We met this evening at West Oxford Community Centre.  The agenda was not huge.

We started with a good summary from Craig Rossington from the County Council about transport and roads plans for the next 20 years.  Clearly this is a long term strategy but it’s good to see the County Council thinking strategically even in these straightened times.  I think we all agreed that there has hitherto been over-regulation in the City Centre and that the cycling restrictions on Cornmarket and Queen Street are not ideal as considerate cyclists would be careful to work with, rather than against, pedestrians and careless inconsiderate ones probably ignore the restrictions anyway.  We also agreed that the traffic lights at the junction of Broad Street, Catte Street, Holywell Street and Parks Road are a waste of time as there is very low traffic flow at that junction, many cyclists ignore them and they don’t even have a pedestrian phase!

We had a good report from Dave Huddle who has done some excellent work on street scene issues and similarly from Matthew Bullivant of Thames Valley Police.

We had two planning applications to determine – one was a technical matter that had to come to committee and be done in public because it was an application by the council to the council.  We approved that without discussion.  The other was for the old Marlborough House pub in Grandpont that has been vacant and boarded up for some time.  It read “Demolition of rear outbuilding. Erection of ground floor extension. Change of use from public house to cafe on ground floor and 4 x 1 bedroom holiday apartments on the ground and 1st floor and 1 x 1 bed flat on 2nd floor. Provision of cycle parking and bin storage.”  It’s always a shame to lose a pub but it had gone anyway so the application was approved.  A very local resident also took the trouble to come along to give her supporting views of the application, for which I was grateful.

The other planning application was just for our comments and was for a for a big redevelopment on the corner of St. Aldates and Queen Street which has been festering for a long time.  As with all major projects, developers have to provide money sometimes called “section 106” money to the local authorities to mitigate the effects of the development on infrastructure things such as roads, schools, libraries etc.  This application had reached stalemate as the developers were offering about £200k and the planners were recommending about £1.9M.  Personally I thought some of the proposed buildings would have been a bit out of place too although I would have welcomed a new way through to Queen Street from St. Aldates that didn’t go via Carfax.

We meet again on 11th Jan if there are any planning applications to determine.  If not, then on  8th Feb.  We may not have many area committees left as the Labour administration of Oxford City Council is planning to abolish them early in the new year.  I think this is a terrible blow for local democracy but rather typical of Labour.