AS HOUSE prices creep beyond the reach of many workers, Oxford and Cambridge universities are looking to the past and reviving the idea of employer-sponsored home building.
With a nod to the great industrialists George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and William Lever — who built communities for factory workers — the two universities are investing in new housing for staff and postgraduate students.
Cambridge is planning to build 2,500 homes in the north west of the city. But, notes The Times Higher Education Supplement (Jan 13), 1,500 of these will be on sale on the open market. The development will include “necessary social amenities”, including a school, and the accommodation will be a mix of rental and partial-equity ownership.
Oxford’s plans, meanwhile, are rather more modest: the university plans to build 200 homes in a £40 million development at the village of Wolvercote. This would make the village grow by about 20 per cent.
It remains unclear who will be entitled to live there, as Oxford City Council regulations stipulate that 50 per cent of new housing developments should be affordable to locals. This does not include housing built specifically by employers for keyworkers.
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But as John Goddard, the city councillor for Wolvercote, points out in the THES: “It is not clear whether academics are key workers. I know of bus drivers who can’t afford to live in Oxford and have to drive in from Bournemouth.”