News Update 23 March 2020
The Green Belt provides a safe place for exercise as the Covid-19 pandemic reaches Oxford
The essential restrictions to slow the spread of this coronavirus throughout Oxfordshire have ensured that none of the large meetings crucial to Oxfordshire's future development can take place for some months. This places into limbo all the decisions about the allocation of strategic sites for housing and the promised public consultation on the route for the proposed Oxford-Cambridge Expressway. However, this emergency also brings into focus the value of the Oxford Green Belt as a vital amenity to be maintained in the future for public health. For more details, please read the OGBN Newsletter for March 2020 which is here.
CPRE : Space to Breathe:
Providing space to unwind, engage with nature - and also grow our food - the Green Belt is the countryside next door for 30 million people in some of our largest and most historic cities. The urgent need to help us address the climate emergency and give people more opportunity to engage with nature means that our Green Belts have never been more important.
Yet this space is under threat like never before: from the impacts of climate breakdown to development in the countryside. CPRE, the countryside charity has published regular reports detailing development proposals on the Green Belt since 2012. This report highlights the unprecedented proposals for building housing in the Green Belt, squandering this valuable asset at a time where it is needed for our own health and wellbeing, and to address the climate emergency, more than ever before.
CPRE: Space to Breathe: A State of the Green Belt report - Publication date: October 2019
For Oxford Green Belt Network's responses to consultations on the Local Plans of Cherwell, Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire District Councils, see the menu opposite under Planning Consultations.
The Oxford Green Belt Network continues to fight any suggestion that Green Belt policy be weakened in an attempt to stimulate the national economy. A city's Green Belt setting, like that of Oxford, encourages economic growth rather than preventing it.
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