THE absence of Lib Dem councillors from the meeting that threw out Oxford Brookes University’s £150m redevelopment plan has been defended by the group’s leader, David Rundle.

Only six out of the 16 Lib Dem councillors on Oxford City Council were there to vote at a special meeting of the full council that could have major implications for Oxford’s second university for decades to come.

The absence of the Lib Dem councillors was all the more perplexing for Brookes supporters, because the group’s leader, Mr Rundle, who did not himself attend, was responsible for calling in the planning application to the full council.

The application had previously been approved by the council’s strategy and development committee.

But Mr Rundle said the vote on a planning issue was not a party political matter and councillors had their own individual reasons why they could not attend.

Mr Rundle said the short notice of the meeting could have been one reason for the numbers of councillors who were absent from the council meeting which voted 20-13 to reject the Oxford Brookes scheme to redevelop its Gipsy Lane campus in Headington.

Mr Rundle said: “I called in the Brookes scheme, not as leader of the Lib Dem group, but as a local councillor. There was no suggestion that this was something where there was a party line or an expectation that our members had to turn up to vote in a particular way.”

He said he had been unable to attend for family reasons.

“I could have been selfish and said, ‘have the meeting at a later date’, when I could be there. But it would have meant slowing down the process.”

Other Lib Dem councillors offered a variety of reasons for not attending.

Jim Cambell said he was on holiday and said councillors had only been given ten days’ notice. Natham Pyle said he was ill, while Chris Scanlan, a researcher, was attending an Aids conference in America.

Patrick Murray, who had supported the call-in, said he would have felt “uncomfortable voting” having recently graduated from Brookes.

It has proved impossible to evaluate the impact of the Lib Dem ‘absenteeism’, with only one saying he was “inclined to vote in favour” and the rest claiming they were undecided how they would have voted.

Three Labour councillors had also been unable to attend the council meeting on September 17, when councillors voted to oppose the scheme on the ground of the impact of large buildings on the neighbouring conservation area and on neighbouring houses.

A poll on The Oxford Times website this week showed that 91 per cent of the 260 readers taking part believed the city council had made the wrong decision on Brookes.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Brookes said it was too early to say whether the university would be appealing against the council planning decision.