Housing – or rather lack of it – was a hot topic at Estates Gazette’s first Oxford City Talks event, which led to a heated debate at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.
Research by Centre for Cities published earlier this year revealed that Oxford was in the top three (with Cambridge and London) for house prices, and was in the bottom three for housing delivery.
One of the 110 guests, a disgruntled developer, placed the blame on the local authority. He said: “The only way we will get what we need in Oxford is with a change in the city council. We suffer from a council that is negative and anti-developer, and as a result there are many sites within the city boundary that are not developed because the city council is too greedy or too difficult to grant planning permission.”
He added: “At the same time the city council wants 50% social housing. If it wants 50% so badly, why does it not get off its backside and build some council houses? The problem we have is a very negative and unconstructive city council.”
As the packed room fell silent, Patsy Dell, head of planning and regulatory at Oxford City Council and one of the event’s four panellists, defended the council’s position and stressed that developers bringing forward only small development sites was exacerbating the city’s housing woes. She added: “We are now really being constrained by the government in our ability to deliver housing. We are willing and ready and have the money to build social housing, but it is not sensible for councils to do it anymore.”
Dell said the council was pro-development, but that it has “many issues to deal with and we have the 50% requirement because of the acute affordable housing needs in this city”, which it cannot address on its own. She called for the development and property industries to work together with the local authority to make a change.
A fellow panellist, Carter Jonas’s head of planning and development James Bainbridge, suggested that strategic planning issues might be one of the reasons that housing allocations had been slow to be brought forward. He said: “The city is not delivering the housing required and is heavily constrained by the green belt boundary. Things have improved since the NPPF came out but we are in a situation where pretty much every plan is under review. We have to get the planning situation right.”
Dell was quick to reply. “You cannot just blame the planning system,” she said. “It is really disappointing that small phases of 20-30 homes by housebuilders won’t address the problem of housing in this country – but unfortunately that’s the main model of housing delivery. You can say the planning system needs to improve and we accept that, but so can the industry bringing forward housing supply.”
Whatever the reasons for the housing shortage Oxford is currently the least affordable city in the UK based on average house price and average earnings, with property values surging by £41,000 in the 12 months to May 2015. As many people are being priced out of the housing market and cannot afford to live centrally, this is having a direct impact on business decisions.
With the completion of the 800,000 sq ft extended Westgate shopping centre just 15 months away, panellist Ailish Christian-West, Land Securities head of portfolio, shopping centres, said it will be a challenge to fill the 3,000 job vacancies.
She added: “It is an additional factor when we talk to retailers or potential occupiers when they are deciding to come to Oxford or not because they know this will be a challenge. They are concerned that they won’t be able to fill those jobs from people from the local area.”
Land Securities and Westgate’s occupiers must now extend their search area to a 30-mile radius of the city for suitable employees.
But simply looking further afield for workers unable to live in Oxford won’t necessarily be an answer if the infrastructure is not sufficient for them to commute in. Both the city and the surrounding county have suffered from long-term underinvestment in infrastructure and, as a result, traffic in the city regularly comes to a standstill.
Oxford successfully won £118m of City Deal funding to help with transport projects such as the Milton Interchange, the Southern Approaches and London Road upgrades, pointed out panellist Ian Hudspeth, leader of Oxfordshire County Council. Work still needs to be done on the A34 and the A40, which Hudspeth described as “the foot on the windpipe of business in West Oxfordshire”.
Where the cash for this work will come from is unclear. Although Oxford is predicted to have the third highest GVA growth in the UK between 2015 and 2025 – behind London and Cambridge – it, like other local authorities, faces cutbacks from central government financing.
Hudspeth concluded: “Funding will be replaced with an increase in business rates, so we need economic growth to drive these and still provide the services we need.”
Oxford Shard
Could Estates Gazette’s City Talks event have found an answer to the acute shortage of modern office space in Oxford’s city centre? In the middle of a discussion on the topic James Bainbridge, head of planning & development at Carter Jonas, asked the key question: “Are we going to be allowed to build up?” This prompted fellow panellist Oxfordshire County Council leader Ian Hudspeth to wonder out loud whether the city might be able to create a B1 version of its dreaming spires. “We should be looking at increasing the height of buildings in the city centre to provide more office space. We need to lift the cap,” he said.
Hudspeth’s apparent willingness to build upwards was particularly welcomed by developer Ailish Christian-West from Land Securities, a company that has form developing tall buildings, most notably 20 Fenchurch Street, EC3. “And yes it did fry a car,” she told the audience, “but we have learnt a lot from developing that building.”
Oxford City Council’s Dell said: “We need to work this out and test it within the local plan. There has to be places within the city of Oxford where you can build taller.”
More workers would be a good thing for the new Westgate shopping mall’s footfall, said Christian-West. “When Westgate opens we hope this will demonstrate that you can have appropriate and sympathetic development in an historic city centre environment.”
Asked by chair EG’s Stacey Meadwell if she would like to see an Oxford Shard with views across the city, Christian-West said: “It is good to see people here are open to examining all of the options.”
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