Save Grandpont Nature Park
Stop the Oxpens River Bridge
Success so far - but we still need your support!
Thank you for the £24,000 we have raised so far! We are now more than three-quarters of the way towards raising the £32,000 in legal fees we need for our judicial challenge - please help us get over the line!
JUDICIAL REVIEW - report back! 14/2/25
Several of us attended the judicial review hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice last week. The hearing lasted a full two days - longer than the 1.5 days originally allocated. Our barrister Peter Cruickshank laid out our arguments against the lawfulness of the planning permission for the bridge and the judge asked thorough questions about each of our five grounds. To us, the judge seemed most convinced by Ground 3, specifically our claim that the pathworks which form part of the planning application cannot be seen as standalone from the pathworks project as a whole which was always envisaged to run from Osney Mead to the new bridge.
The pathworks in the planning application stop at the railway bridge between Osney Mead and Grandpont Nature Park, with the final leg of the pathworks excluded from both the application and the Environmental Impact Assessment screening process for the bridge development. This final phase, from the railway bridge to Osney Mead, will have serious environmental impacts, as it will cause flooding and significant habitat loss, and the Council’s plans have been rejected by the Environment Agency as a result. The fact that the Council have no solution for dealing with this last phase of the pathworks makes a mockery of the whole project, whose sole purpose in the local plan is to provide a new dry connection all the way from Osney Mead across the river.
A dramatic twist came on the morning of the second day of the hearing when we finally received a response to the Freedom of Information request we’d put to Homes England back in July 2024. Homes England had kicked the request into the long grass citing “commercial sensitivity,” but a critical front page article in the local press, along with a complaint to the Information Commissioner, appears to have forced their hand.
Homes England provided £1.5million for the pathworks part of the bridge development from their Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF). The FoI response showed that HIF money can only be provided to projects that are necessary for housing developments, and the Council’s application for these funds (included in the FOI response) insisted that the pathworks were essential for housing at Osney Mead to go ahead. This was because, the application explained, Osney Mead is on a flood plain and currently has no safe dry route out in times of flood.
The pathworks from Osney Mead to the new bridge were to provide this safe route, without which residential development could not proceed. This clearly demonstrated that the pathworks was a single project, which was itself necessary for the Osney Mead development to go ahead. The Environmental Impact Assessment screening assessment should have been carried out on the Osney Mead housing development as a whole, as well as the pathworks project in its entirety. Such a screening report would have had to conclude that a full EIA was necessary due to the significant environmental impacts of such a large project in such an environmentally sensitive location.
The judge overruled the objections from the Council’s legal team and allowed us to submit the FOI documents, along with written submissions explaining how it fitted into our case. The Council would then get a chance to make their own submissions in response. The final ruling will likely come sometime in March or April.
Our crowdfund remains open to fund the additional work now required - please give what you can!
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.
