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Depending on what side of a fractious political divide in Oxfordshire you sit, news that the South East Regional Plan as amended by Whitehall will next week recommend a review of Oxford's Green Belt and the development of 20% more new housing over the next twenty years than proposed at Oxfordshire Structure Plan level will be seen as victory or worst case scenario.

Whilst some, such as City Council leader John Goddard quoted in the linked Oxford Mail article, point out that we are looking at developing just 1% of Oxford's Green Belt, the true story is that the total number of new housing units demanded of the county in the next twenty years is more than an entire new city the size of Oxford. The fact that it appears that most of the additional units recommended by Whitehall planners seem to be destined for edge of city development, the grandiosely termed "Central Oxfordshire Sub-region", suggests that the city itself will be required to grow by at least 20% in twenty years. A handful of land owners will each trouser nine figure windfalls for their land currently worth about one hundredth of that.

The existing Green Belt, the nation's second oldest only after London, took forty years to agree - talks began in the late 1950s and the boundaries were only finally fixed in the Oxford Local Plan 1997. So, unless the process of redrawing the Green Belt boundaries is going to be railroaded through with all the attendant risks of riding roughshod over dissenting opinion, it seems highly unlikely that development would be able to start on any of these major sites inside a decade at the very least.

Now, I'm no great fan of the protectionist Green Belt policy in the first place - it has just as often worked as a "choker" than a belt. In Oxford's case, its main raison d'être was to preserve the historic character of Oxford. And I have often observed that the real, human historic character of Oxford, of "poor scholars and clerks" here to study and the attendant infrastructure that makes the city's very purpose in the world possible, is itself compromised by making housing unaffordable to those very people. I have also consistently pointed out that fulfilling even the government's latest plans for three million new homes over twenty odd years would require just over half of one per cent of England's non-urban land so this is not a NIMBY or "BANANA" anti-development rant.

Mistaken interpretation of needs data.

But I do rail against inappropriate development wherever it surfaces. And I completely believe that this "Central Oxfordshire Sub-regional Growth Zone" is inappropriate. And unnecessary. For a start the housing need data on which it was largely based are just plain wrong - well, more wrongly interpreted I suppose. In 2004 Fordham Research produced a Housing Needs Assessment for Oxford City Council that concluded that 750 units of additional affordable housing were required every year for the next decade just to stand still. Delivering such a requirement with the current maximum affordable-market priced housing quota of 50:50 would imply development of 15,000 new homes in a decade, which is clearly not even in the thinking either of the City Council's planners nor of the South East Regional Plan, even as amended by Whitehall.

However, that figure of 750 affordable units is naively misleading at best, utterly mistaken at worst. For 75% of all the people represented by that annual need are currently housed in the city. And whilst some of them are in unsuitable or overcrowded housing and by definition all of them in unaffordable housing for their incomes, it equates to an overcrowding rate of around 2% of households. Whilst anything up to about 40% of housing if it follows the national pattern is underoccupied. The naive extrapolation from these figures, which is what has been pushed as the "growth zone" option, is that most of that 750 a year requirement can only be met by creating net additional housing units as near as possible to that 750 figure. But, since 75% of them are already housed in the city, such a solution in reality means not merely housing those in housing need in the city, but growth of the "greater Oxford" population to the tune of 20% in twenty years.

No consensus on large scale city growth.

And the one thing we have not had is a debate about whether such overall growth is justified or necessary. In fact, the whole debate, driven as it has been by high housing costs for people already in the city mainly (and quite rightly in many ways - for that is the pressing problem) has not really discussed growth so much as an imperative to get housing costs down for existing residents. For a start, such a rapid rate of growth is likely to cause all sorts of demographic and other social problems that cannot be planned for through mere spatial planning policies. Oxford does have a shortfall of resident working age population compared with the number of jobs in the city, but in the context of a county town in a predominantly rural county that is actually a good thing. If we suddenly meet the employment requirement within the city or on its near borders we risk the economy of the rest of the county insofar as it relies on people earning money in Oxford itself and thence able to support the smaller county towns and villages.

The cost of urban extensions.

Further, concentration on developing virgin edge of town land and new additional housing abandons existing housing to its inexorable decline. One of the most naive, I feel, enthusiasts for the Whitehall changes to the South East Plan, Labour City Councillor Antonia Bance, who positively whooped with joy in her blog the other day when the news broke, represents a ward, Rose Hill, that illustrates quite nicely both the pitfalls of the growth plan and the better solution to the housing need. Tagging new estates onto the edge of the city is no great answer. As Rose Hill shows, such marginal land housing tends to be taken up by the least well off, people who actually could do with being closer, not further, from centers of employment and social interaction.

One can only imagine the potential effects of plonking another 3,500 homes on the edge of the most deprived wards in the city. Optimists will say that it will drag up the fortunes of its neighbours, making it more likely that that whole swathe of post-war development on the edge of the city will attract the infrastructure is still needs to become prosperous and desirable. But the history of such developments tends to prove the pessimist more likely to be right. Indeed, the same was said of what is now Northfield Brook ward - that the new mixed tenure housing of the eighties and nineties in Greater Leys would pull the whole area of the Leys up out of the doldrums, yet just a few years on and Northfield Brook has made its mark as being the newest most deprived area of the city. At the very least, it proves just how long it takes to create new, vibrant communities - a generation and more.

Redeveloping existing urban areas the better alternative.

So, if we are likely to take a decade to get started on these new developments if everything goes well in the Green Belt review, and in the process negate the very ethos of Green Belt - that it should be as permanent as possible and not seen as a stock of land on which the city can call every few years, we should also make attempts to look at other mechanisms for delivering more affordable and more appropriate living spaces for the current needs of the city first and foremost before we plan for topsy growth.

And here, Antonia's ward also proves that it can be done. The Rose Hill redevelopment program proves that where there were 138 housing units of very low, almost derelict, standard you can provide 238 brand spanking new homes better matched to today's household composition and importantly energy needs. Of course I believe it's been badly handled - handing over nearly half of them all to private sale is the equivalent of enclosing half of what up till now has been land held in trust by the council for the people off Oxford, and the resulting housing will not be what it could have been in terms of 21st century energy efficiency. But the principle is correct - and all over Oxford we have lots of twentieth century housing that is not now, or will soon not be, appropriate or efficient in an era of high energy costs.

What Fordham showed was that we need to make around 600 existing units of housing more affordable each year, plus plan for more modest demand of about 180 units a year for people who aspire to move into the city. We can achieve this without wholesale estate building, by redeveloping existing estates (including the private inter-war housing estates in the inner suburbs), But to do that we need to transfer our property tax from taxing both land and buildings to taxing just land. This will relatively penalize underoccupancy and encourage redevelopment of areas that are below the optimal density. In the process more of our existing housing land will be equipped for that low energy 21st century living. And the additional units that can be incorporated by increasing densities will mean that newcomers slot into existing mature communities.

LVT the 21st century radical key to urban regeneration/redevelopment.

Much of Oxford's development in the nineteenth century was the work of Liberals and Radicals through vehicles such as the National Freehold Land Company which, amongst other things, was a mechanism for enfranchisement of the working classes before universal suffrage was enacted. It was a model for social change built, if you pardon the pun, on the idea that land ownership was what made a person free and give them full citizenship. What we need now (and what more fitting a tribute to the recently late Brian Hodgson who a few years ago got the county to investigate LVT's effects on a part of the city) is for that Liberal-Progressive coalition at the Town Hall to demand the right to try out this approach which has recently been making such a vision as I have given here possible in cities across the United States, such as Philadelphia and Harrisburgh, before the bulldoizers move into South and West Oxfordshire and land owners pocket several hundred millions of pounds at our expense.

Finally, if none of that works, I will consider supporting some edge of town new development if we find a way of using the land owners' unearned increment from their rent seeking to create a light rail service from Shipton right round to the Cowley works, taking in all the proposed new estates and employment growth areas such as the Oxford Science Park and the Oxford Business Park. Only with such a piece of infrastructure will these potential new estates be anything other than marginal. At the moment it takes over an hour to get by bus from Kidlington round to Headington for example. Such travel times are unacceptable for estates that would be intended to supply housing for workers in the main employment areas of the city.

In Yellow Peril | Why won't Lynne Featherstone admit the truth? they want to know, amongst other things...

On her "blog" (actually just a website - what sort of blog is it that doesn't allow comments?)

Er, actually, yours, most of the time. I would say that three quarters of my attempts to post a comment on Yellow Peril I get some kind of error along the lines of:

Error
You are not allowed to proceed with this request.
Spam

But you know, over there at Yellow Peril they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Lynne. It's pretty tiresome really. What's it all about? Glynis not give you enough attention as a child Kinnockkid?

This is more than a little parochial for me, and just a tad conservative with a small "c" - it reminds me again why little changes can deeply affect people in all sorts of ways. And whilst my own thoughts on this are probably unprintable, and not only because the decision has been made by my employer and landlord and I wouldn't really want to find myself sleeping under a hedge next week, I cannot let this little bit of Oxford's history disappear without some commemoration...

Headington Hill Hall, mark II (mark I is to the far left of this picture), built by James Morrell.

When John Henry Brookes was entering his job as first principal of the Oxford City Technical School in 1928, which, by a circuitous route is the fore-runner of Oxford Brookes University (and so allows us to celebrate our "150th anniversary" in 2015), the Morrell family, already an unusually important non-university influence in Oxford had, six decades previously, built not one, but two grand houses on this side of Headington Hill and had laid out the arboertum/park in their grounds that is now Headington Hill Park, Oxford's most beautiful urban park, if I do say so myself.

Indeed, their estate straddled what is now the main Headington Road out of town, encompassing what is now South Park, Cheney Lane, Cheney School and Oxford Brookes University's main Gipsy Lane Campus, its sports centre and the Cheney Student Village (another hall of residence). They built the land-mark iron bridge across Headington Road on the hill when it replaced what is now Morrell Avenue and Old Road as the main London road, and they owned a farm and other properties on the north west side of Headington Hill Hall that are now allotments and, until yesterday at least, "Morrell Hall" of residence.

The family, which included I believe two Liberal MPs and of course the famous Lady Ottoline Morrell (who started the nearby Garsington Opera which will also, once again, be coming to an end soon I gather) had not lived in Headington Hill Hall since before the second world war, during which it and its park was requisitioned as a wartime psychiatric unit and in 1953 the family sold the hall and park to Oxford City Council until Robert Maxwell started renting it off them ("the best council house in Britain" I believe he used to describe it).

But they retained some of the land around, including that set out by then as allotments on the Marston side of Headington Hill and when the last of the family directly connected with the hall died in 1965, James Herbert Morrell (son of Emily, the last occupant of the hall, and George Herbert Morrell) they made available part of the allotments to the City Council for the development of residences for the students of the now named Oxford College of Technology which had some twenty years previously managed to acquire some of the other Morrell family estate on the other side of Headington Road, which is now our Gipsy Lane campus.

New signs, no sign of Morrell Hall (I'm not sure I'd put the lavatorial status on a road sign!

And those halls have been called Morrell Hall ever since. Until now.

Ten years ago the by then Oxford Brookes University bought land adjacent to Morrell Hall that had been used by government offices since before the war and built what is now called "Clive Booth Hall", named for Sir Clive Booth, the last director of the Oxford Polytechnic and first Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University who left office the year after I arrived at Brookes. It seems right and fair to want to commemorate the person who managed that momentous transition from polytechnic and council ownership to fully fledged independent university. Indeed I like Clive, for all that he has made his later career out of high office in some of the most powerful QUANGOs in the country - first SEEDA and now the Big Lottery Fund, he is down to earth and always friendly and happy to stop and chat. He was telling me last week in fact how flattered he was, or he thought he maybe ought to be, that there was now a bus running around Oxford with his name on the front (it stops at the halls on Marston Road)!  One of the nice things about working in a university community is that the chief executives, in my experience at least, are nowhere near as remote as they probably would be in private sector businesses of a similar size.

But the university has decided to extend the Clive Booth Hall name to the adjacent, Morrell Hall, site - they were already functioning in terms of management as one site with two identities - with the utilitarian description differentiating the two halves of the hall of either "Clive Booth Hall (ensuite)" and "Clive Booth Hall (non ensuite)".  One might wonder what these titles may be shortened to in the sometimes wicked humour of students!

In a very real sense, we're not talking about a family who happened to live on this hill side but who quite literally made the hillside, in a similar way to the Churchill family or Cavendish family created the landscape of Blenheim or Chatsworth. And so we have to say goodbye to the university's only commemoration of the family without whom the university might still be looking for a suitable home.  You could say that wittingly or unwittingly the Morrells have been the university's biggest benefactor.

"Here lies James Morrell Esq, who died at his bedside at Headington Hill Hall, Sept 12th, 1863, Aged 53" - the grave near the entrnace to St Clement's Churchyard which the family used to reach through the park via the gate on Marston Road.

New blocks are replacing the old at the former Morrell Hall, and they are to have some kind of green energy plant. Little did I suspect at the time that what was intended was to harness the power from over the road in St Clement's churchyard where James Morrell lies no doubt a-spinning in his grave!

You can find lots more information about the Morrell family and Headington Hill Hall and its history at Stephanie Jenkins' very informative Headington website (which also has other links to more information).

And in other news about destruction of historic local interest, here's now what's left of the the majestic old chestnut tree the City Council have just killed in the Headington Hill Park grounds that James Morrell planted 150 years ago:

Felled horse chestnut in Headington Park - apparently this was dangerous. Or something.

Iain Dale and "Yellow Peril" variously "broke" a "news" story yesterday about a chap being arrested in Spain apparently over some kind of spat over a business deal gone wrong. From what we can understand so far, it appears that his bankers decided to pull the plug after some dealings with another rich bloke that once had something to do with a famous football club that the guy had tried to cover up or some such when they tried to sue him or something.

Great. So? Well of course the political bubble down in London is all abuzz with it now, because the person concerned, one Michael Brown, of uncertain abode it seems, donated a lot of money, by party standards, to the Lib Dems last year. A donation that drew some attention, most notably in the Times, owned by a man who thinks he owns most of the world's politicians anyway, because it was unclear whether it was a permissable UK based donation. You can read Iain Dale getting all excited about it here:

Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: LibDem Donor Faces Fraud Charges:

So, I just want to say that I cannot get terribly excited about this.

First - it was well known within the party at least, if not at the time, then shortly after the donation was made public (the first most of us wee foot soldiers knew of it), that Mr Brown had made his fortune in property speculation in Florida in double quick time and was on a wanted list for one or more rubber cheques he had written while apparently dirt poor at the start of his meteoric rise. No doubt he had pissed off some counterparty in his property deals at some point. If nobody ever accepted money from anyone who had ever issued a cheque their account could not cover, especially when they were hard up, I suspect there would be precious few donations ever made to anyone, political or otherwise. But Americans are more anal about this sort of thing anyway, so on a wanted list he remains.

Second, and probably most importantly for me, I was personally pissed off that the party had accepted any such donation in the first place - I mean size wise and from one person. We have long traded on the fact that as a party we raise most of our money from local supporters and a few charitable type research organisations' donations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I don't eat Weetabix since I discovered they were once big donors to the Tories, and I steer as clear of Sainsbury businesses as I can because of their connection with Labour donations. I don't knowingly smoke Philip Morris products (Marlboro cigarettes in the main) because of their funding of George Bush.

But, from what I can gather, despite people continually dredging the donation up, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that it was permissible and that matter is closed. No doubt someone will correct me, excitedly, on that if they have evidence to the contrary.

What I am pissed off with though is the fact that some chap who apparently did not seek any influence in the party at the time his donation was made has subsequently been pushed, or has pushed himself, into a position of making singularly unhelpful comments about the way the party has moved in the past year or so, with Stewart Wheeler-esque "threats" that he would give more money if they did things the way he hoped they would when he gave the money. As if he actually had some influence, which, in any kind of ballot about it amongst the membership I think I can confidently say he doesn't. I hoped on every occasion that they would have the balls to say "thanks but no thanks" and so far as I can see, they have. And he has gotten increasingly petulant about it. So he did, really, seek some kind of influence, even if after the fact.

I don't know the guy - he seems like quite a fun character. He seems to have gotten involved in funding a political party without really understanding the ethos and independent mindedness of its members. But Ming was right in October - there was nothing at that stage that appeared to make him unacceptable as a donor if he had wanted to give more and the commission said he was acceptable. I would not have accepted it, but then I'm only a foot soldier paying for my own Focuses at election time and so on, and not involved in how much money it takes to run the party as a whole and how easy it might be to raise equivalent sums required in this sad modern world of big money politics from small donations.

And finally, I certainly won't cry for HSBC if they feel wronged in this. As readers will know I couldn't give a fig for the already over-privileged world of bankers and the usury they inflict on society and might even rejoice at one of them having had the wool pulled over their eyes by a relatively small financial operator - if you sup with the devil....

And if somehow, though it seems unlikely, they get the right to demand his money back from us, I will probably be the first in the queue with my thirty-five quid share to make sure we can do so and not have to rely on big donors like this again. And I hope others in the party would do so likewise in proportion to their wealth and level of commitment.