A £1.1M PLAN for eight new council houses in Oxford is set to be approved next week.

The authority wants to build the homes on back land sites, with some planning permission already secured for most of the scheme.

The council said the eight homes will be the first homes delivered in the city as part of the £215m Housing and Growth Deal.

It wants to use an innovative method by building the homes off site, as part of a pilot.

That will hope to ‘reduce time required in construction’ and ‘lessen the impact of works on neighbouring homes’.

It has already got permission for homes at Mortimer Drive in Marston – where homes will be built on a disused garage site. Other homes will be built at a disused play area in Bracegirdle Road in Wood Farm.

All but one of the homes will be built at those two sites.

A third site at Broad Oak, also in Wood Farm, still needs to get planning permission.

The council hopes to spend £1.1m in a contract with F1 Modular.

The company has been working with the council for a year on the project.

If delivered, the homes would cost about £137,500 each. These costs are ‘competitive in terms of general build costs and cheaper than current prices’, according to a council report.

The city council’s executive board will be asked to sign the plan off and delegate responsibility to its deputy chief executive, Caroline Green, at a meeting on Tuesday.

The project has already been provisionally signed off in the council’s 2017/18 capital programme and medium term financial plan.