Vale of White Horse District Council
Abbey House, Abbey Close,
Abingdon, OX14 3JE
Email: comments@whitehorsedc.gov.uk
Telephone: 01235 520202

Vale of White Horse District Council

The Preferred Options for the Vale

The future development of the Vale for the next 20 years is about to be decided.

As part of the Local Development Framework, which replaces the Local Plan, the Vale of White Horse District Council has to set out where it believes  11,560 new homes, sites for employment, shopping and leisure facilities should be developed in the Vale up to 2026.

This presents a chance to breathe new life into the Vale’s town centres and provide new opportunities for business, employment and leisure, as well as new roads and opportunities for new services and community facilities.

The greatest challenge will be to identify sites for new housing development. The South East Plan requires 11,560 new homes to be built in the Vale by 2026. The Council has already made provision for a substantial proportion of these homes in its current Local Plan, however sites for around 4,470 new homes still need to be found, largely on Greenfield sites.

A document has now been prepared which sets out plans to:

• Increase housing in Faringdon, on the western edge of Didcot and either Wantage or Abingdon
• Develop and improve the centres of Abingdon, Botley, Faringdon and Wantage
• Promote the expansion of jobs at Milton Park and the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus
• Build new roads.

This is the "Preferred Options" stage of the Local Development Framework process and sets out where the Council believes new developments can be built in the Vale and what changes to infrastructure need to be made to support them.

The full document is available to download from the right of the page, or can be downloaded here by chapter:

• Section 1 - Help shape the future of the Vale
• Section 2 - The Vale today
• Section 3 - The vision and objectives for the future
• Section 4 - The Spatial Strategy - the location of new development
• Section 5 - What the preferred options would mean for different places in the Vale
• Section 6 - Policies applying across the Vale
• Appendix 1 - LDF background 
• Appendix 2 - Abingdon
• Appendix 3 - Wantage and Grove
• Appendix 4 - The Didcot area
• Appendix 5 - Botley
• Appendix 6 - Faringdon
• Appendix 7 - Types of development appropriate in different flood zones

Public consultation on the Preferred Options has now finished and all the comments received will be carefully considered before preparing the draft Core Strategy. This will be published in January 2010 and sent to the Government who will appoint an inspector to examine it. A summary of the comments received can be found on the Preferred Options consultation page.