Turning Gloucester Green into a food court?

I have received much correspondence this week from concerned residents of The Chilterns, the apartments that are along two sides of Gloucester Green.  The applications are 11/01135, 11/01140 and 11/01142. The first appears to be on the West side and the second two on the North side.  All applications are for a change of use from use class A1 (retail) to A3 (hot food restaurant and/or takeaway).

Concerns are around the much larger amount of rubbish A3 units tend to produce and its storage as these are quite constrained sites.  There is also concern that food waste not stored properly will cause bad smells and attract vermin.  I certainly share those concerns and also those about late night running of noisy ventilation fans and of course all the people-noise that more food outlets will inevitably bring.  Some objections are based on the impact more A3 will have on the viability of existing A3 premises but unfortunately this is not a planning reason that can be taken into account when determining a planning application.

What can be taken into account is the actual noise, smell, refuse problems that more A3 units will inevitably cause.  I think this would be a step too far in reducing amenity and increasing nuisance for residents of The Chilterns so I hope these applications are turned down.  There is already another hour added to the opening time (making it 4am) of a food outlet that backs onto the cinema (subject of an earlier blog post) and I really do think that enough is enough this time.

The applicants seem to make the argument that the retail units are not financially viable and that the only way to make these units viable is to let them be food outlets.  I think the applicants (who are the landlords) are rather forgetting that the financial equation also includes the rent payable to the landlord. These applications therefore do rather strike me as yet another landlord being greedy and trying to maximise profit without showing any regard for the amenity of the area, balance of uses of premises or the rights of quiet enjoyment of their properties that those living in the area have.

I am pleased that these applications have been called into the West Area Planning Committee by my Lib Dem colleagues Stephen Brown, Alan Armitage, David Rundle and Jim Campbell and I do hope that when it comes to determine the applications  the new West Area Planning Committee will turn them down.

In the event that the planning use changes are granted then I hope the provisions of the Licensing Act 2003 can be used to prevent any new A3 units from operating late at night and into the small hours that further disturbing the residents of The Chilterns.

Central South and West Area Committee

We met at St Barnabas School on Hart Street today.  It was freezing cold and sitting on children’s chairs is not ideal.  There was not a huge amount on the agenda although we had a useful update on street scene issues and a City Centre Police report from Insp. Matt Bullivant.

barnabas.jpgThere were no planning applications although we did talk about the plans to make Jericho a conservation area and put an article 4 direction area in place (which basically removes permitted development rights from building owners).  Although some buildings in Jericho, notably St. Barnabas Church, are worth preserving I must say that a lot of the housing is very substandard with no cavity walls, poorly insulated windows and incredibly insubstantial foundations.  I’m not quite sure why we are preserving rows and rows of cheap houses that were originally built as mass housing for the poor.  I think the planning restrictions will severely limit people’s ability or inclination to make their properties more energy efficient and I think that’s a real shame.

There was a presentation from a County Council officer about the cuts to libraries and youth services.  I was very embarrassed at the hard time one member of the committee gave the officer, especially in public!  It’s not the officer that decided on the cuts – it was the Tory County Councillors!  Talk about shoot the messenger!

We finished just after 7.30pm all very cold and uncomfortable on the children’s chairs.

Greens trying to trick the public again

img014.jpgWe’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.

Central South and West Area Committee

Well that came around quickly! We met today in the town hall but I was rather late as I’d been to a work meeting in Nottingham and got stuck in a huge jam driving back through Oxford to go home and get my bike to cycle back to the Town Hall.  Oxford would jam up on the one rare evening I choose drive through it!

map_of_central_south_and_west_oxford_29783.gifWe looked again at the Westgate redevelopment planning permission renewal and I was concerned to hear from some residents who were seriously worried about noise and fume pollution to their properties.  I hope this can be sorted out before any development proceeds. We also determined some other fairly minor planning applications.

We had an item of urgent business that  was essentially asking to divert some developer contributions in the Botley Road area away from public art and towards improved flood mitigation measures.  Given the disastrous flooding we have seen three times in that area in the last decade this was a bit of a no-brainer and was approved once we’d asked a few questions about how the council would be ensuring best value for money for the citizens of Oxford.

There was one final item that was rather unfortunate as it was about a retrospective application for funds for an event held in September by the Oxford City Canal Partnership.  The application should not have been retrospective but it seems that nobody in the council remembered to ask the organisation to apply for the grant once it had been agreed in principle by the area committee back in February 2010.  We reluctantly decided to overturn the officer recommendation not to pay the money as we felt it had only not been paid because of an error that was in no part the fault of the Canal Partnership.

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.

18102010979.jpgThe 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.

Licensing and Gambling Acts Committee

I chaired this meeting today as the chair, Mary Clarkson was unavailable.  I’d had lunch with her on Monday to talk through the issues so I felt well briefed.  The agenda today consisted of three main items:

The review of the City Council’s statement of licensing policy.  This policy has to be regularly reviewed and there were no major changes.  The most significant is that it now allows members of the City Council to have representations heard as an interested party for any licensable premises in the City – they not longer have to be resident locally to it.

The second item was the Committee’s response to the Home Office Consultation entitled Rebalancing the Licensing Act.  A balanced and proportionate response had been prepared by our licensing team leader and the committee was happy to re-endorse it (as it had had to be sent last month after approval by me as vice chair and Mary as chair).  An interesting proposal is to give local authorities discretion to set license fee levels.  I think this might be useful firstly as a levy for very late opening so that the Police can be better resourced to cope with the consequences of later opening, and secondly as a levy on off-licences to fund test purchasing to make sure sales are not being made to those under the age of 18.

The third item was the update on licensing activities by The Council.  I was impressed at the can-do, proactive approach taken by our licensing team that had produced so much better control of licensable activities without stifling well-run operations.  We talked about the Tesco (St Aldates) appeal that had been allowed by magistrates and there was a feeling that the appeal had been allowed because the original panel had refused the application on grounds of crime and disorder even though there had been no objection from the Police.  We talked about a couple of other cases and about the need for panels to make proportionate decisions that actually address real problems for which there is evidence rather than second-guessing what might or might not happen.  We also talked about the special saturation policies in place for the City Centre and East Oxford and discussed how applicable they are to off-licenses selling alcohol outside of the troublesome times that the SSP is in place to address.

Finally, I couldn’t resist linking to this image from a story in the Daily Mail from March 2008.  Thankfully things are not like that in Oxford, largely thanks to the excellent work of our licensing team headed by Julian Alison and its partnership working with Thames ValleyPolice, Nightsafe and other organisations.

We completed the meeting in a little under an hour.

Mansfield College Development Plans

This was a brief meeting set up by the architects Rick Mather and they showed us plans for the redevelopment of the inside of one of the Mansfield College buildings to improve the dining room and kitchens.  There is also proposed a link between the chapel and that building that would be built after demolition of some rather unattractive garages.  I shan’t comment further on this as it may go to a planning application determination in a public meeting and I don’t want to fetter myself.

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.  poolmeeting.jpgMy 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. capture.PNG

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.

A walk around the ward with PC Paul Phillips

I met with PC Paul Phillips today and we had a walk around Carfax Ward.  Paul’s been policing this area for 8 years now and clearly knows lots of people and is generally accepted and liked in the neighbourhood.

28062010698.jpgWe talked about issues which include homelessness, drug dealing and binge drinking.  It was good to see Paul being firm but fair and polite with people being antisocial in the streets and we came across a couple of worries.  These were the £2 per pint of Stella all day at one pub and the complete blocking of the fire exit of another by a parked car – despite the sign!

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Licensing Training

Licensing Training SlideThis was a long but useful session.  It was introduced by Tony Payne, Support Development and Licensing Team manager, and we were given lots of useful information about the structure of the licensing committees and subcommittees in the Council.

There are two main committees:  The Licensing and Gambling Acts Committee deals with alcohol, entertainment and late food licensing as well as gambling establishments.

The General Purposes Licensing Committee deals with street trading; hackney carriage and private hire and sex establishment licensing (table dancing, pole dancing, lap dancing etc.).  There are also several subcommittees.

Julian Allison is the licensing team leader and told us lots about how the 2003 act works and is based around the Council’s licensing policy that it is legally require to have and regularly review.  We learned about personal licences and premises licences.

Finally, two of the City council’s solicitors, Daniel Smith and Jeremy Franklin, explained to us how licensing hearings work.  A very interesting and useful session.  You may be interested to know that you can check current licensing applications online.