By Dr Sue Roberts of South Oxfordshire Sustainability

What do you do when you are ill?

Do you rest and recuperate and put your energies into recovery? Or do you work to develop and train for a triathlon? What happens when you lose control of growth? In body terms, it is cancer: sapping resources and poisoning healthy areas.

Is now the time for unrestrained building growth? Central Government is forcing Oxfordshire to build 200,000-300,000 more homes, in addition to the 100,000 already agreed. Thus, a potential 400,000 new homes, equivalent to two Liverpools. One million new people would be needed to fill them; and to share in our depleted services.

Eight years of austerity and the halving of Oxfordshire council budgets have reduced amenities for our residents: for children, the elderly, the disabled, for education, health, road maintenance, waste disposal, police, nature, and, ironically, planning. Subsidised buses have gone and there is no sustainable transport for isolated communities.

We need at least £9bn for the 100,000 homes that we are already struggling to build (Oxfordshire Infrastructure Strategy, 2017). The government has given £215 million against this in the Growth Deal for Oxfordshire.

How did we get to such a large number? Originally we were to build 50,000 homes by 2031; this was doubled in 2012 to 100,000 homes. And now, our new housing minister (the 16th in 17 years) Mr Kit Malthouse has given us six weeks to decide where to build a further 200,000-300,000 homes.

Do we need these homes? For every two people living here now, we would need to find three more. We have looked at how many people will actually be living in Oxfordshire as projected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS, medium.com/@ecomorph). Over almost 40 years, (2011-2050) we need 54,000 new homes. Not 400,000. ONS regularly update their stats, and the projected population keeps falling.

Building seven times as many homes as can be filled means we shall have 350,000 homes that will necessarily remain empty (second homes, investment properties), unless we severely deplete other areas of the country, or start a programme of massive immigration from abroad (expressly against government policy).

Where would two Liverpools go? In green fields reducing our capacity to feed ourselves and in natural areas where fragments of wildlife are hanging on. This is not a sustainable solution.

See neednotgreedoxon.org.uk for more information and what can be done.