Bicester Development: A Green Perspective

Bicester is currently undergoing the building of new developments including housing. Additional housing is something the Greens campaign for to address the national housing crisis. However new local housing developments are often built in the interests of those that can afford expensive luxury homes and not local people, particularly the young, who want to live close to where they have lived all their lives.

New developments in Bicester increasingly make you feel that the town is being formed, not in the interests of local people, but the interests of those purely seeking to profit from new developments. The voice of Bicester residents needs to be heard loud and clear in decision making at all-levels of Government, particularly by the town and district councillors that are tasked with representing them.

Decisions taken by the district council recently seem to have been decided by party politics rather than what makes the greatest positive difference to local people’s lives.

Take free parking for instance, what we saw in Bicester over the festive season was a notable increase in cars using Council run car parks leading to more people walking through the Town centre. It’s disappointing that a recent motion at a Cherwell District Council meeting, proposed by Labour, which called for a pilot free parking scheme on Thursdays in February was turned down by the Council. This motion appears to have been defeated purely because it was proposed by Labour and not because there were any faults with the proposed scheme.  

Currently when many people come to Bicester town centre they will park in Sainsbury's car park because it’s free and they can get all their shopping in Sainsbury’s. The issue with this is that, whilst many people will still just want to visit a supermarket, people won’t be encouraged to visit local shops which need supporting. Spending money locally builds wealth for the local community instead of leaking out to the global economy. As local businesses spend your money they will be far more likely to invest it in local people than a large corporation. The upshot is that free parking in council run car parks can only be a good thing as it will lead to increases in footfall for local businesses and a far greater overall return for the community compared with minimal takings from parking charges.   

As previously mentioned, housing is a critical issue in the planning of Bicester's future. In this area the Conservative ‘right to buy’ policy is a fundamentally flawed idea as it reduces social housing stock without any focus on replacing it. The focus of housing policy should be placed on finding people without a home somewhere to live. If the focus is placed too heavily on ownership you get the bizarre situation that we find ourselves in with councils having to buy back social housing that they have sold to top-up their social housing stock for rent.

Instead of selling off social housing and leaving it up to private developers to build more affordable housing the Government need to be stepping in to build far more genuinely affordable homes.

This is an issue that the Government need to be challenged on and whilst Labour can see some of the problems with current policy, they aren't prepared to challenge it fully by saying “there is nothing wrong with the right to buy concept”. On an issue as vital as this for working people, can we really afford to have an opposition that will stand for a failed policy?

Robert Nixon

Vice Chair, North Oxfordshire Green Party