THERESA May has been asked to intervene on a ten-year housing delay in Grove.

Housing campaigner Les Clyne emailed the Prime Minister asking her to set her best ministers to work on the hold-up at the Grove Airfield site.

Vale of White Horse District Council first agreed the principle of building 2,500-homes on the Second World War airfield more than a decade ago.

The council's planning committee granted housing developers Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon outline approval to build the homes in December 2013.

Work should have already started but has been held up because one of the 14 landowners who own bits of the airfield is refusing to sign off on the final deal.

The delay is specifically due to a 'section 106' agreement between the developers, landowners and Oxfordshire County Council, which would outline how much money the developers would contribute towards local council services such as schools, roads and leisure facilities.

Dr Clyne, a former Labour Party activist who lives in Abingdon, has been pressuring the Vale for years to force movement on the development.

He wants the new estate built to help provide more affordable homes in the district – social housing run by a council or housing association.

In February he threatened to make an official complaint to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) if the S106 agreement was not signed by April.

Now he has gone straight to the top, and asked Theresa May herself to instruct DCLG to investigate the delay.

He revealed his move in an email to Vale of White Horse District Council's planning committee chairman Sandy Lovatt.

He warned in the email: "If no solution can be found, then surely it is up to the Vale to remove the site from the local plan, and then find other sites for the 2,500 housing units for the local plan 2031, no easy task."

Mr Lovatt, a councillor for Abingdon, said that he and other councillors shared Dr Clyne's frustration with the delays on Grove Airfield, but that he was confident the S106 agreement would indeed by signed by April, as promised by council leader Matt Barber in January.

He said: "I believe we are getting very close to a solution and I'm satisfied the officers are working very hard but it is, to some extent, out of our hands because the final contract is between the developers and the landowners."

Mr Lovatt also said the council was well-ahead with building affordable housing and at the latest count was about 200 homes ahead of its target for the financial year.

The Prime Minister's office confirmed it had received Dr Clyne's email and had passed it onto DCLG. The department declined to comment.