Sir – Stuart Skyte (Letters, August 6) says it was exactly right 60 years ago to create the Green Belt to prevent urban sprawl, but then says that it is now exactly wrong because urban sprawl is needed to allow houses to be built.

But the Green Belt does not prevent necessary houses being built. 8,000 houses (a 15 per cent increase in housing stock) are under construction within the city.

The city accepts that it has room for 2,000 more – far more if it stopped using land for commercial development which ramps up housing demand, and used it to build houses instead.

The 25,000 further houses it is targeting at the Green Belt are not for people presently living or working in the city, but for what Mr Skyte calls “UK migrants” attracted here by an inappropriate Growth Strategy.

Even if such a Growth Strategy was desirable for our rural county – which it is not – houses still need not be built in the Green Belt, which is only 13 per cent of our land area, and should not. On this issue, Oxford has an exceptionally well-informed public, largely because of the City Council’s thirty year campaign against the Green Belt which so beneficially thwarts its ambition to become another Birmingham.

Three quarters of people in the city itself, and 73 per cent of non-home owners, the very people Mr Skyte says it disadvantages, want the Green Belt to remain undeveloped, with 58 per cent identifying house-building as the greatest threat.

Clearly the public appreciate that the Green Belt is more necessary than ever to prevent urban sprawl, preserve the setting of Oxford, on which its economy so much depends, and protect the county’s other towns and villages which would otherwise be overrun, or drained of economic growth, by the city.

Michael Tyce
Campaign to Protect Rural England, Oxfordshire
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