For the first time ever I think, I have managed to get a consultation document that has clearly been sent to all households in Oxford. Usually these affairs seem to be "all households except Jock's". Or perhaps it's just that as a "tied worker" it's usually my employer that gets to answer on my behalf. Anyway, aside from the fact that over a thousand of them have been delivered to a now empty hall of residence, as consultations go I quite like it. And its ten questions about how we want to see Oxford develop over the next twenty years was very apt for me on Friday.

I'd just come home from a "Question Time" style debate on Oxford, its future development and the pressures this puts on Oxfordshire as a whole and in particular its natural and rural hinterland, organized by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. For anyone not familiar with the situation, as in most of the south of England there is tremendous pressure for housing, in and particular affordable housing, and in Oxfordshire Labour, whose remaining strength is largely in the city, are promoting urban extensions as part of a "Central Oxfordshire Growth Area" while the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens are largely against the sort of large extensions envisaged.

For their part, Labour point to evidence based housing need far outstripping both actual supply of housing and the potential land availability for more in the city. They claim that only their proposals can relieve the plight of the many artisans and other workers needed by the city who cannot afford decent housing, and believe that extensions to Blackbird Leys and Kidlington will prove to be the most sustainable and be somewhere people will aspire to live and magically create new communities of 7,000 homes each.

And their former housing portfolio holder on the city council, Ed Turner, now group deputy leader and Malik hugger, was on the panel to defend their different viewpoint alongside Christine Drury, chair of CPRE South Eastern region, Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon whose constituency straddles the town and country divide, and environmentalist and author Paul Kingsworth.

Now, not wanting to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but having got involved in strategic housing policy when on the City Council, I've done a lot of research and reading around the subject and my biggest personal project is all about providing affordable housing in innovative ways. And my vision for Oxford belies any accusation of wanting our fabulous city to stagnate. But I fundamentally disagree with Labour's approach, and here's why:

1.The evidence they cite does not in fact make a case for planning new homes, but for better organising the existing housing stock the better to match market needs.

2. It perpetuates the idea that outward growth (sprawl) is the only answer to housing affordability problems.

3. Crucially, it effectively ignores the need of the existing housing stock for regeneration and renewal, which, as I argue, is urgent and growing.

4. Creating communities is difficult, expensive and time consuming, and Labour's proposals primarily tag their new housing onto existing areas of multiple deprivation that prove that very point.

5. The proposals are less sustainable than other alternatives and are not, as they claim, likely to lead to places where people aspire to live.

6. The proposals, frankly, pander to rent seeking by local landowners at the expense of good sense and investment in our urban core (how ironic that Labour should side with big landowners!).

So, first and most crucially, the evidence of need is being wrongly interpreted.

Ed Turner on Friday evening trotted out numbers from a Housing Needs Assessment report carried out by Fordham Research in 2003/4 for Oxford City Council. Strangely, an otherwise very good council website does not seem to have this report on public view, but they do regularly review the figures and publish an annual report on housing need. But I've read the Fordham report and whilst I fully acknowledge that it concludes that 1750 more affordable housing units are needed every year for the next decade to cope with the backlog and emerging demand, that does not in my opinion translate into a need to build net new housing units.

Fordham state that some 75% of those they included in this figure are already living in the city. Yes, they may be in difficult, sometimes horrendous, conditions - overcrowding or substandard housing - but the basic message is that they need more affordable housing, not just more housing. Despite what Kate Barker might have said (the self confessed economist with no experience of housing markets before she was commissioned by Gordon Brown to do a national review of housing supply), house prices are not simply determined by supply and demand, but by the ability to finance more and more debt. Increasing the overall stock of housing in Oxford is not simply about having to build twice as many as you want to be affordable under planning obligations - it will also increase demand.

14,000 new homes, as Labour propose, is the equivalent of a twenty five per cent increase in the city's population. Now, they may think that is desirable, but it is a political position, not an evidence based projection, and not something they have spelled out as starkly as that, nor have they a mandate for such dramatic change. When they talk of relieving the housing needs for the citizens that are here already, they do not explain that it's also provision for major growth in the overall population, somewhat against national trends. Indeed the last set of projections based on the 1991 census about the population expected at 2001 were significantly undershot and subsequently revised downwards. Though admittedly the reason for this could be that people simply cannot afford to move here to fill the essential jobs we need to fill.

Actually what they'll find, I'd suggest, is that new incomers to the city will continue to desire to live in the urban core by and large, close to employers and so on, and the people who will be driven out to the new estates will be the poorer households - further gentrifying the core and impoverishing the peripheral estates.

Secondly, sprawl is no long term answer.

In refusing to face up to the undoubted challenges, which should not be underestimated of course, of finding ways of fitting more households into the already built up area, and instead opting for urban extensions at the first sight of housing pressure, it is, whatever Labour claim, the thin end of the wedge. Their 14,000 homes, coupled with the difficulties of redesigning a Green Belt that took fifty years to put in place in the first place and is only a decade old in its final form, will not even meet the Fordham demand even if we accept the city's interpretation that it translates easily into a demand for net additional housing. For they'll only get 50% of them affordable, and with the Green Belt issues it will likely take at least a decade to get started.

So whilst putting their eggs into that longer term basket, they will continue to accumulate that 1750 annual demand and by the time the new estates are ready for occupation they will be a drop in the ocean of affordable housing need. Then what? Propose another extension? And another? It is quite disingenuous in fact for them to propose an extension that won't even meet their own claimed need as if it's a solution. They are building up expectations that that solution cannot meet.

Thirdly, by focussing on urban extensions, they will ignore the pressing needs of the existing housing stock and the opportunities redevelopment and renewal present for more sustainable living.

Already we know that 30% of Oxford's privately owned housing stock fails to meet the government's very minimal "decent homes" standards, as well as the same proportion of the social rented stock. Most failures are because they do not meet current standards for energy efficiency and thermal comfort. As I have blogged before, these standards themselves will be worth little if we are entering an age of greatly increased energy costs and even overall shortages. Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute's 40% House project reveals the extent of the problem according to one group of experts. Others go further and suggest that our housing stock in the future will have to operate on just 10% of its current energy use.

And for all the problems of overcrowding and affordability in this city, whilst we don't have many actual empty homes, you can bet that for every teenager having to share a box room with their opposite gender sibling there's an empty bedroom somewhere in the city because of underoccupancy in the older population and other factors. You see, all the urban capacity studies only focus on where land can be changed to housing use from another use. Brownfield sites are important, and Oxford is making the most of converting such sites (though not as much as Site Value Rating for local business tax would achieve of course) but they ignore the fact that all built land, including that occupied currently by existing housing, is in fact "brownfield" - one day, like the slums of St Ebbe's, it will become ripe for redevelopment.

And that day, if oil runs out, is coming quicker than ever. Of course here is one area where the city council could make a huge difference on its own. It owns some 8000 homes and the land on which they stand. They are in the middle of proving that densities can be increased without undue discomfort with projects such as the Rose Hill Orlits redevelopment where just over a hundred household units are being replaced with more than two hundred (though I'll bet any money you like that they will not meet the 40% House standards let alone the 10% energy footprint that we may require).

If and when these council estates sport better homes and more desirable places to live as a result the sort of far-sighted large scale redevelopment I propose than the privately owned suburbs, I'll bet the ball will start rolling on those private neighbourhoods coming together to secure their energy futures and sustainable living. Face it, we have a huge amount of inter-war semi-detached housing that will soon be unsustainable, and if not actually slum by the old definition of the word, then at least anti-social in the sense that they will be guzzling up more than their share of energy and land resources.

The city is in long term decline as far as its residential neighbourhoods go. You can't wander around for more than a few minutes to see the problems created by haphazard redevelopment, by the imposition of more cars crammed into residential streets, the lack of investment in infrastructure (check out the pavements in any part of the city). The pressures for more affordable housing, for living with climate change and/or dwindling fossil fuel reserves and for having generally nice places to live and play offer a great opportunity to get neighbourhoods, even private ones, redeveloped to everyone's benefit.

Fourthly, creating new communities is expensive, difficult and time consuming.

Most notably, the proposals to add 7,000 homes on the edge of Greater Leys, at the time the largest council estate in Europe I understand, are tagging more housing onto an area already plainly struggling to cope with its recent vast growth over the past couple of decades. Whilst much of the Northfield Brook ward is new or newish commuter housing, including the planners' holy grail of intermingling owner occupied and social rented housing, it is still amongst the most deprived areas of the country.

It is not the organic development of a community, but the dislocation of people from other areas to fill the (much needed) new housing that causes the problems. It is not a problem of people but of planning. Even somewhere like Bicester, a market town with all the facilities that self-sufficient settlements need, is struggling to cope with a similar amount of housing to what is proposed on the edge of an area with few facilities. And what facilities there are in Greater Leys are artificially subsidised in order to try to generate that elusive community feel.

Mgadalen College and the city's Labour party say that they plan to include such facilities in their new developments. But it's just not the same as reivigorating an existing community. Better by far to concentrate on areas that already have community. My proposals for redevelopment keep people in the communities in which they have heir roots whilst creating more space for new households to join those communities. If they focus on these peripheral extensions they will inevitably have to skimp on maintaining existing communities and they in turn will degenerate.

Fifthly, and related to the sprawl argument, Labour claim their proposals are more sustainable.

But this is only in relation to other proposals for housing further out into the county from which city workers will have to commute longer distances. Oxfordshire is a remarkably self-contained housing market. Most (95%) of its emerging households are self-generated - children wanting to leave the family home, pewople remaining single longer and so on. And most moves are within Oxfordshire. Promoting a single solution of urban extensions risks the destruction of rural communities. Village schools are dependent on young families with school aged children being able to afford to remain in the settlement they are rooted in. So whilst it might be more sustainable than building whole new super-settlements around the county towns of people predominantly dependent on Oxford itself for work, it is far less sustainable than ensuring our existing communities remain viable.

And the sustainable argument as I have already said, ignores the potential for increasing overall sustainability of the city by redeveloping existing communities in place.

And finally, we have the unholy alliance of Labour lobbying for the big landowners that surround the city.

We do not even know, for example, whether there are more suitable sites that other landowners may offer at a lower cost for development. If, and it is a big if, there is no alternative to building urban extensions, we should seek suppliers of land as we do suppliers of other goods and services - at best value. Lib Dem policy of "community land auctions" sounds interesting - where landowners seek to offer land free of planning consents to capture the hope values in their land, but the community captures the uplift in values arising from the actual planning consents and can use this money to provide infrastructure.

A Postscript on the CPRE.

I just want to say something about the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England who organized the debate that led to this essay. In my opinion they get a bad rap, especially over housing. They are seen by many as being made up of a hardcore of anti-development activists. I my experience, whilst there may be a few who are drawn to them because of that reputation, in fact they have a lot of constructive ideas of their own and are open to those of others. Already Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts has presented our ideas to their Oxfordshire executive committee and got, I think, a good reception for our vision of keeping rural communities sustainable.

Many of the issues aired on Friday were not about whether Oxford and Oxfordshire was full, but about how to address the obvious and pressing needs they too recognize as blighting the lives of many and putting the prosperity of the city and its hinterland and all its citizens at risk. They prompt us to look at alternatives to Labour's all to easy solutions of helter-skelter sprawling growth. Part of the attraction of Oxford is that it is compact. That will become even more important as fuel costs rise and working patterns and demographics change. There are better ways to achieve equity for all in meeting their housing needs, for anyone brave enough to promote them.

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