I attended both of these committees today although was last for the first as I had a work meeting that was longer than expected. I had attended the pre-meeting on Monday so I knew there was nothing too contentious.  I’m always impressed at how much hard work the licensing team does and how much they seem to get done.  You can read their update report on the council web site.

The General Purposes Licensing Committee was a bit more interesting and a few things a worthy of mention:

Firstly, my fellow LibDem councillor Gwynneth Royce made some excellent comments about having women represented on the taxi-licensing sub-committee (a panel of three councillors – two labour and one libdem).  It would be fair to say that the panel consists of three white, older males so is not very diverse.  I think diversity is always good on decision-making bodies and Jim Campbell pointed this out saying it’s good to have to work with people who don’t agree with you.  We resolved to invite both Labour and the LibDem group to consider if they might like to change their nominated councillors for this panel so as to make sure both sexes are represented.

Secondly, we discussed the issue of designation of streets for trading purposes.  We agreed to make all streets in the City “consent streets” which means that street trading has to have a licence from the City Council.  This is good because it will simply things and make issues such as on-street car selling on Cowley Road easier to deal with but the legislation has a very broad definition of “Street” so it may affect some food outlets in private car parks such as the one near Wickes on Botley Road and the one in the John Allen Centre at Cowley Centre.  We asked Officers to look carefully at this to see what could be done to mitigate the problem.

Finally we had a discussion about pavement trading stall as there is apparently a problem that the City’s standard 1Mx2M is difficult for traders as the “standard” size you can buy is 1.3Mx2.4M (4ftx8ft).  I’m a bit worried that this represents over 50% increase in area but was assured that this will only be a discretionary increase when officers believe that the larger area is necessary for the type of items being sold (i.e. a flower stall may well need to be bigger than a jewellery stall).  Personally I don’t like the stalls with large objects attached to the side of them either.  They clog up the street and impede pedestrian flow as well as being grossly outside the size limit.  Officers agreed to consider these carefully when doing enforcement.

The meeting finished soon after 7pm.