WE should be celebrating: the inspector has approved the Local Plan for the Vale of the White Horse.

Yet I find it difficult to celebrate when housing is increasing exponentially and public services are declining in inverse proportion.

We've heard recently that there will be no funding for expansion to Wantage Health Centre and that the capacity of primary care can’t cope with current population levels.

The same applies to Faringdon and I hate to think how Didcot is coping.

The chances of Wantage Community Hospital re-opening are moving further away as the NHS consultation into services is delayed.

Possibilities of Grove Station re-opening are disappearing as Network Rail delays its plans again and Government funding is focused on HS2 and the links between Oxford and Cambridge.

Local bus services have gone and our parking survey shows that most adults need a car to get anywhere around this area (by the way, if you haven’t completed the survey yet please do – we need as much evidence as possible of the numbers of cars owned in relation to the number of bedrooms in your home).

Schools are another problem. Crab Hill won’t provide a primary school until about 450 homes are occupied (at least six years away).

Grove Airfield can't get outline planning permission until the last landowner signs and until then children’s lives are being affected by attending schools outside their local communities. That may seem a small issue but if they live further than walking distance from their friends they will spend more time on the internet or phone to stay in contact rather than meeting face to face. This affects the way that they interact with society in general and will affect all of our futures.

This is supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men but I don't think anyone told that to the Chancellor before he finalised his autumn statement. No mention of the NHS or social care and of all the investment funding announced, our OxLEP has only managed to potentially receive £15 million of the £382m it had requested from the Government.

Even the Chancellor admits that growth will slow.

The only goodwill bit I could find in the statement was that banking fines will go to more than 100 projects supporting armed forces personnel, their families and veterans; emergency service personnel; children’s hospitals, air ambulances and emergency responders; and museums and memorials, over the next four years. I wonder if any of that will reach South Oxfordshire.

So our Local Plan is approved and if we are very lucky and developers commit to building the homes they have permission for in the next five years, then we might be able to stop more green fields and green spaces being given permission. Some of the infrastructure that the developers have committed to might even be built.