City Centre Neighbourhood Action Group

A useful meeting of the City Centre NAG today.  Nothing particularly exciting but it was good to meet the new OUSU VP for Charities and Community - conveniently also called Daniel like his successor!  Daniel Stone this time.

It's good to be keeping this link with Thames Valley Police open and it was good to meet the new City Centre Inspector, Katy Barrow-Grint.  You can see the current City Centre team on their web page.

Licensing and Gambling Acts Committee and General Purposes Licensing Committee

I attended both of these committees today although was last for the first as I had a work meeting that was longer than expected. I had attended the pre-meeting on Monday so I knew there was nothing too contentious.  I'm always impressed at how much hard work the licensing team does and how much they seem to get done.  You can read their update report on the council web site.

The General Purposes Licensing Committee was a bit more interesting and a few things a worthy of mention:

Firstly, my fellow LibDem councillor Gwynneth Royce made some excellent comments about having women represented on the taxi-licensing sub-committee (a panel of three councillors - two labour and one libdem).  It would be fair to say that the panel consists of three white, older males so is not very diverse.  I think diversity is always good on decision-making bodies and Jim Campbell pointed this out saying it's good to have to work with people who don't agree with you.  We resolved to invite both Labour and the LibDem group to consider if they might like to change their nominated councillors for this panel so as to make sure both sexes are represented.

Secondly, we discussed the issue of designation of streets for trading purposes.  We agreed to make all streets in the City "consent streets" which means that street trading has to have a licence from the City Council.  This is good because it will simply things and make issues such as on-street car selling on Cowley Road easier to deal with but the legislation has a very broad definition of "Street" so it may affect some food outlets in private car parks such as the one near Wickes on Botley Road and the one in the John Allen Centre at Cowley Centre.  We asked Officers to look carefully at this to see what could be done to mitigate the problem.

Finally we had a discussion about pavement trading stall as there is apparently a problem that the City's standard 1Mx2M is difficult for traders as the "standard" size you can buy is 1.3Mx2.4M (4ftx8ft).  I'm a bit worried that this represents over 50% increase in area but was assured that this will only be a discretionary increase when officers believe that the larger area is necessary for the type of items being sold (i.e. a flower stall may well need to be bigger than a jewellery stall).  Personally I don't like the stalls with large objects attached to the side of them either.  They clog up the street and impede pedestrian flow as well as being grossly outside the size limit.  Officers agreed to consider these carefully when doing enforcement.

The meeting finished soon after 7pm.

Town Twinning trip to Bonn

I’m just on the way home from a brilliant trip to Bonn, one of the towns with which Oxford is twinned.  The flight is delayed so I'm writing this.  There was a delegation of seven City Councillors and a few others from Oxford and I should say at this point that we all travelled at our own expense. I took Gordon, my partner too.  We flew into Cologne on Wednesday 1st June and visited the wonderful cathedral there before having a good lunch and getting the train South to Bonn.

The visit programme started at 5.30pm with a reception in the Stadhaus in Bonn and then had a welcome dinner at the old Rathaus, that is in the middle of a re-furb.

Day two consisted of a wonderful boat trip down the Rhine to Remargen, where there is the remains of a bridge that was very important towards the end of World War II and a museum about it.  We hopped across the river while we were there to a little village called Erpel and had a needed ice-cream.  We got the boat back to Bonn a bit later and spent the evening having a nice meal in a Turkish restaurant with our hosts, Elmar Konrads-Hassel and his wife Ursula Hassel.

Day three started at the Stadhaus with an interesting seminar about all the fair trade activity that Bonn and its council takes part in.  We share Oxford experiences and were all presented with some fair trade coffee.  Lunch followed and then we had a free afternoon.  Gordon and I used that time to visit the cathedral in Bonn and the Beethoven memorial as well as the protestant church.  We went on after that to the Scholsskirche (the University Church) for an excumenical service that was held in both English and German.  I was pleased to be able to take part in the prayers of intercession, fortunately in English!  We then processed in our robes to the Bonn Oxford Club where we were treated to a barbecue supper and entertainment by the Oxford Fiddle Group, another part of the English delegation visiting Bonn.

Day four was an incredibly hot day so worked well for the Bürgerfest where lots of groups both from Bonn and Oxford gave performances.  The Bonn Irish dancers were among them as were the group from the Pegasus Theatre and the Oxford Fiddle Group.  Gordon and I visited the Beethoven Haus in the afternoon where an really excellent audio guide (thankfully in English) gave me a real sense of a tour through the great composer’s life from start to finish.  There was also a very modern 3D rendition of some scenes from Fidelio where the singers were 3D shapes and we could move them around to hear the change in musical effect.  We briefly visited the Arithmeum, a fascinating collection of mathematical and arithmetical instruments.  We didn’t have long there as it shut at 6pm.  The final evening’s entertainment was as the Haus den Karnevals where we were fed again and then took part in a sort of gig called Losst mer Singe – where we had to join in with a band singing carnival songs in a local dialect called Bönnsch.

Our last day started with another wonderful breakfast from our hosts and then a trip to a fairly new museum of  the history of Germany.  It covered the period from 1945 right up to the current day and gave a fascinating insight in the German Democratic Republic (from 1949-1989) and the Federal Republic of Germany and how reunification had come about.  I was interested to hear about the struggles of the former GDR to adapt to the economic freedoms enjoyed by the Federal Republic.  We finished off our trip by taking our hosts to lunch at Restaurant am Rheinaue (basically a lea on the Rhine).

I was extremely pleased to be able to attend this twinning trip and I feel I know some of my fellow councillors in Oxford much better now, as well as having made some wonderful new friends in Germany.  I do think that twinning is great for Cities and brings about an international dimension to their civic lives.  It’s also great to be able to take young people along such as those from the Pegasus Theatre as I think such things hugely broaden their horizons.

I look forward both to welcoming new friends from Bonn back to Oxford and to visiting Bonn and other twins of Oxford and strongly encourage other councillors and members of community groups to do the same.  It’s definitely well worth the effort and expense of the travel.  The youngest member of our group was still at primary school and the oldest over 90 so there are no excuses!