Save Grandpont Nature Park
Stop the Oxpens River Bridge
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Only £5000 more to raise!
Thank you for the more than £26,000 we have raised so far! We are now more than three-quarters of the way towards raising the almost £32,000 in legal fees we need for our judicial challenge - please help us get over the line!
Judicial Review update - appeal now lodged!
The case against Oxpens bridge, bought by almost 400 local residents, was heard in the High Court (planning division) on February 4th-5th. The barrister arguing the case, Peter Cruickshank (generously working pro-bono to keep costs down), argued that the granting of planning permission for the bridge was unlawful in five different ways (see below for details). The Council pulled out all the stops, hiring a top-dollar Kings’ Counsel barrister (Melryc Lewis) to put their case.
The judge appeared to accept the Council’s arguments for most of the grounds, but there were two points which neither he nor the Council appeared to be able to challenge: 1. That the claim that Grandpont Nature Park was in an ‘Area of Change,’ mandated for development by the local plan, was both false and misleading. This claim was made repeatedly by planning officers, both verbally and in official documents, and was never corrected. In fact, the GNP is listed in the local plan as ‘Green and Blue Infrastructure,’ to be protected against development; 2. That the ‘pathworks’ connecting Osney Mead, and the bridge itself, were always considered a single project (a new connection from Osney Mead across the river), and therefore the whole of this project should have been screened for an Environmental Impact Assessment (not just the bridge alone, especially as it is the pathworks that would do the most environmental damage). In fact, not only were the pathworks not screened, but the planning committee never even considered whether the connection as a whole should have been viewed as a single project.
The ruling, issued on 10th March, sadly dismissed the case. This was not entirely unexpected, given the Labour government’s much-trumpeted disapproval of such challenges; the courts’ general reluctance to overturn planning decisions; and their willingness to be ‘lenient’ in their ‘interpretation’ of officers’ advice.
However, the ruling did not address the two key points raised above, and therefore left the door open to an appeal. This appeal has now been lodged! Funds are still needed for legal fees, so please do consider donating if you possibly can. Over £26,000 has been raised already, but a further £5,000 is still needed to take it to the next stage! The good fight continues!
These were the original 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!
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.
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