I have been very vocal on the subject of building on our green belt.  Cherwell District Council held a partial review of its local plan which included a massive amount of building in south Cherwell almost exclusively on green belt land. These plans were approved by the council in 2019, despite massive local opposition and repeat attempts by me and other councillors to rethink the flawed polices that lay behind them.

Whilst I agree that we need more housing in Cherwell, I think that housing should be for the people of Cherwell and it should be genuinely affordable.   The Partial Review is pushing to build an extra 4400 houses in Cherwell to meet the needs of Oxford City, even though those needs defined in the City’s local plan are widely viewed as overstated.

We have ample space on brown field sites to accommodate that need, and the Labour run city council has time and again ring-fenced those sites for more economic development, rather than prioritising the housing needs of its own people.

The Green Party wants to see housing needs met, but with the right houses in the right places.  We don’t want to see our green spaces gobbled up by greedy developers looking to build luxury houses on expensive land that will never be truly affordable to the local population.  These developments are being driven by quangos like the Local Enterprise Partnership which are all dominated by vested interests.

Green belt areas are not just pretty landscapes, they are also vital places that help the planet deal with the emissions being created by growth elsewhere.  Concreting them over and siting more roads and more housing on the space where trees and grass once grew not only removes the capacity of those areas to lock up carbon, it also increases emissions, worsens local air quality and increases the likelihood of flooding which is becoming ever more prevalent due to climate change.

I will continue to fight for more genuinely affordable housing, built to high environmental standards and accessible to the local people and their families who really need it.  But I will resist that being done on our precious green spaces unless there is a real and demonstrable need.

We need a huge increase in building affordable houses – both to buy and to rent. Conservative and Labour governments have an appalling record regarding housing, with denying local government the ability to build social housing to rent and preventing the building of private homes.

The current definition of housing affordability is houses for sale at 80% of the current market value.  In Oxfordshire this is a ludicrous proposition, putting houses well out of the reach of anyone on an average salary.  It’s time that this calculation was revised.  My personal preference would be to reduce it to 50% of market value, but I doubt very much if that would be supported by property developers or the local politicians that hand them the projects to build much needed housing.

The policy of Help to Buy has already led to increases in house prices without increasing the supply and new schemes such as shared ownership are condemning people to paying rent as well as mortgage interest on a house they may never fully own.  The Conservatives have re-inflated the housing bubble that led to the crash of 2008. Once again using house price inflation and debt to show a false upturn in the economy.

The Green Party would resume direct investment in council and other social housing and allow councils to use receipts from sales to fund affordable accommodation. We would also build thousands of new social rented homes renewing the supply of council housing and affordable rented homes that has been devastated by decades of right to buy sell-offs.  We would also ensure that housing is built to serve local needs rather than as dormitories for London commuters or as investment opportunities for large scale buy to let landlords.

We need to have a realistic conversation about the future of housing in Britain with an acceptance that the idea of owning their won home may be a very dim and distant dream for most first time buyers.  Faced with that situation, we need to focus much more on making the private rental sector much fairer and more affordable.  We also need to build more council housing and create a national building project where local finance can support the costs of building homes rather than lining the pockets of private developers.