Save Grandpont Nature Park
Stop the Oxpens River Bridge
Success so far - but we still need your support!
We are now well over halfway towards the £32,000 in legal fees we need to raise by February 4th!
Our application for a judicial review of Oxford City Council’s decision to grant itself planning permission for the Oxpens River Bridge was successful! The High Court ruled that all five of our grounds for a legal challenge had merit and were worthy of a hearing. That hearing has been set for 4th-5th February 2025.
If any one of our grounds are upheld, planning permission will be declared unlawful and struck down.
We are incredibly grateful for the £18,000 you have helped us to raise to get us this far. We are over halfway to our target - but we still need another £14,000 to finish the job!
These are our grounds for the legal challenge:
The officers’ report presented to the planning review committee falsely claimed that the site for the bridge was ‘located in an Area of Change,’ and councillors were repeatedly told that a bridge "in this location" had been mandated by the Local Plan. Areas of change are areas designated for development within the Local Plan Policies Map (see second map below!). But Grandpont Nature Park, where the bridge is scheduled to land, and where the most destruction will occur, is in fact designated as ‘Green infrastructure’ scheduled for protection in the Local Plan, and not as an ‘Area of Change’ at all. This had a materially misleading impact on the committee members, helping to create a false narrative that the bridge’s landing in the Nature Park had been mandated by the Local Plan.
Committee members were wrongly told by officers that they were not allowed to question the Council’s opinion that an Environmental Impact Assessment was not required by the bridge, even if they believed it was wrong. If this were true, Councillors would be obliged to grant planning permission even where they knew or suspected that doing so would be unlawful. Clearly this is a nonsense.
The Council’s opinion that an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was not required was wrong. Wherever one development is “an integral part of a wider development,” that whole wider development must be ‘screened’ for EIA. In reality, the Oxpens River Bridge and its pathworks form part of the new connection from Osney Mead across the river specified by the Local Plan. Yet the most problematic part of that new connection - from Grandpont Nature Park to Osney Mead, which will require significant natural destruction and loss of large mature trees - was left out of the planning application and not considered in the screening decision.
The Council failed to follow due process by a) allowing a Councillor who had approved key decisions on the bridge as a Cabinet member to then sit on the planning review committee judging the application and b) falsely telling committee members that they were not allowed to meet with local residents concerned about the development.
The Council failed to inform the committee about an official report into refurbishing the existing bridge as an alternative to a new one. The report concluded that the refurb could be done for under half a million pounds (compared to over £10million for the new bridge), the only drawback being that it would “not deliver a new bridge structure in the visible landscape of the new Oxpens development.”
Please give what you can.
TOGETHER WE CAN STOP THIS!
Oxfordshire County Council: Stop the abuse of public housing money! Pull the funding for the bridge!!
Demonstration outside County Hall
Tuesday 21st January 1.30pm - 2pm
As overseers of the Growth Deal, the County Council have both the power and the moral duty to claw back the £8.8million funding provided from that fund to the Oxpens River Bridge. The Growth Deal is intended, not to augment private developments of Oxford University, but for projects that facilitate affordable housing. We demand the County reallocate the bridge money to projects that actually do this - before it’s too late!
Path of the proposed bridge. Note that the new 4.5m cycle track is proposed to run along the TOP of the woodland, not along the route of the current footpath, taking out almost the entire woodland on the left hand side of the existing path (as you walk from Grandpont towards Osney Mead). The large landing point will also take out a large chunk of the woodland on the right hand side (larger than the area felled already).
Just a reminder - the plans for Oxpens River Bridge, if enacted, would largely destroy the only woodland on the main path through Grandpont Nature Park (at the northwest corner, just before the path joins the towpath under the railway bridge). The little hill will also be flattened, to make way for a 4.5m cycleway feeding into the bridge and its huge landing point. The existing path will be destroyed, with the new cycleway built at a higher level through what is currently the woodland. The £10.3million cost of the project is to be funded from the Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal and the Housing Infrastructure Fund, both of which are funds which are supposed to facilitate housing and make homes more affordable. Yet the proposed bridge will do neither. At the planning review committee, council officers were at pains to declare the bridge as “standalone” and “not required” by the new Enterprise Park planned for Osney Mead. And yet funding was procured solely on the basis that the bridge would “unlock” that development (which contains plans for 247 new homes, all reserved for graduate students). And even if the bridge really did unlock the Enterprise Park, the net effect would be to make housing less affordable citywide, as it intends to employ 4000 workers, and only provide accommodation for 600 of them, exacerbating the housing crisis!
In reality, this is a huge public subsidy to augment a private commerical development of Oxford University.
The plan, in other words, is a monstrous abuse of both public funds and of a much-loved natural haven in the centre of Oxford
What would be lost ...
Woodland marked for destruction by the bridge.
