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.

Planning Review Committee: Mill Street Student Block

And so we get to the Planning Review Commitee meeting that will reconsider the planning decision made at the last West Area Committee. This is the first Planning Review Committee meeting I’ve chaired as the first meeting happened while I was in Bonn on the twinning trip. I was very keen to get things right so ran the meeting as carefully and inclusively as I could.

I should point out that “review” is a slightly confusing name for this committee as its job is not to review the previous decision and the process followed to reach it, but rather to take a fresh look at the planning application and make a new decision based on all the evidence presented.

All objectors had time to speak as did the applicant’s agent. The planning officer (Murray Hancock) gave a very informative and useful report and though he was recommending approval, that is just one of the opinions we as a committee were to consider. We had some debate among councillors and then a motion was put seconded to refuse the application and this received almost unanimous assent. The application was thus refused.

Mill Street Site Visit

One of the planning applications that was approved on 13 July at West Area Planning Committee was for some accommodation for students of a local college to fit in a strip of land between the back of houses on Mill Street and the railway, just south of Oxford Station. At West Area Planning Committee councillors and officers had largely spoken highly of it and it was given planning permission (although not unanimously).

The council has a procedure after such decisions where if 12 councillors request it the decision is “called in” and get re-determined at Planning Review Committee. That happened in this case. I am chair of the Planning Review Committee so decided that we should actually visit the site to see how things would look from the neighbouring properties and well as from other angles. Quite a few members of the committee attended the visit and we were accompanied by Murray Hancock, one of the City Council’s senior planners, as well as some local residents and the agent for the applicant so he could let us onto the site.

I found the visit extremely informative and instructive and I think councillors much better equipped to made informed decisions in the actual committee meeting.

There was some controversy over the accuracy of pictures submitted and I was slightly amused at this one (although the whole issue is of course a serious one) as I think it looks like the mockup of the propsed building is floating in the air!

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.

Oxford Chinese New Year Gala Evening

What an amazing evening! I was invited to this event as a ward councillor and I’m really glad I went. It really was a multi-talented, multi-colour spectacular of entertainment. The event was organised by the Oxford Chinese Students and Scholars Association.

The large audience included several important figures from the Chinese Embassy, including Minister Counsellor Mr Xiaogang Tian, as well as senior figures from Oxford University including Dr Stephen Goss, one of the Pro-Vice-Chancellors. Dr Goss gave an excellent speech about how important the Chinese link is to Oxford University with Chinese being the 2nd most common nationality among undergraduates, 3rd-most with graduates and 4th-most in staff.

We heard two choirs, one opera singer, some martial arts, a fashion show, a somewhat manic but very good violin player and much more. I was grateful to the Chinese embassy official sitting next to me for providing some translations!

The amazing multicultural mix in Oxford is one of the great things about our City and it really humbling and an honour to attend such a wonderful event.

Full Council

We had quite a good meeting today. We had some addresses by members of the public about disability access as well as more about Temple Cowley Pools. It’s such a shame the Labour administration seems so hell-bent on depriving the Temple Cowley and East Oxford of such a well-loved and well-used community facility but I do rather feel the battle is lost now. I was rather disappointed to hear one speaker make entirely inappropriate remarks about the probity of the leader of the Council.

We moved through executive board recommendations, most of which were not controversial. I am disappointed that City Council is going to start charging for parking in quite a few well-used places including those where people park to take their children to football practice etc. and I hope this won’t decrease participation. I do understand the need to balance the budget though. I was also disappointed to see that the report proposes putting in mains-powered ticket machines rather than solar-powered ones, simply because the latter don’t contain a heater to keep the tickets dry. Surely there must be a better way!

We then moved into the questions on notice, starting with a question from a Green councillor about the terrible human rights abuses happening in Iran at the moment. Lots of members of the public were in the gallery to hear this question which is why it was taken first. All present agreed that the council should send a strong message of support to those oppressed and a strong message of disapproval to the Iranian authorities. The international links committee was not the right way to do it but the leader said he would do what was appropriate, as did the Lord Mayor.

I asked a question about why the “save East Oxford” banner had been targeted for enforcement by the planning department. Colin Cook, the portfolio holder, said it had been done without his knowledge but was the result of a complaint from a member of the public and because it was a listed building it had received high priority.

I also asked a question about the threatened closure to the public of the waste and recycling centre at Redbridge and the risk of increased flytipping. I received a somewhat reassuring response from John Tanner, the portfolio holder, that he (along with the other Oxfordshire districts) had had a very robust discussion with the County Council and were hoping to reach some agreement on keeping Redbridge and other centres open. It wasn’t a promise but it felt like a move in the right direction. The County is already offering money to the districts to cover increased fly-tipping clear-up cost but personally I’d rather see that money used keeping the tip open!

After the questions we had a break for tea and I had an extremely useful chat with the chair of licensing (I’m the vice chair) about a few issues.

After tea we moved to the motions, the usual political grandstanding that doesn’t achieve a huge amount and is probably the ugliest part of being a councillor. I thought the most significant motion was the one about tuition fees. It was by a Labour Councillor. Mark Mills, one of our group, put an amendment that pointed out some of the positive things that are happening around education funding which I actually thought was rather helpful. Sadly the Labour and Green groups just mocked it and called it an apology for the coalition’s actions on this (which I have already said I think are terrible).

I then stood up and said I was quite willing to say I was ashamed of what the government had done to higher education funding, just as I’m sure the Labour members were ashamed of at least some of what their party’s leadership had done in government. That’s what happens when you’re in a party that is in government! I urged us all to step back and to consider that although the cuts were very bad, I firmly believe that we as councillors have a duty to encourage our young people to take up educational opportunities and to encourage them, where appropriate, into higher education, not to scare them off with political grandstanding. I received a round of applause for this and even a nice email from a Labour councillor today about it. After the amendment fell the Labour group asked for a named vote on the substantive motion. This happened. Lib Dem group mostly abstained but I voted in favour of the motion. It passed as the Labour group voted for it and they have a majority.

The meeting finished around 9pm.

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.

My thoughts on the coalition vote on tuition fees

The short version of this post is that I think the decision stinks and I am ashamed of the way the most senior members of the Lib Dems have seemingly ignored party policy and reneged on their election pledges. I am staggered. Just this week I have been really upset to hear young people I know having lost all their aspirations to go to University because the sort of debt figures they are facing are numbers they cannot even consider, however much later in life and higher in salary they might have to pay them off.

I represent a ward that is about 65% students and I am feeling like they have all been terribly let down by my party. I have considered resigning, and indeed Richard Huzzey, who used to be a City Councillor for Holywell Ward until his academic career took him abroad, had indeed done so. He’s written an excellent article about it in Lib Dem Voice.

I could leave the Lib Dems over this but all that would achieve is effectively terminating any representation I can offer for students, and the other people that live in Carfax, to Oxford City Council. As an independent I would immediately have virtually no voice, no committee seats and no power. It would make me far less effective as a representative of those who elected me. We may not like it, but that’s the way party groups work in local authorities. It’s the law! I stood as a LibDem in 2010 and was elected by nearly 1000 people who I believe expected me to represent them as a LibDem for four years. I don’t intend to renege on that promise even if my party’s MPs have reneged on theirs. I certainly won’t be joining any other parties as if people in Carfax ward had wanted a councillor from another party I guess they would have voted for one.

To those who say that we’re in a coalition so we can’t win all the battles and pursue everything in our manifesto, that’s true but not pursuing a policy is one thing – that’s called abstention.
Pursuing an entirely opposite and contrary policy is entirely different – that’s called selling out and reneging on promises. The first is pragmatic, the second is shameful.

I can entirely sympathise with those who feel the Lib Dem government ministers are not representing them at the moment, and indeed I don’t think they are representing me, but I do feel that I still have a duty to carry on representing my constituents as a Lib Dem so will no be resigning from the party at this stage. From the inside of the party I will of course continue to put as much pressure as I can on Clegg, Cable and the others who voted for this disastrous attack on Higher Education. None of them would currently be getting my vote in a leadership election.

Remember: The Government Lib Dems may have let you (and me) down but I promise to carrying on striving to represent you and your views to Oxford City Council to the best of my ability and in line with what I and my party promised in May 2010.

Street Pastors Training – Police briefing

I attended a training session today where we were briefed about the role and practices of Thames Valley Police in the City Centre. This was a catch-up as I’d missed this session in the last series of street pastor training. It was heartening to see how many new people are training to be street pastors. The Police officers present gave a really good overview of how Policing works and how it will compliment us street pastors. We learned how we are separate and must stay separate but how Police support is always available for us if we need it.