Given the strength and persistence of the campaign against the Castle Mill development, built on the edge of Port Meadow, Oxford City Council has been wise to announce an independent review.

While nobody would want to underplay the visual impact of the student accommodation on famous views of the city, it is the way the application has been dealt with that has so badly shaken confidence in the whole local planning process.

As the Oxford West and Abingdon MP Nicola Blackwood - one of those calling for an independent review - told the Oxford Times in May, with every new revelation about the Castle Mill accommodation “the picture just seems to get worse.”

Soon after the student blocks began to come into view, it was clear that something had gone very badly wrong. Any doubt about that was confirmed when past and present university professors spoke of their shame that Oxford University had been behind such a scheme.

Leading conservationist groups held up their hands to confess they had failed to protect such a sensitive and much loved view of the city, like everyone else at a loss as to how the scheme had sailed through the planning process.

But local campaigners, relying heavily on freedom of information requests, managed to throw more light on a planning application which left many worried about the relationship between officers and the university.

Many of the allegations _ “internal reports were suppressed”, “visual analysis presented to the committee was misleading” with a report on site contamination failing to arrive - were set out in a council agenda, outlining the background to the independent review.

Many will be cheered by the composition of the working group, largely made up of opponents of the scheme and representatives of the city’s leading conservation groups. Until now, as Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch observes, many of those involved have scrutinised their own actions and discovered that they acted entirely properly. An independent eye is indeed overdue.

Whether any of this brings about any reduction in the height of the student blocks is doubtful, although some will continue to cling to the hope that a judicial review could yet force the university’s hand.

That too seems unlikely. But for now we must hope with Ms Blackwood, the CPRE and many others that this review is given the scope to do a thorough investigation of how we got into this situation in the first place.