Licensing Authority and Thames Valley Police partnership working meeting

A useful meeting today I thought.  It was attended by quite a few police officers including the chief inspector for Oxford as well as county council community safety people, neighbourhood action group council officers, and nightsafe.

It appears that disorder in Cowley Road  area, particularly on student club mights is becoming a bit of a problem.  Lots of Brookes Students attend Fuzzy Ducks at the O2 on Wednesdays and tend to be a bit noisy walking around the area afterwards, particularly Divinity Road and Southfield Road.  I'm sure many of us have been there - being noisy late a night, not going to Fuzzy Ducks! It's a problem though because it keeps the other residents of the streets around awake (remember students are residents too).

Thames Valley Police officers have been voluntarily working extra hours on Wednesdays to cover this but the Chief Inspector reminded us all that this is on a good will basis and she can't easily or quickly force her officers to do this.

The need for joined-up working was  re-iterated and all agreed that there should be a central repository of information about problems around the Cowley Road area be they noise, licensing issues, crime or general antisocial behaviour.  I think all were in agreement.

City Council Licensing Officers and The Police plan to take members of the Divinity Road area Residents' Association out with them as well as some Brookes senior staff so people can experience Cowley Road area first hand at busy times.  I suggested it would also be good to include students in this initiative as peers are often then best group to communicate with students, and indeed any group.

I hope this problem can be sorted out as it's not fair on anyone who wants to sleep at night in East Oxford.  I firmly believe that students are a good thing for Oxford and vital to our economy but it is really important that all groups in the city, particularly busy and densely populated areas like East Oxford, understand each other's needs and situations so that we can all get on with our own lives without disrupting others.  I am sure mutual understanding rather than penalising people is the way to move forward here.

St John Street Area Residents Association

I attended a good meeting at Rewley House in the Lecture Theatre this evening.  It was organised by Jonathan Brown, the chair of the association.  I was pleased to see such a well organised association and such a well-attended meeting.  There must have been about 30 there.  Cllr. Alan Armitage was there as he is a County Councillor for the area and local Police Community Support Officers also attended.

I was disappointed to hear that the  problems with the bins behind the Ashmolean Museum have not bee resolved despite the efforts of committee members Margaret Booth (Treasurer) and John Temple (Secretary).  We'll see what we can do about that.

One St. John Street resident Jonathan Michie, Director of the Department for Continuing Education and Professor of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange at Oxford University gave a couple of interesting talks: 'CONTINUING EDUCATION AT OXFORD' followed by 'THE CREDIT CRUNCH AND ITS AFTERMATH'.  Jonathan is also a former Director of the Birmingham Business School.  I think doing this sort of thing is an excellent way to increase attendance at such meetings.

The evening was nicely rounded off by drinks and nibbles in the Mawby Pavilion, also at Rewley House, where I had fascinating conversations with several extremely interesting people including Prof. Clive Booth, a past vice-chancellor of Oxford Polytechnic and Oxford Brookes University.

It was good to see one student resident of St. John Street at the meeting but would have been better to see even more.  It can be difficult getting people to feel enough part of a community to go to such events when they will probably only resident for a year but I think it's still important.  If you're a student reading this I encourage you to engage with your local community and take part in such events. I bet you'll be surprised at the welcome you receive!

The Frideswide Civic Service and Dinner

This annual service of thanksgiving takes place as Christ Church in the Cathedral and is a celebration of all the good work people do in a voluntary capacity around the county of Oxfordshire.  It is attended by senior dignitaries of Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford City Council and the other districts in our county, as well as by senior figures from the University of Oxford.  Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action (OCVA) coordinates a lot of the good work we were celebrating.

There were some excellent contributions by children from several Oxfordshire Schools including a gospel choir from Cherwell School.  The order of service was beautifully illustrated by children from Yattendon Primary School.   We were read a poem by the Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford and there was an excellent address by Tim Stevenson, the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire with a contribution by Cheney School.

Towards the end of the service we all processed to the tomb of St. Frideswide who is, according to legend, the Patroness of Oxfordshire or Berkshire.  We dressed the tomb with sprigs of rosemary, as is customary, as a symbol of remembrance and thanksgiving for Frideswide and for all who have lived in Oxfordshire through the Centuries.

I felt extremely privileged after the service to have been invited to the celebration high table dinner in the Dining Hall at Christ Church (which some might recognise as Hogwarts in Harry Potter films).  There were lots of extremely important people there including the Dean of Christ Church, the Chief Executives of both the City and County Councils, the Lord Mayor of Oxford, The Chief Executive of OCVA, the High Sherrif of Oxfordshire, the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police and several Fellows of Christ Church.  It was fascinating talking with so many of them.  I've said it before but I'll say again that this was one of the nicer things about being a City Centre Councillor and more than makes up for the torture of full council!

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.

City Centre Wayfinding meeting

I attended a meeting today with Placemarque and various figures from around the City Centre.  We had a good discussion about issues of finding your way around the city centre as a tourist, other visitor, local person, student or otherwise.

We had some interesting discussion about creating themes around areas and classes of attractions and how a balance needs to be struck between too much information on signs and too little.



We had a walk around the City Centre and it was striking how, in the eyes of someone who doesn't know the City, it can be so confusing.  Where, for example do you go from the station to get to the centre of town or to Tourist Information?  It's not at all clear!

We talked a bit about how mobile devices might help to make life easier for visitors without cluttering the streets with signs.  Some Cities have 3D barcodes on signs so people with mobile devices that can scan them (increasingly common these days) can easily find out more if they need to.  The Placemarque people were also very impressed with the Mobile Oxford site that I showed them as a piece of work by a couple of my colleagues at work.

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.

Central South and West Area Committee

We met again today at St. Barnabas' School on Hart Street in Jericho.  The agenda was short so the meeting lasted on an hour.  We discussed the proposals to make Jericho a conservation area and talked about usual street scene issues including the mess near the "backside entrance" (phrase of the night award to Cllr Stephen Brown!) to a building in the Walton Street area.

We were disappointed that the person from First Great Western who had come to listen to the concerns of many residents about noise and pollution from Jericho sidings was unable to attend due to being stuck in a traffic jam on the M1.  What does that say about FGW's attitudes to transport I wonder?

We also expressed our horror and the County Council's proposal put increase the cost of residents' parking permits by a whopping 25%.

We were pleased to note our committee's unblemished record this year (rolling to 31 Aug 10) on planning appeals - not only had no appeals against our decisions been allowed, none had even been lodged.

It was good to see  Daniel Lowe, OUSU Vice President (Charities and Community) present at the meeting.

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.

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.