Sir – I am sorry if Paul Hornby (Letters, June 18) feels taken to task. He could not be expected to know, as I did from talking to Lord Segal, that Lord Segal’s condemnation in 1965 of Oxford’s planners was made under the mistaken impression that the obtrusively high Hartwell’s Garage at Botley had been approved by the city council, which had in fact already adopted its high buildings policy.

The council has had successes and failures, as I suggested in a booklet Forty Years of Oxford Planning. The best hope now for improved design after the Port Meadow flats fiasco lies with the city council’s new design panel.

The need for an agreed regional plan, based on public transport, for where homes, jobs and shops should go is shown by the support recently given by the Vale of White Horse planners for an inappropriately large shopping development at Botley. The Government has already created more development pressure through its promotion of science-based economic growth and insistence that the region needs more homes than previously proposed. A regional plan would not increase pressure but direct it. The long-standing policies of pushing growth in the county towns and keeping employers out of Oxford who have no operational need to be there makes sense. But they have not overcome the imbalance under which Oxford has far more jobs than homes.

The city has the highest house prices in the country in relation to average income. More affordable social housing is badly needed. Most of the Green Belt round Oxford must be kept inviolate to preserve the city’s green setting and prevent coalescence with neighbouring villages. But there is a case for reviewing the boundary where this does not apply, provided that the line between town and county is maintained.

Mark Barrington-Ward
Oxford