Hi Jock,

I haven't been following the developments in Oxford about this, but area committees are a terrible idea which haven't worked anywhere in the country and if they are being scrapped in Oxford then that seems entirely sensible. I'd have thought that with your politics you wouldn't have supported a system imposed top down from central government and based on dividing up an area solely according to administrative boundaries rather than actual communities.

As for planning, people in other authorities thought I was making it up when I said that we did development control at area committees, there were so many obvious problems with this approach that a change is long overdue. Because planning decisions are, rightly or wrongly, quasi-judicial, they should never have been part of the same meetings as those intended to encourage community involvement at a local level.

The question about new ways of devolving decision-making is how they avoid reinforcing already existing inequalities. Having more local committee meetings with more power, for example, gives greater power to people who are able and willing to turn up to meetings. Just because something is more local doesn't automatically mean that all different voices in the community are going to be heard, sometimes quite the opposite. I'd like to hear more about how re-parishing Oxford would deal with this problem.