Jock's Oxford Manifesto: 2. The Challenges facing Oxford

Jock — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:05:54 +0000

Some of what makes Oxford a fantastic place also puts intense pressures on those who live in and use the city. We are rightly precious of both our built and natural environment and heritage. The City Council's current local plan, the document that sets out policies about how they expect Oxford to develop in land use terms, neatly encapsulates some of these pressures:

We have about 145,000 residents, of which nearly 30,000 are students - and therefore not always "permanent" residents, and usually not paying council taxes, though of course of crucial importance to the local economy and cultural vibrancy of the city.
Of the approximately 100,000 jobs in the city, around half are filled by people commuting from outside the city, putting intense pressures on our transport infrastructure, which are extremely difficult to accommodate given the historic urban design nature of the city centre.
We have about 5 million tourist visitors a year, also adding to pressures on transport and accommodation.
We are an attractive area of more affluent workers deciding to live outside of London and commute.

It is also clear that living in the city is disadvantageous to health, educational and economic achievement (of the long term resident population - often masked by the fact that we have the highest level of degree level qualifications in the South East), and wealth:

Health - Oxford has several areas in the lowest twenty per cent of England and Wales for "good health"
Educational achievement - again we have several areas, predominantly in the east of the city, in the lowest twenty per cent of pupils achieving 5 A* to C grades at GCSE
Crime - again predominantly in the centre and east of the city we have several areas with crime rates in the highest twenty per cent of the country and nearly all of the city has higher than average crime for the whole country.
Housing - the lack of affordable housing in Oxford means that we are amongst the worst places in the country for people to be able to get the housing they need at a price they can afford. On this map you need to look at the equivalent urban areas - blue means access to housing is most difficult and it's no surprise that in rural areas where few houses are developed or already exist there are more problems affording them, but look at Oxford compared with Banbury, Bicester, Witney and so on. Oxford is nearly all blue (unaffordable).

Putting all these together, this map shows that Oxford has some significant pockets of deprivation amongst the worst in the country. These areas can become a focus for anti-social behaviour on the part of the few that disproportionately affects the quality of life for the many.

These pressures feed through into pressures on city governance and directly affect all of us through our taxes and quality of life. For example:

The cost of homelessness amounts to around £4.5 million to the council and double that to all public revenue sources such as central government funded Housing Benefit. That's fully half of the council tax collected.
The need for people to commute, many of whom can only afford housing in the expanding towns beyond the green belt, causes traffic difficulties in our historic city centre and the radial feeder roads through our suburban centres.
The city has an ageing housing stock, increasingly environmentally inefficient, in both the private sector and the council owned housing, its inner suburbs were built before the prevalence of private motor vehicles and the infrastructure of its outer suburbs is crumbling, and much of the inner suburbs local populations are displaced when family homes are converted to student lets.
We have a cornucopia of facilities, for sport, leisure and the arts, but they are often in the control of and designed for the universities' and their students use. Whilst the city council owns and operates several major sporting and leisure facilities, lack of investment means they cannot compete with more modern private facilities and do not maintain the cross section of users to pay for them properly - the leisure centres run at a £3million loss on a turnover of just over £7million.
In business, local businesses are often squeezed out by high and increasing commercial rents, especially in the city and district centres, whilst because of the housing pressures others find it difficult to recruit and retain employees.
In governance, whilst the city is asset rich, amongst the highest in the country, it is cash poor, and what cash is generated will, if things carry on as at present, be required just to bring council houses up to the minimum "Decent Home" standards.

We need to find innovative ways around central government restrictions to free up assets to be used for the benefit of all the people of Oxford. I hope to set out in the remainder of this manifesto some of these ideas to see us into the twenty-first century as a city in which all get an equitable share of the many benefits of being part of this vibrant, diverse, innovative and world leading city.

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Jock's Oxford Manifesto: 2. The Challenges facing Oxford