THIS is a big week: Lodge Hill, North Abingdon development, traffic: all familiar themes that have dominated doorstep conversations for years now.

A major chapter will open this Wednesday as the planning committee will hear the application for 950 homes to be built on the Green Belt in North Abingdon.

Together with Liberal Democrat councillors, I plan to be there to raise the concerns of residents about the planned development.

And there are many of them, from school provision to the affordability of the houses themselves. But at the very top of the list of concerns is traffic and, in particular, the southern facing slips of the Lodge Hill Junction are secured before any houses are built.

The traffic problems in Abingdon are a blight on our community. The fact that residents who want to go south on the A34 must travel through the centre of town means you can often add half an hour onto a journey of only a few miles in rush hour. Adding 950 homes without a solution to this is just madness.

Now, the plan does make some provision for this and says that once 400 houses are built, the slips must be in place or no more can be built.

I will be arguing that this is not good enough. Think about it: this also means is that 399 homes could be built with no slips in place at all. That is 42 per cent of the housing potentially being in place before any guarantee of this much-needed improvement. And anyone who lives here knows it is needed now.

Furthermore, the Environment Agency report agrees. In fact it says that the application is non-compliant with the National Planning Policy Framework unless the slips are in place prior to the development going ahead and so would be open to challenge. This is very compelling reason to change this condition and the committee needs to take this fully into account.

But where is the money going to come from, you ask? Before the election a business case was put to the Department for Communities and Local Government. I have seen a letter from the minister Sajid Javid which states that this was looked at by the sub-committee responsible on April 24. It further states that ‘the case is proceeding as we expected’ and that ‘we will communicate an outcome after the General Election’.

Frustratingly, when I wrote to the minister asking for the exact timing of the decision, the response was that it would be communicated to us 'in due course'. So I will also be making the case to the planning committee that, in order to put pressure on Government, I need as much leverage as possible to press the case for why we need this money now. I sincerely hope there will be no gerrymandering with it. This issue should be above petty party politics.