Some may be tempted to feel some sympathy for Oxford University this week.

The first postgraduates are shortly due to arrive at the new Castle Mill accommodation, all no doubt looking forward to enjoying the beautiful views over Port Meadow.

City council officers, as we reported last week, were recommending that the city council’s west area planning committee should effectively sign off the scheme, having accepted that the university had taken satisfactory measures to mitigate concerns about everything from contamination to a badger sett.

True enough the possibility of a judicial review lay ahead, but perhaps the university was lulled into believing that the worst was behind it and one of the most bitter planning wrangles Oxford has seen in 40 years was drawing to an end. But there was to be no signing off.

There was to be no item on the agenda. Instead there seems to have been a last-minute Town Hall panic as legal advice arrived calling for the brakes to be slammed on.

Worst of all the council’s sudden concern about the need for further technical assessment appears necessary under European environmental regulations. This seemingly late awareness of the implications of Euro rules, leaves the university in no-win situation.

It is faced with breaking the news to the new graduates that they will not after all be moving into new flats with the best view in Oxford, on the grounds that unhappily the site of the new blocks where they were to be accommodated are the subject of an ongoing contamination investigation. Instead, alternative accommodation elsewhere in the city would need to be found for them — and quick.

Alternatively, the university may well choose to move in its students, confident that the city council is really fully satisfied with the mitigation measures carried out — and simply shrug that it is only a question of going through fine print regarding past activity on the site, in any case.

Yet, attractive as this option may be, the university will stand accused of moving in students before the issues of contamination and health have been resolved to the satisfaction of councillors. Even the university must now be wishing an environmental impact assessment had been carried out long ago.

But Castle Mill and the relationship between Oxford University and Oxford City Council will remain major issues where ever the new arrivals lay down their cases later this month.