Sir, We are writing on behalf of a number of Cumnor residents to highlight the concerns we have about the Vale of White Horse Council’s consultations on their Local Plan 2031, the overwhelming feeling being that the forms provided by the council were completely non-user-friendly.
Despite lengthy explanation of the form-filling process at a village meeting, online support and a well-attended Saturday morning ‘help session’ many villagers gave up on the process.
Those with no Internet access, or with a low level of computer literacy, were, effectively, disenfranchised.
As one of our number (a Professor of English and Dean of an Oxford college) said; “Never have I thought more highly of George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, which excoriates bureaucratic deadening and politically convenient obfuscation of English.”
Another of us (Philip Pullman) was moved to comment “I’ve just submitted my online response, and it was one of the most complicated and difficult things I’ve ever done. It’s completely unnecessary to make things so resistant to use.”
There is a clear and striking difference between the websites of organisations such as Sainsbury’s, eBay, and so on, which make it easy for the public to engage with them, and that of the Vale of White Horse District Council, which actually seems designed to discourage participation.
Why isn’t the process of making one’s views about planning matters as easy as buying something from Amazon? Perhaps it is because, as another resident puts it, “The truth is that voices that people don’t want to hear are effectively being muffled in this disingenuous approach to ‘listening’”.
Sad to say, this lack of local democracy may well encourage the attitude that, “if they don’t object they must be in favour” and the assault on the Green Belt will be sanctioned.
The disingenuous way that the five Green Belt sites in and around Cumnor have been earmarked for housing has caused much angst and the frustration felt by being made to jump through hoops to oppose such opportunism has been palpable.
We suspect that Cumnor residents are not alone in their discomfort.
Philip Pullman
Clive Ricks
Cumnor
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