Sibford Ferris Parish Council – Extraordinary Meeting

The main purpose of this meeting is to consider the Parish Council’s response to Cherwell District Council’s public Options Consultation on proposals to meet the provision of a 5-year supply of sites to relieve housing pressure on Oxford. Two sites have been identified in Sibford Ferris: Land West of Hook Norton Road, 9.05 ha, and Land at Folly Farm, 22 ha (click on the links for details of the submissions). For more details, please see CDC’s Summary leaflet; all the relevant documents are available on the CDC website. They are also available to view in Banbury public library or on application to the Parish Clerk (788 557).

You may find it helpful to read the note (below the Agenda) by the Chair of the Parish Council.

The meeting will also consider two tree-felling planning applications for which consultation ends before the parish council’s next scheduled meeting. As always, all residents are very welcome to attend.

Agenda

1. Apologies
2. Declarations of Interest
3. Planning applications:
   • 16/00356 TCA T1 x Silver Birch – Remove – 3 Folly Court, Sibford Ferris. To be discussed and comments agreed.
   • 16/00361 TCA T1 x Lawson – Fell to ground – 2 Mannings Close, Sibford Ferris. To be discussed and comments agreed.
4. Cherwell District Council Consultations
   • Cherwell Local Plan Part 1 Partial Review Consultation. To be discussed and consultation responses agreed.
   • Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) Consultation Consultation. To be discussed and responses agreed.
   • Developer Contributions Supplementary Planning Document (SPD). To be discussed and responses agreed.
5. Any Other Business

A note on the local impact of the CDC LP1 Partial Review

In essence, the CDC Local Plan Part 1 Partial Review is about identifying development sites in Cherwell District that will each accommodate at least 100 houses to contribute to a total of 4400 houses to help the city of Oxford meet its housing needs up to 2031.

Two local sites are included in the evaluation, one of 6HA on Hook Norton Road that includes the land we have been considering for affordable housing, and a second of 22HA surrounding Folly Farm. The owners submitted the Hook Norton Road site specifically for the Partial Review. The same owners submitted the Folly Farm site for consideration in Cherwell’s Local Plan Part 2, but Cherwell have also included it in the LP1 Partial Review.

The sites chosen as suitable for development towards Oxford’s housing needs will be identified in the Submission Document to be published for public consultation in May or June. So far, Cherwell have not published evaluations of all (about 200) sites individually, but it seems to me unlikely that the Sibford sites will be identified as suitable, for the following two reasons:

1. CDC initially evaluated 9 “Areas of Search”, labelled A to I. Areas A to H are smallish areas around Kidlington, Bicester, etc. Sibford falls into Area I “Remainder of District / Rural Dispersal”. This area did not come out as very suitable in the initial evaluation, for reasons of infrastructure availability, limitations of the rural road network, rural character, lack of an immediate relationship to Oxford and impact on the countryside.
2. Following the Area evaluation, the Review focused on the 38 sites in Areas A (Kidlington) and B (North and East of Kidlington) for individual site assessment. This focus seems to me to be ruling out sites in the other Areas for serious consideration.

However, I think it is important that the Parish Council forms a view on the suitability of the local sites and submits this to the consultation. If you have any comments on my note above, please get in touch, or come to the meeting on 5 January. You can, of course, also submit your own response to CDC (before 9 January), using the Representation Form provided on their website.

Tim Huckvale
Chair, Sibford Ferris Parish Council
tel: 780 491
email: chairofsfpc@thesibfords.org.uk