Report
Executive Summary
As Witney has expanded over the last 40 or 50 years, elements of the road infrastructure have been gradually added, funded by the developers of major housing schemes. The final parts of the perimeter road system around the town that remain to be constructed are the West End Link, the Northern Distributor Road, and the west-facing slip roads on and off the A40 at Shores Green. In the Local Plan 2031, Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) recognised that congestion and air pollution in the Bridge Street area of Witney will be made worse by the additional traffic that will be generated by housing developments in the Strategic Development Areas (SDAs) at North Witney and East Witney. To mitigate this problem, the Local Plan requires the completion of Witney’s perimeter roads and specifies that this infrastructure improvement must be funded by developers.
This is the background to consideration of current proposals for the housing development in North Witney. Residents in the area are concerned that the developer will limit the scale of infrastructure elements of their proposed scheme and that consequently the community in Witney and the surrounding district will suffer. To address these concerns, Windrush Infrastructure Neighbourhood Group (WING) has been established. WING has representatives from ten local councils that contain and surround North Witney SDA. We believe that we can collate local opinion to find the ‘best fit’ that meets the expectations of our community. WING is therefore able to make a strong case that, if North Witney housing goes ahead, the associated infrastructure improvements are well thought out and fully delivered.
A range of stakeholders and decision makers have responsibility for managing Witney’s infrastructure. This includes OCC, West Oxfordshire District Council (WODC), Witney Town Council (WTC), and the Environment Agency (EA), together with any developers. No single body has overall control, so the challenge is to ensure that all infrastructure improvements contribute to a coordinated solution. Undoing or reworking the contribution of any stakeholder must be avoided.
To achieve this, WING has set out four main challenges. These are to ensure:
- Construction of the West End Link (WEL)
- Construction of Northern Distributor Road (NDR)
- Flood Prevention Measures through the Windrush Valley
- Community infrastructure as part of the North Witney housing scheme
Flood prevention has been included because WING considers the history of flooding in Witney is evidence of an infrastructure problem. It was not a requirement of the OCC Local Plan to tackle this issue, but we believe there is an opportunity to reduce flood risk by constructing the WEL as an embankment/dam that can retain water in the flood plain above Witney. WING’s position is that the North Witney developer must contribute to this approach.
On 9th April 2024 WING submitted an initial objection to North Witney Land Consortium’s application for outline planning permission for a residential-led mixed-use development in North Witney SDA (WODC Planning reference 24/00482/OUT). We consider this application fails to make adequate provision for our challenges and we gave an undertaking to provide substantiation and explanation of our case. This report has been written primarily to satisfy this undertaking.
We also intend to use the report for consultation with the ten local councils who support the WING initiative. We will obtain feedback and written confirmation of the opinions from these parish and town councils that will be included in the next version of the report that is issued. WING will use this as a mandate to consult and liaise with the stakeholders to influence decisions that are reached in the best interests of the wider community around Witney.