This issue of the Newsletter, and any other recent issues saved in colour in electronic form, will be posted on the newly established Horspath Village website, (www.horspath.org.uk) by our professional, but entirely voluntary webmaster, Councillor Heather Palmer, to whom very special thanks are due for achieving in a very short time something which no one else has been able to do for us during some years of talking about it! The website is still in its infancy, but it is already really worth looking at, if for nothing else, just to see all the village photos in colour, and to find answers to many frequently asked questions about the Council and the village. This will become the electronic noticeboard and archive for the Council, and whenever in the future we have a real village crisis requiring the help of every resident, as we did when someone tried to demolish the Bridge against our wishes, this is where the information will be posted first, before leaflets can be printed for door-to-door delivery, and where further quickly updated information will be found, as well as on the noticeboard on the Green.

The most important current project for the future of Horspath is the development of a Parish Plan, which despite its name, is not just about the Parish surrounding our famous church, but it concerns the future of the whole village community. The Plan will be a written statement of the hopes and priorities of our village community, including an Action Plan listing what has to be done to achieve these aims, which when completed, will be distributed free of charge to every household as a well-presented booklet. This is a community initiative, supported by the Council, which should involve every resident in Horspath contributing their own views on what should be done to protect and improve Horspath, and it will involve everyone at least answering a fairly long questionnaire later this summer, which is explained more fully on pages 4 & 5 of this Newsletter, and will be discussed by anyone who can attend the Annual Parish Meeting on 30th April. Horspath is a village where the majority of residents take a very positive pride and pleasure in living here, and want to protect the village community and improve the general quality of life, and when we have produced a Parish Plan, the Council will know that it is representing the majority views of all residents when it follows the priorities agreed in the Plan, and fights its various planning battles to keep Horspath as a village separate from Oxford.

Unlike the successful ‘Battle to Save Horspath Bridge’, the latest of the ‘planning battles’ fought by the Parish Council to protect Horspath as a Green Belt village has not been fought in Horspath at all, but at the Examination in Public (EiP) of the draft South East Plan (SEP), where I represented the village at the public debates held in Woking and Reading by the South East England Regional Assembly (SEERA), which is the organisation which now takes over the future structure planning of Oxfordshire from Oxfordshire County Council. Horspath was one of the very few Oxfordshire Parish Councils which were able to have their

say in this EiP about the importance to us of remaining a village surrounded by the open countryside of the Green Belt, as proposed and supported by SODC, by the County Council, and by SEERA itself. At the EiP our views were opposed by a vast consortium of professional planners and lawyers representing builders and property developers supporting the claim by Oxford City Council that it needs space in the Green Belt to build a new "urban extension" to Oxford on the south or south-east side of the Oxford Ring Road – which could mean right here in Horspath - if some local landowners are allowed to have their own way. I produced all the written statements of case for the village as we simply could not afford a lawyer for Horspath for the long duration of this EiP, and I strongly opposed the scheme proposed by the City of Oxford to build in the Oxford Green Belt. I made the case that Oxford still has land within the City boundaries, designated as "Safeguarded Land", which it could develop if it needs housing for some of it s ‘key workers’, that even if the Green Belt was abolished, there would still be people who, provided that a rural village environment could be maintained, would prefer to live in a nice village like Horspath rather than in Oxford City, and would choose to commute into Oxford or elsewhere to work. I also made the point as often as possible that our efforts to preserve the rural environment and independence of our Green Belt village and prevent it from being overwhelmed by any future expansion of Oxford does not represent any selfish "nimbyism" on our part, but is a more responsible longer term way of protecting not only the local environment, but also the economy of the whole central Oxfordshire sub-region. The developers are in these big planning battles simply for money, very big money, on the scale of millions of pounds of profit for every single acre of Green Belt land which they might succeed in removing from the protection of the present Green Belt policy in the draft South East Plan. We will not know how well our viewpoint was received by the government Planning Inspectors at the EiP until they report in July, and then the final decisions about any possible changes to the Oxford Green Belt will be taken by the government in Westminster, where we will have to depend on our MP, Boris Johnson, to fight our case. So it is quite fortunate that Boris Johnson is visiting the village on the afternoon of July 13th and will take a short tea break in the Village Hall. It will be the next Council’s decision on how best to exploit this opportunity to lobby him, and to decide whether or not we need to mount a further campaign to protect the village.

The successful campaign to Save the Bridge showed that we can protect our rural community when we have such a crisis, and although the Bridge cannot now be legally demolished and remains there to slow down the traffic and prevent the largest heavy goods vehicles coming through Horspath, we have not yet been able to buy it for the quoted price of £1. The owners (BRB) still have to offer it for sale to Mr. Kelly at this price, even though it cannot now be legally demolished, and if he bought it, he would quickly face very expensive bridge engineering