Hallam Land has gone to the Secretary of State over 370 homes at Peashell Farm, Downs Road, after West Oxfordshire failed to decide the plan in 18 months.

A plan for up to 370 homes on the edge of Witney has gone to the Secretary of State because West Oxfordshire District Council never decided it. The developer, Hallam Land, lodged the appeal on 19 August 2026, against what the statutory notice calls “the failure of the Council to give notice of a decision”.

The application, reference 25/00144/OUT, was validated on 29 January 2025. It was still marked “under consideration” when we checked today, more than 18 months later.

The statutory deadline for a decision was 30 April 2025. The council and the applicant then agreed an extended date of 29 May 2026, and that passed too. The appeal followed almost three months after it.

The site is Peashell Farm, on Downs Road. It sits in Curbridge and Lew parish, immediately beyond Witney’s south-western edge, next to the Windrush Place estate. Witney Town Council told the council in its own response that Windrush Place is inside Witney parish and that Witney would be the new development’s “main service centre”.

What is being applied for

The scheme is outline, with everything reserved except the access. It covers:

  • up to 370 homes, including affordable housing
  • land for up to 400 square metres of local retail
  • pedestrian and cycle connections, bridle routes and internal roads
  • open space, play areas, allotments and landscaping
  • surface water drainage and supporting utilities
  • demolition of the existing farm buildings

The one matter fixed at this stage is vehicle access, taken from the existing Downs Road roundabout. The applicant is Hallam Land and the agent is David Lock Associates of Milton Keynes. The case officer is Mike Cassidy.

Twelve days before the appeal was lodged, West Oxfordshire’s environmental health team put its position in writing to the case officer.

In an email dated 7 August 2026, the officer wrote that the key question is whether the planning department considers the site “desirable”. If it does not accept a design in which most homes keep their windows shut, then “Environmental Health would be of the belief that the site is not suitable for housing, and I would therefore recommend a refusal based on the illustrative plan”.

The objection is to relying on closed windows and mechanical ventilation to keep road noise out. The officer wrote that this approach “depends on occupants keeping windows shut”, is “generally considered contrary to the principles of good acoustic design”, and limits natural ventilation, “particularly in a rural setting”. Witney Town Council raised the same road in its own response, citing the site’s “proximity to the A40”.

The same email sets out the conditions environmental health would want if planners decided to approve anyway, including a fresh acoustic assessment before any reserved matters on layout, scale or appearance.

The land is in the draft Local Plan, for later

Peashell Farm is named in the Regulation 19 draft Local Plan 2043, which is out for consultation until Friday 9 October. It falls inside Policy WIT6, “Land west of Witney”, an 84-hectare Strategic Location for Growth for about 700 homes. The plan names the site promoter as “David Lock / Hallam”, the same pair behind this appeal.

The plan does not treat Peashell Farm as a standalone site. Paragraph 8.2.101 says existing uses in this “rural fringe location”, including Peashell Farm, the Witney Lakes Resort and Curbridge Business Park, are “likely to have an impact on the quantum and distribution of different land uses”. Paragraph 8.2.103 says that if the Witney Lakes Resort stays where it is, there is “the possibility of two separate areas of development taking place either side of it”, one of them at Peashell Farm.

WIT6 also comes with a requirement that development “must be guided by a comprehensive, community masterplan”. And the plan says its strategic locations are “expected to come forward from Year 6 of the plan period onwards”, which is 2030/31.

An appeal decision, if it goes the applicant’s way, would not wait for any of that. The draft plan has not been examined or adopted, and it carries limited weight until it is.

The Club Company, which operates Witney Lakes Resort, objected to the application in November 2025.

What the councils and residents said

Curbridge and Lew Parish Council did not object. Its clerk wrote in March 2025 with a list of things it wanted funded instead, including:

  • £100,000 to upgrade the cycle path between Well Lane and Main Road along the A4095
  • £60,000 for parking at the Parish Hall
  • £30,000 for solar panels and energy efficiency work at the Parish Hall
  • £10,000 towards Well Lane play area, which it expects to wear out sooner
  • money towards extending the cemetery at St John the Baptist Church in Curbridge

The parish council also flagged a culvert across Main Road and Well Lane that a 2013 council survey found in “very poor condition”, and the width of the Downs Road bridge and junction, where it says larger vehicles have been seen mounting the kerb to pass each other.

Witney Town Council did not object either, but set out conditions it wants attached. It recorded that it “resolved a vote of no confidence during 2024 in Thames Water’s ability to provide adequate infrastructure”, asked for the Environment Agency to be brought in on sewerage, and said members were “acutely aware of the poor delivery” of community facilities on the neighbouring Windrush estate. It asked for contributions including £30,000 for sports and recreation, £17,000 for community infrastructure and £5,000 for Windrush Cemetery, and asked the district council to consider reopening Deer Park Medical Centre for west Witney residents struggling to get a GP appointment.

The register lists 31 documents as objection comments and one as support, though those are document counts rather than people: Windrush Against Sewage Pollution alone filed six objection documents on 11 February 2025.

Timeline of the Peashell Farm planning application from January 2025 to the August 2026 appeal
How 25/00144/OUT reached appeal. Source: West Oxfordshire District Council planning register and the appeal notice. Graphic by Witney News.

What it means for you

Nothing is built and nothing is approved. An appeal against non-determination takes the decision away from West Oxfordshire councillors and hands it to a planning inspector acting for the Secretary of State.

If you commented on the application already, your comments go forward. The Planning Inspectorate normally passes representations already made to the council to the inspector, and it runs its own comment window once the appeal is validated and given a case reference. When we checked today, no appeal reference appeared on West Oxfordshire’s planning register or in the Planning Inspectorate’s case portal, so there is nothing yet to comment on.

The deadline in the newspaper notice, 2 September 2026, applied only to owners of the appeal site and to tenants of an agricultural holding on it. It is not the public comment deadline.

Two things are worth watching. The first is the appeal reference appearing on the register, which is when the public window opens. The second is the Local Plan consultation, which closes at a fixed date, Friday 9 October 2026, and which is the argument about whether this land should be built on at all. We set out the three Witney allocations in West Oxfordshire Local Plan: 2,100 homes on Witney’s edge.

New applications for the town are listed on our Witney planning news page. If you are following what the A40 and Downs Road look like day to day, the current closures are on the Witney roadworks and travel page, and district sale prices are on the Witney house prices page.

Sources

Checked on 2 September 2026 against the sources above. One thing could not be confirmed: the Planning Inspectorate case reference for the appeal, which had not appeared on either the council’s register or the appeals casework portal when we looked.