The expansion of the Westgate Shopping Centre is the worst decision the City Council has ever made
The proposed expansion of the Westgate shopping centre will be a disaster for Oxford. It will be a disaster in terms of its environmental impact, its housing implications, its effect on the local economy, and for the quality of life of anyone living in the city centre. It is, in short, the worst decision the City Council has made in my term of office.
If that opening statement seems a little strong, then let us examine the problems with this enormous, 750,000 sq ft retail development in the middle of Oxford’s town centre - if we have space to list them all. We can begin with perhaps the most obvious; the nightmarish traffic impact of a shopping centre three times as large as the currently existing complex.
The Westgate Partnership has been unable to solve the problem of how to properly design transport to and from such a development, given Oxford’s medieval transport infrastructure and already overstretched road network. This is not from lack of trying - such a solution is logically impossible.
The granting of planning permission despite the lack of a comprehensive transport solution will lead to gridlock on Oxford’s major arterial roads (commiserations if you live on or near the Abingdon Road, Botley Road, Iffley Road and so on) while drastically increasing our already toxic air nitrogen dioxide pollution problem. Oxford is not Milton Keynes, nor is it Reading - and the kinds of developments suitable in those towns simply will not work in Oxford.
Proponents of the scheme quickly gloss over the traffic problems, and point to the promised land - a John Lewis store! The question of whether the citizens of Oxford will enjoy their John Lewis while kneedeep in floodwater seems to escape them, until our attention turns to the climate credentials of the new development. Thanks to years of work by Greens, Oxford City Council recently passed some of the most radical planning policy on sustainability in the UK.
Among other things, the new policy demands 20% of the energy of large new developments to be provided by renewable energy, on site. The Westgate development just about reaches 4%. Despite this pitiful attempt at ‘greenwashing’, most councillors were happy to go along with this fundamentally unsustainable retail behemoth - climate change reduced to a sidenote, despite the recent warning of the Stern Report.
Our politicians, as ever, are happy to speak about the importance of this issue; but when it comes to the difficult decisions that a truly sustainable society requires, their actions are conventional, cautious and utterly insufficient. As if compounding our traffic, air pollution and climate problems wasn’t enough, the Westgate also worsens Oxford’s chronic housing shortage.
On a site that is owned by the City Council itself and is large enough to provide 1200 new affordable homes, the Westgate development is providing a feeble 127 houses - only 63 of them ‘affordable’. In fact, the final tally is even less than that, because in order to make way for this retail expansion the City Council will be bulldozing Abbey Place, a functioning community of elderly, disabled and vulnerable tenants, living in 14 specially adapted homes.
While barely increasing the amount of affordable homes in the city, the Westgate will bring hundreds of new employees into the city, further increasing pressure on our overheated housing market. None of these problems are a result of the Westgate Partnership being particularly greedy. In comparison to most other retail developments, the new Westgate is a decent scheme.
Unfortunately, in comparison to the absolute standard of what Oxford needs, in terms of sustainability, housing, transport and economy, it is disastrous. The response of Labour and the Liberal Democrats to this problem is to view the expansion of retail as important above all else. Cynics amongst the OxStu readership might even suggest that the vast income due to the City Council on the completion of the development may be influencing councillors’ decisions.
On the other hand, the Green response is to make it clear that if a new development does not fit into our agenda of social justice and sustainability, then it should not be built.
2nd Nov 2006