The government’s requirement that councils consult their neighbours on housing plans lacks clarity and is holding back development, Oxford council’s leader has said after the Planning Inspectorate recommended the local authority withdraw its draft Local Plan.

In a letter dated 11 September, the Inspector wrote to the council explaining that it had failed in its “duty to cooperate” with nearby authorities when it developed the plan.

It also said that there were no exceptional circumstances to justify the council’s decision to depart from the use of the Standard Method of determining housing need, which resulted in a significantly higher assessment of need for the city. 

According to the council’s Housing and Economic Needs Assessment (HENA) 1,322 homes a year were needed to meet housing need in the region, and it identified that 481 of these should be built within the city’s boundaries, with 841 needing to be built outside. 

By contrast, the standard method calculation puts need at 762 homes a year.

In a statement, the council said it was “alarmed and extremely disappointed” by the recommendation and said that, while it was considering its options, it understood that withdrawal of the plan would likely be the best course of action to avoid further costs.

It also criticised the duty to cooperate requirement, which requires local authorities to maintain a dialogue with certain bodies, including Natural England, the Environment Agency, and Historic England, as well as neighbouring councils.

Susan Brown, leader of Oxford City Council, said: “The duty to cooperate is not a duty to agree. Nor should it be a charter for those who object the loudest to be able to block the building of desperately needed homes.”

Oxford council said there was “no clear threshold for the level of involvement of other authorities”, which it said planted “a seed of doubt about whether the duty is met, because if other parties state strongly enough they are dissatisfied with how they were involved, then that in itself can be taken as a sign of failure”.

“The duty to cooperate is not a duty to agree. Nor should it be a charter for those who object the loudest to be able to block the building of desperately needed homes.” 

Susan Brown, leader of Oxford City Council

“We have a longstanding history of working collaboratively with neighbouring councils and other stakeholders on planning issues affecting Oxfordshire – including during the preparation of this plan,” said Cllr Brown.

The city’s alleged failure relates to its development of the HENA  which was developed by Oxford City Council and Cherwell District Council after the collapse of work on a Local Plan for the whole of Oxfordshire.

Work on a strategic plan for the region, known as the Oxfordshire Plan 2050,  came to a “somewhat abrupt end” in August 2022, according to the Inspector, with the local authorities unable to “reach agreement on the approach to planning for future housing needs”.

While detailed elements such as specialist housing were considered only for the two authorities, the HENA did make an Oxfordshire-wide assessment of housing needs.

Oxford City Council maintained that other districts in Oxfordshire were offered the opportunity to join the HENA commission, and that, after they decided not to do so, findings and implications continued to be discussed with them.

However, the Inspector said the nature of involvement of other authorities in Oxfordshire was “not clear” and that representatives from South Oxfordshire and the Vale of White Horse councils “gave recollections of meetings and discussions that contradicted those of the City Council”.

In a joint statement, South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse District Councils told Housing Today that they had “made a representation at the public examination of the city council’s Local Plan and acknowledge that the government’s duly appointed planning inspector agreed with our position”.

The inspector concluded that the duty to cooperate was failed because the other districts were not directly involved in the commission and its methodology.

“A fundamental aspect of the HENA, and one which has caused substantial concern, is that it seeks to assess housing needs first of all on an Oxfordshire wide basis, and then sets out a preferred distribution of these needs between the five individual authorities,” it said in its letter to the council.

“This is despite three of the authorities affected not being party to the study and indeed raising serious concerns about its scope.

“On the basis of evidence before us, the other authorities had not been given an opportunity to have any meaningful input into the HENA during its preparation.”

On this point, Oxford City Council said: “Our firm view is that it is not normal practice for authorities to have involvement in the running of a technical study when they are not part of the commissioning of it or relying on that study themselves”.

The Inspector also raised concerns about the methodology itself, though its conclusions on this point were not the basis of Oxford’s failure in its duty to cooperate

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The Inspector said that while the HENA identified a need for Oxfordshire “significantly above that which would be derived from the sum of housing needs for each individual authority using the standard method”, its assessment of capacity within the city’s boundaries was “well below even the standard method figure”.

Oxford said it was “particularly alarmed and surprised” by the Inspectors’ conclusion that there were no exceptional circumstances for departing from use of the Standard Method, and accused the agency of lacking “consistency”.

The council called the method a “discredited and outdated approach” and noted that the Inspector’s report into the Oxford Local Plan 2036, published in 2020, had been “very clear that exceptional circumstances for departing from the Standard Method exist”.

The council also noted that average house prices in Oxford are more than 12 times household earnings and that more than 3,300 households are on the waiting list for council housing.

According to the Planning Inspectorate, the plan identified an unmet need of around 16,828 over the plan period. 

Agreements and commitments from other Oxfordshire authorities only accounted for 14,300 homes, however, and the Inspector said the city had “made no attempt to discuss how and where the newly identified unmet need up to 2040 would be met”.

Oxford also said it was “very surprised” by the conclusion that the plan failed to demonstrate how unmet housing need will be met outside the city, noting that current local plans for the surrounding districts already include enough housing to meet the city’s needs for the majority of the plan period.

“This is said by the Inspectors to be inadequate because the plans are from the previous rounds of local plans,” it said.

“However, we absolutely do not agree that our plan should wait for surrounding districts to bring forward new plans in order that it can go ahead.”

The agency said that the soundness of the Local Plan itself was “a matter that could have potentially been rectified, if the examination had continued”.

But this would have required the council to accept that there was “no justification for moving away from the standard method”.

Asked to address the criticisms made by the city council, the Planning Inspectorate said it did not comment on live casework.

Cllr Brown said the inspectors had “failed to grasp the seriousness of Oxford’s housing crisis and the number of new homes we need to tackle this crisis”.

She said the inspectors had not “heeded the clear message from government which requires all councils to up their housing delivery ambitions” and that the logical outcome of its conclusions would be “a delay to proactively planning for the homes we need”. 

“The reality is that while the City Council are builders, there are others elsewhere who are blockers,” she continued. 

“Waiting for a situation where all councils in Oxfordshire are agreed on housing numbers and cross-boundary matters is just not realistic. That’s why the government is planning the reintroduction of mandatory housing delivery targets.”

Cllr Brown said the current standard method was “not fit for purpose” and failed to take account “of population increases that have already happened in Oxford and across Oxfordshire recorded in the census”.