Full Council

Well this was a mammoth of a meeting!  We started with the normal formalities and also observed a minute's silence to mark the death of Bob Hoyle, who served Oxford City Council as a member for many years.  Bob was also a personal friend so this was a particularly poignant moment.

We heard a few addresses from members of the public including several people objecting to the end of Area Committees and the new planning arrangements coming into force.  We also had addresses from Jane Alexander and Nigel Gibson about the proposed new pool at Blackbird Leys and how nobody seemed really to want it, and concerns of more elderly and infirm users that it would be much colder than the current pool, possibly meaning they couldn't use it.

We had the usual plethora of questions from members of council, which are really more about making a point in public than actually needing to ask in that forum.  There were then two petitions, one about publicly funded leisure in Oxford and one about the Chinese Advice Centre which has suffered a savage cut to its grant this year at the hands of the Labour-run Council.  We stopped then for council tea and I had to dash home and back on my bike as I'd forgotten my lights and it would be dark at the end of the meeting.

After tea we moved on to the motions on notice and I was quite appalled at how many members of the Labour administration appeared to be deliberately filibustering so that we would run out of time and not get to the motions that might embarrass them.  There was one motion about Bee colonies and I was flabbergasted at home much research and how many long speeches we heard from Labour councillors.

We also had a discussion about the new single-member decision-making that is coming into force and I expressed concerned about how transparent that would be and quite how a single member is going to make any decision other than the one recommended on the report that they will probably have requested and approved!

The final item that caught my attention was a tightening up of taxi licencing policy and making some recommendations on the relevance of offences, cautions and convictions of those applying to be private hire or hackney carriage drivers.  I think it must be right that the decision-making panels have discretion to take these into account even when they might be "spent" for other purposes as taxi drivers are in a huge position of trust and we as councillors cannot risk putting vulnerable members of our society at risk by allowing people with incompatible histories to take on such positions of responsibility.

The meeting finished after 10pm and I was very glad to get home and have a rest before bed!  You can see a video of this meeting (beware it's 338 minutes long!)

University of Oxford Building work programme briefing

This was a fascinating presentation by Oxford University's Estates department.  After a sandwich lunch we were shown a fascination presentation by Mike Wigg, the Acting Director of Estates.

It's great to see that the University has so much going on in this time of economic difficulty.    Mike covered areas including:  the Science Area; Outside Oxford; Bodleian Libraries Projects; the Headington Hospital Sites; International Projects  and the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.

I was particularly interested to hear about the roof replacement on the University Museum and also enjoyed the tour around the new Earth Sciences building.  We saw a mass spectrometer that had just been delivered and was in the process of being assembled, and had to wear shoe covers to go in that room.  I was also fascinated by the information about the burial ground that had been discovered on the old Radcliffe Infirmary site.

I think it's great that the University is showing that it has a proper strategic building plan and I am glad that all this work will keep lots of local people employed in these difficult financial times.  It also makes planning decisions easier if councillors can see them as part of a clearly well-thought out strategic plan.

Central South and West Area Committee

We met today at West Oxford Community Centre. Our agenda was fairly short and included the normal items such as the open session, Police and Community Safety, Street Scene and Parks and Planning applications.

We also had a presentation from two Oxford Brookes Students showing their design for a poster for Mount Place in Jericho.  I liked the poster and suggested it have a QR code added for mobile camera phone users to get access to more information about it on the web.  There is an Oxford Mail article about this too.  You can click the picture to see a bigger version.

[caption id="attachment_233" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Brookes Students Design for Mount Place signage"][/caption]

The main planning application was the one for the new Jericho Health Centre on the Radcliffe Infirmary site and was just for comment as it will be determined by the Strategic Development Control Committee.  The application was by Oxford University and as that's my employer I decided to declare a personal but not prejudicial interest.  The committee supported the officers' view that planning permission should be granted although there was some disagreement about whether to put the health centre right on the street or to retain an historic stone wall and put it behind that.  As the application was for the latter, that's what was recommended to the Strategic Development Control Committee.

We also had a planning application about a mobile phone mast near Walton Well Road at the entrance to Port Meadow.  It was to replace a mast that was already there and had only been allowed by a planning inspector on appeal in the first place.  The whole committee bar one member voted not to allow an even bigger and taller mast in this extremely beautiful and sensitive part of Oxford.

The meeting closed around 7pm.

LibDem Group Meeting

I don't get to a lot of these as they are on Mondays and that clashes with Rehearsals for the City of Oxford Choir of which I am a member and the chair.

It was a good meeting with many issues discussed and a lot of consensus formed. We are now ready for the Executive Board meeting on 13th April and Full Council on 18th April!

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.

[caption id="attachment_226" align="alignleft" width="211" caption="Lucie Acraman, Janet Beer, Lorna Fround"][/caption]

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.