Are there downsides to living in what we are constantly being told is one of the most prosperous counties of one of the richest countries in the world? Reading recent research from Oxfordshire County Council, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the answer is yes.
Most obviously, we are caught in a pincer movement caused by wages failing to keep pace with house prices. Not surprisingly in such circumstances, the population is ageing due at least in part to some of us living in expensive houses that younger and possibly more economically active people could not afford to buy.
The average Oxfordshire gross full-time weekly wage ten years ago was on a par with the national average of £392. Now the Oxfordshire figure (£448) has overtaken the national one (£433). But the county still lags behind the average wage for the South East as a whole of £467 (2005). Compare those wage increases to house prices, as collated by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and based on Land Registry data. If you had bought an average priced house in Oxford in 1999 it would have cost you £131,538 (five years ago £174,127). Now, such a house would cost you £246,915 and, of course, your pay is unlikely to have increased enough to service the increased mortgage. In 1999, house prices were 7.2 times earnings; now the figure is 10.2. There, in a nutshell, is the pincer movement in which the county finds itself.
All the same, and perhaps ironically, the county's population is increasing as more Government money is pumped into education (more students at Oxford's two universities requiring more teachers) and ever-more highly skilled and motivated people set up new high-tech companies, many of them spin-offs from the universities.
In 1996 Oxfordshire's population was 588,500; in 2001 it was 607,277. Now, it is 617,168. However, in the last five years the number of children aged 0-9 has actually decreased by 3.2 per cent to 70,984. In 1996, 130,100 people lived in Oxford; in 2001 the figure had risen to 135,500; by 2004 it had reached 145,100.
The strain on infrastructure caused by the fact that there are more of us is most noticeable on the Oxfordshire roads. Traffic has increased 14.5 per cent since 1996. Interestingly, though, less than half that growth (5.3 per cent) occurred between 2001 and now. Each car now travels about 20 miles a day, compared with about 15 in 1991.
From 1994 to 2003, an average of 415 new businesses were registered each year for VAT in Oxfordshire. South Oxfordshire had the highest number of average annual net new VAT registrations in this period (102) and Oxford the lowest (67).
More encouraging still, more enterprises have registered for VAT than have deregistered in every year since 1995. This suggests the economy of Oxfordshire, measured by the number of enterprises, has expanded each year.
Between 1998 and 2004, the total number of people employed increased 4.9 per cent to 313,462. However, the number of people employed in manufacturing decreased by 10.3 per cent, while the number of us employed in health and social care (31,908) increased by a staggering 23.1 per cent.
However, the Oxfordshire manufacturing decline is dwarfed by the decline in the same sector for the South East as a whole (-22.4 per cent), while the increase in health and social care workers is higher than the regional increase of 17 per cent.
Despite central and local government efforts to cut rubbish, with Britain's record in this area lagging behind European competitors (notably Germany) we are producing more and more waste. In 2000/1 each Oxfordshire household produced 460.3kg of rubbish.
By 2004/5 that figure had risen to 489.9kg. The good news here, though, is that the amount of rubbish recycled also increased from 14 per cent to 30.15 per cent, so the total going to landfill actually fell.
Most of the downsides, it seems, are to do with more and more of us wanting to pile into the county. Just this week, for instance, we learn that 153 post-war Orlit houses in Rose Hill are to be replaced with 253 new homes. Could the huge increase in numbers of health and social workers and the rising earnings to house price ratio be related?Perhaps the most obviously Alice in Wonderland aspect of the county's economy is illustrated by the county's largest manufacturing employer, BMW. We rejoice when we hear of more cars being built (200,000 last year alone) and yet ban them from the city centre. Such is modern life in Oxfordshire.
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