Today, I was at Blenheim Palace to appear on The Politics Show on BBC South. The pictures on the left show me with the presenter Peter Henley. This all took place whilst a mediaeval jousting tournament was in full flight in the background. The idea was to have both knights and politicians "jousting" at the same time in the lead up to the local elections on 4th June!
The programme was covering issues surrounding the Oxfordshire county council elections (see previous entry regarding our Lib Dem manifesto). We covered the pedestrianisation of Oxford City Centre and educational achievement in the first half of the programme and then went on to the housing allocations in the forthcoming publication of the South East Plan.
As we all know, Grove and Wantage along with Bicester and Didcot, have all been named as locations for housing growth up to 2026. I tried to get across (although this can be challenging on live TV) the concerns of residents about large-scale housing in areas such as Grove where there is little existing infrastructure. Both Didcot and Bicester are much better locations as they have existing infrastructure like railway stations, close links to the A34/M40 and cultural/leisure facilities (e.g. cinema and arts centre at Didcot).
If you missed it, you can still watch the programme here. The Oxfordshire piece is about 30mins into the programme and is 20 mins long. There was a lot to pack into this short time, but it was an opportunity to try to push our message across.
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