News Update 1st April 2022
25 years ago Dr. Ian Scargill, along with a group of like-minded people, was instrumental in establishing
the Oxford Green Belt Network as the public voice for the Oxfordshire Parish Councils in the Green Belt.
The planning policy to designate and permanently protect the openness of the countryside in Green Belts in England was
applied from 1955 onwards, but it was only in 1975 that the inner boundary of the Oxford Green Belt was confirmed,
and since then the concept of the 'permanence' of this protection has been undermined by the relentless geographical expansion
of Oxford City into various parts of the surrounding countryside, and this signalled the need for all the Parish Councils
in the Oxford Green Belt to join together in this Network in 1997, to share Planning Information, to educate and advise on the
positive benefits of the Green Belt, and to make appropriate representations to the Local Planning Authorities.
More of the recent history can be read here on this website in OGBN's
Spring 2022 Newsletter.
Today The defence of the Oxford Green Belt by OGBN continues as over the past 25 years the pressure has
increased for inappropriate development in this belt of open countryside around Oxford. Its width has become narrower in spite
of the enhancement of its beneficial uses for more public recreation, increased biodiversity and nature recovery, access by people
to nature, and for sustaining the population's mental and physical health, especially during and since the Covid lock-downs.
Since the publication in 2020 of the government's controversial white paper "Planning for the Future" we have been anxiously
awaiting the fundamental reform of the Planning system in a new "Planning Bill", but today we understand that this may be
incorporated into a "Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill" later this year.
OGBN is therefore now lobbying for some expansion and definition of the beneficial purposes of the Green Belt in a new revised
National Planning Policy Framework to be in time for this to guide the continued protection of the Green Belt in the
emerging Oxfordshire Plan 2050.
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