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.