no real changes for Banbury. These objections to the plan have already delayed it for nearly 18 and the delays are growing. This shows that your opinions make a difference.
The council has to report every objection that you make to the public inquiry and explain why they do not agree with you. When the council officers have finally worked out their replies , they will have to be approved by a series of committee meetings that you are entitled to attend. Each of these meetings is an opportunity for your local councillor to vote against the plan in your name.
The meetings have been postponed many times, now they are suspended because of legal advice. If the council goes on with the plan, it will go to a public inquiry. Watch this site for dates and times. If you have objected to the plan and don?t like the reply, your objection will be reported to the Inspector at the inquiry and you are entitled to be there. The inspector's report is due late in 2004 and the Council's responses to it early in 2005. After that, the plan would be implemented if the inspector has recommended it, but he could throw it out and there are plenty of reasons for him to do so.

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How to fight the plans

If, like us, you think that this plan is bad for Bodicote, bad for Bankside and bad for the whole of Banbury, there is a number of things you can do:

1. Come to one of our informal meetings, the next one is on 20 August at Bodicote House at 19:00
2. Join us. You don't have to be a genius. We are a bunch of ordinary folk trying to stop a stupid plan. If you can't come to meetings, that's ok. We have friends that never come to meetings but support us in other ways. E-mail or telephone us anyway.
3. Other things you can do include:
   • Telephone your local councillors and say what you think.
   • Write to them and copy you letters to the local press.
   • Write to the press letter columns with your views.
   • Join us at council committee meetings
   • Record your support on this web site.
   • Show our yellow poster in your house or car window.
   • Tell us how you would defeat the plan, we can't think of everything.

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What's wrong with the way the site was chosen?

The process used to select this site is designed for making sure that a site is properly managed when it is the only available site, not for making a scientifically measured comparison between competing sites. The only site comparison the council made was not based on measurable criteria but looked at a few items that were just a matter of opinion. No one compared how many cross-town journeys would have to be made from the various sites available, or how much pollution would be created by each option. The council does not know what the effect would be on traffic, pollution, the environment or flooding, they have not asked those questions. They argue that this is the only site big enough to extract enough money from the developers for what they call infrastructure. They ignore the fact that, even if it were true when the plan was first prepared, it is not true now because the government has changed the rules.

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What's wrong with putting houses on Bankside /Bodicote?

The plan puts about 1,000 homes on a Greenfield site of high-grade agricultural land, on the wrong site of the town for jobs, motorway access and schools, in the middle of Bodicote village boundaries. We are not saying that there should be no new houses, only that to put them all on this site is to put all the problems in one place, making them worse in the process. The council doesn't know what the effects will be on the town, they have not asked. We think that having all the houses on this one site concentrates all the traffic in one area and will create rat-runs through the village and down Bankside. A thousand homes is about 2,000 cars, 2,000 adults and the same number of children to go to school, mainly across town. Think about it! Bodicote village, a Domesday village would change more in months than it has in the last 850 years, and the council thinks that Bodicote residents on the east of Oxford Road could want to stop being Bodicote residents. The delights of Canal Lane would become a passageway through a housing estate. The views over the Cherwell Valley would be spoilt for travellers on the Oxford Road, in the valley and on the far slopes. There are plenty of other problems.

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