Roads Maintenance and Housing Repairs

 More from the City Council as of 5pm Monday 20th Dec

Roads Maintenance

Two bulk gritters, complete with snow ploughs, have been working throughout the day on our priority gritting routes in the City to enable the majority of bus routes to continue to operate.

In addition to the two main gritting routes, additional snowploughs and gritters have been deployed across the City to deal with localised problems.

The Direct Services Streetscene teams have been re-deployed to clear snow and apply grit to high footfall and shopping areas across the City including the City Centre, Summertown, Headington, Cowley Road and other local shopping areas such as Templar Road, Cherwell Drive, St Nicholas Road, Blackbird Leys Road and Underhill Circus.

Resources have also been deployed to clear snow and ice from the approaches to health centres including Manzil Way and Dunnock Way.

We are working closely with the County Council to manage our salt supplies and arrangements are in place to supplement our supplies from the County’s large stock at Drayton.

Our gritters will commence work at 8pm and will work through the night to cover major routes

Housing Repairs

We are currently dealing with a large number of frozen or burst water pipes and loss of heating in Council properties. Our first priority is the elderly and vulnerable but our aim is to get to everyone within our Service Standard of 24 hours for an emergency call.

Our emergency service is being run using 4x4 vehicles and we have escalation plans in place should the snow arrive this evening.

Recycling and Waste update from Oxford City Council

I don't normally put service announcements in this blog but we are in extreme weather at the moment so please see below:

Subject to there being no more significant snowfall overnight, Oxford City Council  plans  to run the following Recycling and Waste service:

For those who live on major bus routes that have been gritted and whose normal residual or food waste collection day is Tuesday we intend to run a reduced service where possible.

The following services are suspended:

• garden waste


• bulky waste (including white goods and fridge freezers)


• bin and box deliveries


• co-mingled recycling

We will be running a limited trade waste collection service within the city centre and major retail areas where possible. We will also, where accessible, provide a collection service to flats.

We will collect clinical waste where possible.

For collections the rest of the week we will confirm the afternoon on the day before they are due to take place whether or not our crews will go out – for instance the decision on whether crews go out on Wednesday will be made on Tuesday afternoon.

Due to the anticipated build up of extra waste in the next few days, where collections have been missed, a reasonable amount of side waste can be put out on collection days. This should be placed out as follows:

• general/residual waste – black sacks only


• recycling – either in recycling or cardboard box or clear bags


• food waste – in extra biodegradable bags or, if not available, please place in normal household waste.

Central South and West Area Committee

We met this evening at West Oxford Community Centre.  The agenda was not huge.

We started with a good summary from Craig Rossington from the County Council about transport and roads plans for the next 20 years.  Clearly this is a long term strategy but it's good to see the County Council thinking strategically even in these straightened times.  I think we all agreed that there has hitherto been over-regulation in the City Centre and that the cycling restrictions on Cornmarket and Queen Street are not ideal as considerate cyclists would be careful to work with, rather than against, pedestrians and careless inconsiderate ones probably ignore the restrictions anyway.  We also agreed that the traffic lights at the junction of Broad Street, Catte Street, Holywell Street and Parks Road are a waste of time as there is very low traffic flow at that junction, many cyclists ignore them and they don't even have a pedestrian phase!

We had a good report from Dave Huddle who has done some excellent work on street scene issues and similarly from Matthew Bullivant of Thames Valley Police.

We had two planning applications to determine - one was a technical matter that had to come to committee and be done in public because it was an application by the council to the council.  We approved that without discussion.  The other was for the old Marlborough House pub in Grandpont that has been vacant and boarded up for some time.  It read "Demolition of rear outbuilding. Erection of ground floor extension. Change of use from public house to cafe on ground floor and 4 x 1 bedroom holiday apartments on the ground and 1st floor and 1 x 1 bed flat on 2nd floor. Provision of cycle parking and bin storage."  It's always a shame to lose a pub but it had gone anyway so the application was approved.  A very local resident also took the trouble to come along to give her supporting views of the application, for which I was grateful.

The other planning application was just for our comments and was for a for a big redevelopment on the corner of St. Aldates and Queen Street which has been festering for a long time.  As with all major projects, developers have to provide money sometimes called "section 106" money to the local authorities to mitigate the effects of the development on infrastructure things such as roads, schools, libraries etc.  This application had reached stalemate as the developers were offering about £200k and the planners were recommending about £1.9M.  Personally I thought some of the proposed buildings would have been a bit out of place too although I would have welcomed a new way through to Queen Street from St. Aldates that didn't go via Carfax.

We meet again on 11th Jan if there are any planning applications to determine.  If not, then on  8th Feb.  We may not have many area committees left as the Labour administration of Oxford City Council is planning to abolish them early in the new year.  I think this is a terrible blow for local democracy but rather typical of Labour.

Full Council and Lord Mayor's Christmas reception

We had two brief full council meetings today.  The first was to decide on which of the government modernistation schemes we wanted to adopt.  It was a bit pointless as this is legislation that is a hangover from the last Labour government that will probably now never come into force.  As a City Council we don't like either option but have a statutory duty to choose one of them at the moment.  The Greens wasted a lot of time with a ridiculous amendment trying to wreck the whole thing.  Thankfully it fell otherwise we would have risked being outside of current legal requirements on the council.  I fully expect the Greens to produce another misleading leaflet that claims that Labour and the LibDems have voted against democracy.  We'll see.

The other council meeting (which legally had to be a separate meeting) decided on a couple of committee memberships following the Barton by-election and I'm pleased to see that our own Cllr Mark Mills is now a Lib Dem member of the appointments committee.  We also talked about e-petitions and I got an amendment accepted by the leader of the council that just clarified a few things around e-petitons and collecting validated e-mail addresses rather than actual signatures.  I was pleased to be able to  make a constructive and accepted amendment, as a member of the opposition.

After those meetings we had the Lord Mayor's Christmas reception which is a great opportunity to invite people from local charities to meet local councillors and other dignitaries.  Councillors all get to invite a friend too so I invited Pearl Lewis, the coordinator of Oxford Street Pastors and Martyn Chalk, a neighbour and local film director, founder of Chalkstar Films.   Excellent networking opportunities were exploited to the full by all present.  The event is always a joyous occasion and it's a great opportunity for the Lord Mayor to express his or her gratitude to all those who do so much for our City on a voluntary basis or as part of its many charities.

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.

Lib Dem Group Meeting

There should have been a post yesterday about the Oxford University Vice-Chancellor's Christmas reception yesterday but I was sadly laid up ill with the winter stomach bug that seems to be doing the rounds.

We had quite a long group meeting today that was rather well attended.  We started our discussions about the budget proposals from Labour and were pretty appalled that council officers have been persuaded to highlight things that have got worse since the new coalition government came into power.  I don't remember anyone ever hghlighting things that were a proeblem because of decisions by the previous government!  I thought the council officers were meant to be politically neutral!

Clearly group meetings are confidential so there is not really much more to say here.