Oxfordshire County Council’s Cabinet has published its draft budget for 2026/27. The budget is due to be considered by Scrutiny Committee and the county council’s Cabinet in January, before being voted on at Full Council in February. The proposed 2026/27 capital programme includes:
High priority capital schemes to which funding is proposed to be allocated
£14.1m is proposed from corporate funds to enable the Watlington Relief Road scheme to be progressed. The estimated project cost is £22.3m. The WRR is included in a budget line for Schemes that encourage and facilitate active travel and improve Oxfordshire towns
The use of £14.1m of corporate funds to enable the scheme to progress means developer funding has to be sought to replace the corporate funding as far as possible to reduce the amount of OCC funds required for the scheme. This is so funds are maximised for the county’s capital programme.
Last year, the County and District Councils confirmed to ORAA the importance of clarity on forward finance: ” The Councils are being very clear and transparent with developers when money is being used to front fund infrastructure and when County or Districts are contributing towards a piece of infrastructure. We are making sure that where we require a developer to pay for infrastructure we are ensuring that we check against the CIL regulation tests so we can be assured that the funding is valid and can be recovered” (Oxfordshire Leaders Joint Committee October 2025.)
Budget papers are not clear on how the council’s £14.1m corporate funds will be recovered. The county typically seeks funds to mitigate use of its funds from developers. Developer contributions must be ‘directly related” to the WRR and ‘fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind” to it and this further development to justify using council funds for forward finance needs to be included in the scope of the project – the use of corporate funds is on the basis it will be recouped by further development, as much as possible.
There is no firm go live date in 2026/27 for commencement on site. The scheme does not have planning permission and decisions on the planning application are not in the control of the council, and are subject to due process of planning.
WRR secured S106 & growth deal funds
The outline business case for the Watlington Relief Road sets out, the scheme has £2.564m secured in S106 with a further likely £740k.
The scheme had £7.1m secured from the Oxfordshire Housing & Growth Deal but some of this was reallocated to other schemes. £4.237m expenditure of growth deal funds has been spent on progressing the scheme (the remainder of the £7.1m was allocated to other schemes). The £4.237m does not have to be repaid.
The Watlington Relief Road was removed from the H&GD in Q1 2024/25 as its delivery partner. The county council has proposed including the scheme in its capital programme. This commits the council to build it, whatever the cost, which is unknown. The scheme does not have an agreed design on which a “target price” cost estimate to construct it could be given by a contractor.