Land west of Little Smiths Farm, Drayton

6005108·Vale of White Horse·11 Sept 2026allowed·P25/V0180/O

Tier label used

Larger Village / Service Centres

The tier sentence ¶62

“Identifies Drayton as a ‘Larger Village’ within the settlement hierarchy”

Summary

Outline for up to 31 homes on a well-contained field edge of Drayton, a Larger Village. Allowed after inquiry. The inspector found supply of about 4.9 years (not the council's 5.34), rejecting a blanket lapse-rate discount but also refusing to add Oxford's unmet need to the requirement. With a shortfall, S5(1)(j) was met; settlement-strategy conflict was given only moderate weight because S5 "undermines the essential thrust" of those policies.

The location finding

TR3: benefit. walk/cycle to post office, pub, shop, school; 34 and X2 buses; plus highway works moderate weight (DL 66, 127)

Why this is cited

Larger Village tier limits unallocated development to local needs: conflict found, but outweighed; 249-home allowed on S5(1)(j). In the register this counts as a case where the tier counted against the site.

Sources

Decision on the Planning Inspectorate appeals service · full decision note · letter pins-corpus/6005108.txt

One entry in a register of 203 decisions that matched the search for a settlement-tier label, each read at every matching passage and classified by how the label influenced the decision. The quotation was checked against the source named above. Not legal advice. © Planning Distilled. Text, data and images on this page are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: share and adapt them freely, with credit to Planning Distilled. Quotations from decision letters, plans and the Framework remain the copyright of their publishers. Source and data: github.com/planningdistilled/research.