Lib Dem Group Meeting

Another group meeting tonight with lots on the agenda.  We discussed the outcomes from a recent Group away day and our response to the Core Strategy that will direct planning and development control until 2026.

As usual we worked through the paper’s for next week’s City Executive Board.  That promises to be a busy and controversial meeting as it will consider the future of Temple Cowley Pools.

I am really enjoying getting to know the new LibDem councillors since I was last on the Council in group meetings and I’m pleased to see good consensus building in the group on most issues and the very definite support for and confidence in our leader, Stephen Brown.

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.

Full Council

council1.jpgWell this is always a bit of a theatrical experience.  Lots of political gesturing and lots of people who are normally perfectly polite being a little less than civil. We started with announcements and the one I want to mention is the forthcoming retirement of Jude Skipp, the members’ support officer and Lord Mayor’s secretary.  Jude is a wonderful woman and the council will be a poorer place without her.   She started work for the City Council in 1971 – the year I was born!

We then heard some excellent addresses by members of the public about Temple Cowley Pools.  Nigel Gibson and Jane Alexander spoke especially well.  I was amazed to hear that 120 people had turned up to the public meeting at Temple Cowley Pools to ask for it to be saved but only about 12 turned up at the meeting in Blackbird Leys where a new pool was being proposed.

We moved on to questions from the public and 24 had been notified. Quite a few people didn’t turn up to ask their questions which I think is a shame as councillors had put time into preparing answers and the large number of questions were part of the reason the briefing note was 49 pages long!

Next up was City Executive Board recommendations.  The interesting one was the new governance arrangements forced on local authorities by the previous Labour Government. We had to choose between having an elected mayor and having a “strong leader”. We chose the latter and that means the leader of the council has lots of power and can essentially hand-pick her or his cabinet.  The proposal for an elected Mayor was not supported as Oxford City had voted fairly convincingly against it in a referendum in 2002.

council2.jpgWe broke for tea then and returned after 40 minutes for members’ questions on notice. There were another 24 of these and they were used to quiz the administration further about Temple Cowley Pools.  The IWCA councillor was particularly nasty to Antonia Bance and it felt like he accused her of racism and homophobia, which knowing Antonia as I do, are both ridiculous.  I may disagree with her politics but she is most certainly not a racist or a homophobe.  The questions I liked most was the one from Graham Jones to the leader about how much the “Your Oxford” council publication costs to distribute and circulate.  I know that many of us see it as an administration propaganda device rather than being useful at actually getting to the most excluded people in our City.

The longest item in Council was the motions.  The Greens in particular seem to have had their creative hats on overdrive this time.  Of course with a majority administration the motions rarely change anything but they do enable open discussion of important items.  The notable motions were the one to recommend to the remuneration panel that councillor allowances be frozen for the next couple of years; a rather nasty motion about senior officers’ salaries (rather embarrassing as they were all there for the discussion) and an important motion from Jean Fooks about biodiversity and applauding the work of the Oxfordshire Nature Conservation Forum.

Sadly I think the Greens won the bad behaviour award this time.  The leader of the Green group trampled all over the allowed 3 minutes for speeches and had to be reprimanded by the Lord Mayor.  Another Green councillor had a rather unfortunate outburst about Green attitudes to students that had to be stopped by the Lord Mayor standing to silence her.

We finished around 10pm – a long evening after a full day at work.

Another group meeting

05072010721_vga.jpgWe met at 6pm today to discuss how we would approach everything on the agenda for Full Council on 12th July.  It’s important that political groups do this so we can agree our line on the important issues at Council so that our constituents and the press get a clear and consistent message from our party.

We had a bit of discussion about how to handle the fact that our party is now part of the government.  We reminded ourselves that there has not been a Lib Dem-Tory merger and that it is OK not to agree with everything the Government says or decides.

New Councillors Info

I just received this from media and communications.  Good to see they are introducing us to council staff.

ole0.jpg

I was intrigued to read that the new Green member for St. Mary’s appears to see students as a “danger” to East Oxford.  Personally I see students as a positive benefit that adds greatly to the vibrancy, vitality, and viability of the area.  Sure – there are problems with HMOs and Cars but students themselves are not the problem.  Oxford would be a much poorer place without its two world-class Universities and their students.  In fact without them hardly anybody would have even heard of Oxford!  It certainly would not be the great tourist centre it is.

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.

Central South and West Area Committee

Another area committee meeting tonight.  I can’t believe it has been a month since the last one!  We met at St. Barnabas’ School in Jericho at 5.30pm.  As the committee is 4 Labour and 4 Lib Dems we voted Oscar and Mark as co-chairs and Susanna and Nathan as co-vice chairs.  So now half the committee is either chair or vice chair 🙂

Members of the public attending the meeting

We had an address from John Power about antisocial behaviour at Tumbling Bay, particularly in the light of last week’s fatality there.

Then we had an update from Thames Valley Police’s Oxford City Centre Inspector. Matthew Bullivant.  Crime statistics have dropped markedly although there are still a worrying number of thefts from the person.   Matthew was also asked why TVP had not objected to Tescos’ application to sell alcohol from 6am at the site of the the old lighting shop on St. Aldates.  He reassured us that he has a robust approach to licencing.

Mark and Oscar: co-chairs

We moved on to planning applications and the one we discussed was an outline application from the Jericho Community Association for a community centre.  There were some difficult issues raised and building the centre will not be without cost to some local trees and the amenity of immediate neighbours, but the permission was unanimously granted nonetheless.  I must say I entered the meeting thinking I may well vote against this but the discussion convinced me that the benefits outweighed the losses and that the chance to provide an important community facility should not be lost.

We agreed to the planning application at the ice rink for a small enclosure for a new chiller without discussion.  This only had to go to committee because it is the City Council applying to itself for planning permission and to do it in a closed office under delegated powers would not be very transparent!

Dave Huddle from Parks then gave us a street scene update.  He promised to look at the litter problems in Jericho and to make sure the bins along the river in Hinksey Park ward were emptied regularly enough during the summer months.

Our final discussion was about the proposed scheme for the licensing of Houses of Multiple Occupation, which is something I am very interested in, living in a very HMO-dense street.  It will be interesting to see how it operates but I’m afraid I can’t see the council inspecting an licensing the estimated 5,000 HMOs in the City in much less than a year! I would encourage you to comment during the consultation period (until 21 June) if you have a view.

I was a bit alarmed to discover that HMO licensing appears to be an executive function rather than a council function.  That in my view makes it too political but we’ll see how it pans out.

We finished just after 8pm.

Planning and Development Control Training

An interesting training session this evening teaching how Development Control is a balance between the needs of all interested parties.  I was pleased to see that legislation now better recognises that councillors are political animals and that as such we are able to take part in planning decisions so long as we do so with an open mind (and say so) even if we have publicly expressed strong views before.

Reliance WayI was also interested to hear about the new House of Multiple Occupation (HMO) legislation and how Oxford City Council will apply it.  It could make quite a difference to places like Reliance Way, where I live.

Annual Council and Mayor Making

We had the anmayor.JPGnual council meeting today which passed off without event and with much good humour.  I wish all full council meetings were like that.

We the had the first meeting of the Licencing and Gambling Acts committee.  I was elected vice-chair and Mary Clarkson is chair.

At 5pm we had the ceremonial council meeting in the Assembly Room.  John Goddard formally took over the role of Lord Mayor of Oxford and many speeches were made proposing and seconding him, the Sherrif (Colin Cook) and the Deputy Lord Mayor (Dee Sinclair) as well as the outgoing postholders.

Induction Training

I was invited to attend this as I haven’t been a councillor for four
years and things have changed!

We had a good introduction from Peter Sloman, the Chief Executive and
then some overviews by three strategic managers.  Jeremy Thomas, the
Head of Law and Governance gave a useful overview of services and
decision making, including delegation, and there was an excellent
“Freshers Fair” set up for us new councillors where we could meet all
the council services and their staff.

We had a sandwich lunch and then we were given information about legal
rules.  There was useful instruction about the difference between
personal and prejudicial interests and I was interested to note that the
bar for prejudicial interest is now much higher than it used to be.  It
essentially has to be a pecuniary interest.  We also learned about the
difference between pre-disposition and pre-determination.

The last session I attended was about Partnership Working and this is
extremely important in an area with two-tier local government but also
includes lots of other statutory bodies.

I was unable to stay for the session about Scrutiny and Scrutiny
committees as I needed to get back to my day job!