Oxford Local Plan 2040

Oxford is one of the least affordable places to live in the UK, with average house prices more than 12 times household earnings and about 3,000 households waiting for council housing. 

But Oxford has already built up to the edge of its boundaries and – with the constraints of the Green Belt and flood plain – has run out of large development sites to build new homes. The city is already the fifth most densely populated of the 64 local authority areas in the South East. 

The current Local Plan, which runs until 2036, includes: 

• identifying land within the city’s boundaries to deliver 10,884 homes until 2036 
• intensifying new development on previously developed land 
• making it easier for large employers to build affordable housing for workers on their land 
• requiring developments of 10 or more homes to build at least 50% as affordable 

The draft Local Plan 2040 proposes: 

• allowing housing on all employment sites for the first time
• encouraging the conversion of poorly performing or poorly located employment sites to housing 
• protecting existing housing stock as much as possible, and disincentivising the loss of dwellings for other uses, such as short term lets 
• continuing to limit student accommodation to the city centre, district centres (e.g., Cowley Road, Summertown, Headington) and land adjacent to existing campuses 

In the draft Local Plan 2040, the affordable housing requirement on developments of 10 or more homes has been reduced to 40%. This is being done because global economic factors have made housebuilding more expensive and, due to the success of Oxford’s economy, residential use now has a lower land value than offices and lab space. Therefore, without this change it is very likely that developers would choose not to use land for housebuilding and there would be fewer affordable homes built in the future. 

However, the City Council is continuing to prioritise new social housing. Within the 40% affordable housing required at larger developments, 32% must be new council homes, with the remaining 8% being other forms of affordable housing, such as ‘shared ownership’. This is significantly higher than the requirements for new social housing in neighbouring districts. 

The draft Local Plan proposes building 9,612 new homes within Oxford by 2040. This is lower than the 10,884 new homes needed in the Local Plan 2036 because Oxford has successfully built 3,780 homes since the Local Pan 2036 was adopted in 2016, and many of the large available sites in the city have been developed.