Back from Holiday to a tirade of anti-student vitriol

I’m just back from a week away and disgusted by some of the emails I have received about a planning application in East Oxford. Clearly there is a campaign going on and a standard email has been circulated. I quote some phrases repeated in many of them:

“from my many years of experience of the growing numbers of students in the East Oxford area they are incapable of talking quietly or without using offensive language in every sentence that leaves their mouths along with continuously playing loud music.”

“The student population is increasing to unbearable amounts already in this area and they do not need any further encouragement or welcoming into our community because they bring nothing positive.”

“Our community is being destroyed and controlled by the universities and their students.”

Well I’m sorry but I completely disagree with all of that. It is full of gross generalisations and is frankly offensive to the many people in Oxford who are students or staff at either of its world-class Universities. To say students bring nothing positive is utter nonsense – how do people think local business remain viable and vibrant? I don’t just mean bars either – I mean buses, restaurants, supermarkets, local shops and much more. How many people in Oxford would become unemployed if out two Universities disappeared? I would, as would the leader of the council and many thousands more local people. The other thing to consider is that if purpose-built student accommodation is provided then this reduces pressure on more conventional housing that could then be used for families and other social groupings. In principle I think purpose-built student accommodation is a vital part of the accommodation mix in Oxford and the more of it we can have (so long as it is appropriate in scale, site etc.) the more we will reduce the massive housing pressure Oxford suffers.

We have students in our street and they are mostly quiet, considerate and well-spoken. Occasionally we hear them late at night and occasionally they hear us. That’s a consequence of living in a crowded City with densely built accommodation – for me it’s a fair swap for all the wonderful things there are about Oxford. At last night’s Central South and West area forum there were many students present with positive contributions to make and showing genuine interest for local issues of concern. I was extremely impressed that OUSU, the Oxford University Student Union, is organising an-on street collection for the new Crisis Skylight Centre in Oxford this weekend. Students do many good things for our City and many volunteer for all sorts of community outreach. You can read lots about this on the site of the Oxford Hub.

On this particular planning application I will retain an open mind – there may be reasons to refuse it if it gets called in and there may not. As chair of Planning Review Committee I’ll have to study it more carefully. But I can say this without any doubt: I will not be making any decision in either direction just because this is accommodation intended for students. To do so would show complete disregard for planning law and would be frankly stupid.

The language I have read in emails sounds horribly like the racism of the 60s, the homophobia of the 80s and the sexism of the 70s. I wonder – would people oppose an afro-Caribbean resource and advice centre, or an LGBT resource and advice centre, on that site with such gross and frankly disgusting generalisations. They might find themselves on the wrong side of the law if they did.

St Clements Car Park: Call in FAILS

Well the 5pm deadline has passed and only 8 councillors requested a call-in. It needs 12 for a call-in so it fails. This means the council can go ahead and issue the refusal of planning permission but it does of course remain open to the applicant to appeal to the Planning Inspectorate.

I think not calling this in was the right decision as I believe West Area Planning committee last week was run openly and fairly and got to its decision in a correct and proper way.

The saga of St Clements – tweets and many emails

Some readers will know that I like to tweet (Twitter – @tonybrett) about things going on in the council as I believe it makes for more open and accountable democracy. As I was just an audience member at West Area Planning I tweeted about it in some detail. BBC Radio Oxford picked up on this and rang me at home at 0640 on Thursday morning for comments and an interview about the process. I was happy to oblige although I must say getting a phone call at 0640 did make me think for a fleeting moment that someone must have died! Thankfully that was not the case and I was able to explain how call-in works.

Since then there have been a lot of emails to all councillors asking us not to call in the planning application. I am sending a standard response which I hope is explaining how things progress from here. The decision was published on Friday morning which means there must be call in requests from 12 City Councillors if the application is to be re-determined at a meeting of the Planning Review Committee, which I chair. At the moment I have seen five call in requests but there may be more that have not been shared with other councillors. Here’s what I’ve sent (not the picture!) :

Dear <name>,

The application has not been called in.

Some councillors have requested a call in but as far as I am aware only five have done that so far. The application will only be called in if twelve councillors have requested that by 5pm on Monday 19th September.

It is possible for the Head of City Development to call the application in also, within that same deadline, but there is no indication of that happening at this stage.

It is not my intention to support the call in as I believe West Area committee was run fairly and properly but we must accept that it is the democratic right of other councillors to do so if they feel that’s what those they represent want them to do.

I am keeping an open mind about the acceptability or otherwise of the development as I am the chair of Planning Review Committee and will need to be able to chair a discussion openly and fairly if the call-in succeeds.

I hope this explains things at what I of course understand must be a stressful time.

Yours,

Tony Brett

West Area Planning Committee – St Clements

I attended this meeting tonight as I value seeing how others chair meetings and how discussion of planning applications proceeds. Oscar is a good chair and it’s good to learn techniques from him.

Among others, today’s West Area Planning considered the controversial application to build student accommodation on the St. Clement’s car park. There were some very impassioned speeches from many parties and it was clear that the opposers had really brought the cavalry with some very respected planning consultants, senior folk from local businesses and from the Queen’s College.

There seemed to be several areas of discussion. These included access to Angel and Greyhound Meadow, proximity to Queens’ College’s listed Florey Building, the quality of the buildings proposed and the impact on local traders of the removal of the parking facility (in total during building and then reduced after completion).

Many councillors asked excellent questions and made very good and valid points both against and in favour of the application. Eventually there was motion to refuse planning permission, proposed by Oscar Van Nooijen (the chair) and seconded by Graham Jones (Lib Dem St. Clements’ councillor). Five voted in favour of the motion (Cllrs Jones, Benjamin, Van Nooijen, Goddard, Gotch) with four against the motion (Cllrs Price, Cook, Khan and Tanner). The motion thus passed and planning permission was refused.

The council procedures mean that there is a 2 working day period during which the decision can be called in for a second (and fresh) consideration at Planning Review Committee.

New Library and Teaching Building Celebratory Event

I attend this exciting event today that was held at Oxford Brookes University. It was to mark the progress of the work on the New Library and Teaching Building that Brookes is building.

Lucie Acraman, Janet Beer, Lorna Fround

I was impressed by the speech from Janet Beer, the Vice-Chancellor of Brookes and her vision for making Brookes even better than it already is. We also had a talk from Lucie Acraman, the President of the Students Union (theSU), and I was pleased to hear that its focus has moved from trading and basically being a big nightclub to much more student welfare, advocacy and support. The new building will enable that to happen much more effectively than currently and will be very close other important services that students will use. One of those services is the Brookes Careers Centre and that took us to the next speaker Lorna Froud, the Head of the Careers Service, who told us about all the good work that it does and how the unemployment rate of Brookes graduates in their first year after graduating is much lower than for other comparable post-92 Universities.

The evening was a good event and it reminded me how luck Oxford is to have not only one of the world’s best “old” Universities but also one of the UK’s best post-92 Universities.

The saga of the street lights on Magdalen Bridge

Back in early December 2010 I noticed that none of the street lamps along the North side of Magdalen Bridge was working. This isn’t strictly in my ward but I cycle home that way every day and it’s still City Centre. I saw a potential safety issue with cyclists having to pull out to turn right at the Plain and the risk of drivers of buses, cars, vans etc. not seeing them, especially if the cyclists were dressed in dark clothes and not using lights. Sadly that still happens far more often than it should. Many students also report feeling unsafe walking over the bridge and the darkness was not going to help that!

I made a report about the problem to the County Council street light repair service on 9th December. That service is normally excellent and things get repaired in a few days, almost always less than a week. I got a response the same day saying a 24hr job had been raised.

On 13th December I got an update saying the street light repair contractors had attended and found a power supply fault so had passed the issue onto Scottish and Southern Energy the body responsible for dealing with such issues. SSE is contracted to repair such faults in 20 working days. I asked if this could be given priority as it affected so many lights and on 14th December the County Council said they would try to pull some strings.

On 12th January 2011 I reminded the County Council that the 20 working days were now up (count them yourself if you don’t believe me!). Unusually I got no reply so sent a reminder on 17th January. I got a reply quickly that said, among other things:

“Guaranteed Standards of Performance for street lighting cable fault repairs became a statutory requirement from 01 October 2010. We will therefore claim penalty payments from SSE at £10 a day, for every day over 20 working days the fault is outstanding.”

I was also given the contact details for a person at SSE and the job reference so I could complain directly. I did so, as did the Bursar of a nearby College. I got a “not me guv” type of reply yesterday helpfully giving the contact details of the Oxford Depot manager for SSE as well as the engineer dealing with the issue. But still no progress!

Earlier in the week, while I was dealing with the order for Cherwell Student Newspaper for our department I mentioned this issue to the person I was dealing with. He passed it on to one of the Cherwell journalists who has today pursued SSE about the issue. I think the word “journalist” must have worked better than the word “councillor” because the job has now magically been programmed!

I have had an email this afternoon from the County Council saying:

“I have been told by SSE that there is a major cable fault on the bridge, which will require a power shutdown affecting businesses in the area (such as Sainsbury’s). The work has been programmed for next Thursday to allow the relevant businesses to be informed.”

So there we are. Some casework is easy, some takes ages and far too much chasing! I am amused that a journalist managed to achieve, in about half an hour, more than I have achieved in a month with this issue! Well done Cherwell. The £10/day fine for missing the service deadline does seem a rather paltry amount and is hardly going to make contractors take much notice of the20-day limit. I wonder why it is set so low.

Watch out for working lights next Thursday (27th Jan)! Update: There is now an article in Cherwell about this.

Greens trying to trick the public again

We’ve just had a “Green News” through our door. It has a story about how Oxford Greens are entirely behind the Save Temple Cowley Pools campaign and how they have tried to save the pool three times in full council. All true. Then it says that Liberal Democrat councillors have voted against them. You get what they are trying to imply…

The fact is that yes, Lib Dems may have voted against ridiculous Green amendments to motions about the pools but we have NEVER voted in favour of losing first-class swimming facilities in Cowley. We have accepted that maybe Temple Cowley Pools will have to go but have always made it crystal clear that we would only support that if there was a guarantee of an equivalent or better facility (and that includes the gym and sauna) in the immediate locality. Personally I’d love to see a combined pools and ice-rink facility with a big heat-pump to warm the pool and cool the ice on the site of the now vacant Royal Mail facility on the corner of Garsington Road and Hollow Way.

I think it’s this sort of blatant bending the truth by parties and attempting to deceive the public that puts so many people off politics and means so many have so little faith in local councillors. I am frankly appalled that the Greens think people might be so stupid as to fall for this.

Full Council

Not my favourite part of being a councillor but here goes…

The meeting had a big agenda as normal with lots of motions and questions. I won’t attempt to go through them all here but will pick a few things I thought salient.

The Save Temple Cowley Pools group were at the meeting and two of its leading members, Nigel Gibson and Jane Alexander (pictured) addressed full council. The Lord Mayor, who chairs full council, then tried to get agreement to take the two motions about Temple Cowley Pools immediately after that so the 20 or so members of the public in the viewing gallery wouldn’t have to wait hours for those motions that were near the end of the meeting. The Labour group refused to allow this, despite my saying I thought councillors were there to serve the public. As it turned out, Labour made lots of long and repetitive speeches in the earlier motions and I know I’m not the only person who wondered if they were trying to exhaust the 90 minutes available for motions so they could avoid discussing the Temple Cowley Pools issue again. I thought that was pretty poor given that most members of the public who had come to the meeting were mainly interested in just that issue.

We did finally get to discuss one of the two motions but it of course fell as Labour have decided that Temple Cowley Pools are closing come hell or high water.

Other notable items for me where the question to the Leader of the Council about how the Council would try to get a more accurate register electors in areas with lots of students. To my surprise the Labour Leader said “the number of students in Oxford is a problem”. An unfortunate comment given that he himself is a senior member of staff at Oxford Brookes University.

We had a motion put by Alan Armitage that essentially asked the City Council to record all FOI requests, and their answers, on a website so that the public could consult them more easily and we could be a bit more transparent. Even though Freedom of Information is a Labour initative, the Labour ruling group on Oxford City Council saw fit to vote this motion down. I’m not sure why.

Finally, I was also surprised that the Labour group voted down a motion from our own Jean Fooks that essentially would have strengthened the planning controls the city could use to reduce the carbon footprint of all new buildings. The argument was that it’s more important to focus on existing buildings. Which strikes me as not very forward-thinking!

The meeting finished around 10pm and we had a rather needed pint at The Old Tom afterwards.

Back from Hols and a Temple Cowley Pools Meeting

Well I’m back and refreshed after a lovely three weeks’ camping in France where the weather was fantastic. My first council meeting was another public “consultation” about Temple Cowley Pools. It was held in the Town Hall on 17 August and ran from about 7pm to 9.30pm. There was a big panel of presenters including City Council officers and folk from MACE, the consultants the City is using to advise it about pool provision in the City. I reckon around 100 members of the public attended.

Cllr John Tanner chaired the meeting which started with 30 minutes of so of presentation from Richard Smith of MACE and several others. MACE did seem to spend a long time trying to convince the audience why they were the best for the job.

I put “consultation” in quotes because it is abundantly clear that the council officers have already decided what they will recommend to executive board (CEB) that makes the decision on 1st September. One of the executive directors, Tim Sadler, even said as much! The chair said that the 1st Sept CEB would be a “public meeting”. That will be interesting.

Here is the financial “argument” the consultants were trying to put.

After the presentations many questions were asked and raised and it was quite a useful information gathering evening, even if it felt like the answer had already been decided. A big flaw I think in the argument is that I believe the number of people living in close proximity to Temple Cowley Pools has been vastly understated. I asked MACE to check the figure. It also omits all the people who work near it on Cowley Business Park.

We had several excellent speeches and I was particularly impressed by the work Jane Alexander had done to work up a plan that would cost about £3million. MACE did at least agree to discuss that with her but I doubt it will happen before 1st September. Here’s Jane’s proposal.

Jane's vision for Temple Cowley Pools

The comments from the Cowley Marsh councillors was interesting. One of them just wanted everyone to know how good he had been to arrange the consultation meeting and the other one suggested a vote of all present about whether they wanted Temple Cowley Pools to be closed and replaced with a new facility at Blackbird Leys. The chair did that vote by show of hands at the end of the meeting and the result was about 5 in favour and almost everyone else there against. An overwhelming disagreement with what the City Council officers were recommending.

You can read much more about this at http://www.savetemplecowleypools.webs.com/

and join the Facebook Group.

Labour may have a majority administration at the moment but if they close Temple Cowley Pools I can’t see that lasting. There was talk of it not happening for another two years so I have a nasty feeling they’ll wait until just after the next local elections in 2012 to do it. We’ll see.

Licencing hearing: My first premises licence review

I was part of a licensing hearing today where the Police had asked the City Council to review and revoke the premises licence for R&H News on St. Clement’s as it had failed three test purchases of alcohol to under 18s, carried out by Thames Valley Police. The Police only do test purchases where there is local intelligence that there is an underage sales problem in a premises. The test purchasers are not allowed to lie or use fake ID in the premises either.

The hearing was delayed by an hour because the licence holder’s barrister was held up in a difficult case at the Magistrates’ court. After hearing the evidence both from the Police and the licence holder it became apparent to the panel that the problems were caused by the designated premises supervisor (who has to be trained and have a personal licence to sell alcohol) allowing inexperienced casual staff to sell alcohol. These people appeared not to be following proper procedures or checks before making sales.

The panel (me, Mary Clarkson and Rae Humberstone) decided that the public interest would be best served by making sure that only properly trained and qualified people were allowed to sell alcohol in this premises, which is in a sensitive area with an established problem of under-age and street drinking. We did this by imposing a condition that only personal licence holders would be allowed to sell alcohol at R&H news and various other things such as maintaining a refusals book, having a policy of challenging anyone who looks under 25, and specifying documents that can be used as age proof.

We had to balance the desire not to put local people out of business with the need to protect minors from harm by ensuring that they cannot buy alcohol. I believe our decision achieved that.

The licence holder has 21 days to appeal the decision and if he does not do so before then our decision becomes a binding part of his premises licence. If he does appeal then he can carry on operating as he is now, until the outcome of the appeal (which would be to Oxford Magistrates) is known. If the shop fails another test purchase or breaks any of the new licence conditions after they come into force then Thames Valley Police would be entirely within its rights to refer the premises back to the City Council for a further review of its premises licence.