Well this is always a bit of a theatrical experience. Lots of political gesturing and lots of people who are normally perfectly polite being a little less than civil. We started with announcements and the one I want to mention is the forthcoming retirement of Jude Skipp, the members’ support officer and Lord Mayor’s secretary. Jude is a wonderful woman and the council will be a poorer place without her. She started work for the City Council in 1971 – the year I was born!
We then heard some excellent addresses by members of the public about Temple Cowley Pools. Nigel Gibson and Jane Alexander spoke especially well. I was amazed to hear that 120 people had turned up to the public meeting at Temple Cowley Pools to ask for it to be saved but only about 12 turned up at the meeting in Blackbird Leys where a new pool was being proposed.
We moved on to questions from the public and 24 had been notified. Quite a few people didn’t turn up to ask their questions which I think is a shame as councillors had put time into preparing answers and the large number of questions were part of the reason the briefing note was 49 pages long!
Next up was City Executive Board recommendations. The interesting one was the new governance arrangements forced on local authorities by the previous Labour Government. We had to choose between having an elected mayor and having a “strong leader”. We chose the latter and that means the leader of the council has lots of power and can essentially hand-pick her or his cabinet. The proposal for an elected Mayor was not supported as Oxford City had voted fairly convincingly against it in a referendum in 2002.
We broke for tea then and returned after 40 minutes for members’ questions on notice. There were another 24 of these and they were used to quiz the administration further about Temple Cowley Pools. The IWCA councillor was particularly nasty to Antonia Bance and it felt like he accused her of racism and homophobia, which knowing Antonia as I do, are both ridiculous. I may disagree with her politics but she is most certainly not a racist or a homophobe. The questions I liked most was the one from Graham Jones to the leader about how much the “Your Oxford” council publication costs to distribute and circulate. I know that many of us see it as an administration propaganda device rather than being useful at actually getting to the most excluded people in our City.
The longest item in Council was the motions. The Greens in particular seem to have had their creative hats on overdrive this time. Of course with a majority administration the motions rarely change anything but they do enable open discussion of important items. The notable motions were the one to recommend to the remuneration panel that councillor allowances be frozen for the next couple of years; a rather nasty motion about senior officers’ salaries (rather embarrassing as they were all there for the discussion) and an important motion from Jean Fooks about biodiversity and applauding the work of the Oxfordshire Nature Conservation Forum.
Sadly I think the Greens won the bad behaviour award this time. The leader of the Green group trampled all over the allowed 3 minutes for speeches and had to be reprimanded by the Lord Mayor. Another Green councillor had a rather unfortunate outburst about Green attitudes to students that had to be stopped by the Lord Mayor standing to silence her.
We finished around 10pm – a long evening after a full day at work.