This meeting was held at St. Barnabas School in Jericho as we rotate around the area.

The main focus of the meeting was a discussion on community-led planning, both in terms of community work and planning in the development control sense.

The Head of City Planning attended and gave a useful overview of the Localism Bill and its provisions for Neighbourhood Plans.  We were referred to a short overview document (PDF) about Neighbourhood Plans too.

A good discussion ensued and I think some of the salient points are:

1. The localism bill seems to be more aimed at rural communities to allow them to plan for and authorise more development so it’s not clear how useful it would be in a crowded urban area like Oxford.

2.  Councillors are very tightly bound by planning law and when we are determining applications it does feel more like we are serving those laws than serving the desires of our electorates.  If we refuse things when there is no planning reason we are likely to get the decision overturned by an unelected planning inspector and may get costs awarded against us as a local authority.  That has to be paid out of Oxford taxpayers’ money so serves nobody.

I shall keep a close eye on how the Localism Bill develops.

Although the meeting was in Jericho it was a shame very few people from Jericho attended.  I do also question how sensible it is having a meeting in a cold primary school hall, where the chairs are more suitable for 5-11 year olds than adults!