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Your own submissions this time are very important - the LAST TIME for you to have your say about BWSF before the final hearings in October.

There’s a huge amount of reading.  The ones with links below are just a small selection of over 90 published last week and you probably won’t have time to read more than a fraction of them.  The Applicant’s (PVDP) Responses to the Examiners’ questions are particularly important to consider.   If you submitted anything in August at deadline 3, look for PVDP’s reply to you in their answers to questions from other Interested parties (links to these documents below).

We recommend:

1. Pick just questions about issues of particular concern to you and submit your comments on those.
2. Comment on how well or badly you think they’ve been answered, whether you agree with what has been said and what concerns you may still have on the issue.
3. Make it easier for the examiner by quoting the document and question number you are responding to. Keep your submission brief but relevant.  
4. This list may help! It includes some of the issues we suggest would be particularly useful for you to respond to. (main Examiners’ question numbers they refer to - or other reference - in brackets):

• Hedges and Footpaths - ongoing issues with hedges including oppressive new 3/4m hedges on footpaths and overwhelming properties, what happens at decommissioning, upgrades to bridleways - if 5m wide and paved would they be used by vehicles? loss/damage to ancient hedges. (ExQ2.13.8, and responses fromall IPs to this question)
• Education facility (building) at Bladon.  Why there - in Green Belt, with no access and nearer to Blenheim than fields where panels have already been removed on Heritage setting grounds? How will it be funded, noting costs of staff, facilities management etc.  Would it come out of the Community Benefit Fund and who would manage it - Blenheim? (ExA.2.15.4&5, 2.16.3 Change Request 2, change10)
• Land retention for Food growing in Bladon and the Hanboroughs - not as originally trumpeted as allotments for the local community so placed on outskirts of villages but mostly (30 hectares) now to be used by commercial enterprises selling food elsewhere so no community benefit.  This was introduced without consultation with any Parish Councils or relevant village organisations. (ExQ2.5.4,2.5.5)
• Buffers. Minimum 25m for residential properties is lower than any other NSIP proposal so far submitted. Why so little? Why no Residential Visual Amenity Assessment? (ExQ2.13.15)
• Loss of Green Belt - are the “Very Special Circumstances” met? (ExQ2.11.12 &13, Historic England response to Ex2.6.4)
• Loss of best and most versatile (BMV) agricultural land currently yielding well and contributing to UK’s food security. Applicant now admits 42% of land to be taken is BMV. (ExQ2.11.4 &7and Annex 8 in same doc)
• Why so little focus beyond Blenheim onsetting of all the historic elements in the area. If you live in or near a listed building raise the heritage grounds for protection of setting.  Church bodies (eg Church Hanborough, Begbroke, Cassington, Cumnor) please reinforce your earlier submissions.(ExQ2.6.9 to 2.6.18)
• Changes to positioning of Nat Grid substation and impact on Cumnor (ExQ2.3.3, 2.7.1 plus change request 2)
• Funding. The source for £900 million pounds to build still not revealed (ExQ2.5.1&2, 2.5.9)

• Applicants Response to ExA’s Second Written Questions Part 1 and 2. View here.
• Applicants Response to other deadline 3 submissions including SBW (page 75) and maybe to you! View here.
• Applicants Response to Oxfordshire Host Authorities (OHA). View here.
• Historic England deadline 4 submission. View here.
• Historic England submission of ICOMOS Technical Review. View here.
• SBW’s deadline 4 submission. View here.
• PVDP’s Change Request 2 (11 changes to design). View here.

The Local Solution

Solar energy should be used specifically to meet local demands and directly benefit local communities, not big landowners and overseas companies.

1. Solar panels should be on house, office and warehouse roofs throughout Oxfordshire
2. Solar panels should be situated on brown field sites (Didcot Power Station, for example, which is already linked to the Grid).
3. Community solar farms should be encouraged. These are funded, designed and run directly under community control, and service just the community resulting in benefits to everyone’s electric bills.

And there are other imaginative means of providing green energy. These are just four: 

• Smaller scaled wind turbines can be used locally to serve a community.
• France has designed trees whose ‘leaves’ turn in the wind. One tree can provide an estimated 40% of the annual electricity for a house.
• Switzerland is putting solar panels between the rails of their entire railway network.
• In America, transparent solar ‘windows’ can, experts believe, power 40% of America

The National Solution

As well as a national rollout of these local solutions we have offshore windpower which offers peak electricity in the dark winter months when the UK most needs energy and when solar panels are least efficient. And, of-course, there are other offshore energy sources – wave power, tidal power etc already in use.

Finally, Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law at Swansea Law School sums it up in the Spectator: “In the dash for Green Energy “corporate capital is being handed a heaven- sent opportunity at the expense of you, me and the country we live in at least as regards solar power (Government policy) is not working for the benefit of the people ……..

but instead seems to favour a more international clientele.”

All of this means we don’t need old fashioned, large scale, inefficient solar ‘farms’.