Oxford

Area planning decisions to be recentralized? Area committees disbanded? Is this Labour in Oxford's response to near universal calls, in political terms (not least from their own Communities Department), for greater devolution and localism in our government structures?

They're pretty much already committed to the Stalinist recentralization of all planning decisions, slightly modified now to have two wider area based development control soviets as well as a supreme soviet committee in case even these two go against the Politburo's diktat or predilections. All because Labour councillors seemingly cannot work out how they could possibly "lobby" for their constituents wishes on some applications whilst helping decide on neighbouring wards' local applications.

I prefer the Danish system I believe it is, where areas more or less the size of streets have small committees purely dedicated to development control.

But in the absence of that a much more open system of area committee planning hearings would be a step forward rather than Labour's regressive centralizing power grab. Colleagues in other authorities received different legal advice to Oxford's and hold open discussion at their area committees where parish council members usually attend en masse and they claim get better decisions, more local acceptance of decisions and an all round feeling of compromise giving the better solutions for all. The rationale is that it doesn't matter how much time objectors and applicants spend at any individual stage of the process as the applicant in particular can have all the time they like to argue their case at appeal - that it's the entire process from start to finish that has to be fair to both sides.

Despite an initial increase in time spent in planning as everyone wanted to have their say, in practice, area planning meetings are now quite sophisticated - nobody feels the need to fill five minutes because can because they know anyone else could raise questions and so few are repeated. Good chairing of course helps, something also sadly lacking in Oxford City Council in my experience.

But centralizing planning is one thing, now there are rumours that Labour wants to disband area committees entirely. I hope one of them is reading this and will assure me this is not the case, or that something better will be put in their place. I have long argued that Oxford should reparish the city, shrink the city council effectively to an executive committee and have much more local control through parish or town councils. It's really not that long ago (in its history of over a thousand years) that Headington was administered by the Headington Urban District Council for example. Parish and Town Councils can actually have quite a lot of power - indeed more or less anything a higher level authority wishes to delegate to them.

I was at Thame Town Council a few months ago doing a presentation on Community Land Trusts, and I got the great feeling that this body was one that was prepared to fight its community's corner against the district level council when it mattered. Much moreso than where the committee is really a "branch meeting" of that district and collective responsibility trumps representing your constituents. In other parts of the county parishes precept as much as the district in council tax. Even in the few parts of Oxford where there are parishes it's more like 10% of the district level rate. Headington - or rather the current North East Area Committee area - is half as big again as Thame; easily able to support a stronger more local decision making body if the City Council took its claws out by at least as much!

But again, if the nirvana of local parish councils is not available to them for some reason, there are ways in which area committees can be given real power. Again, colleagues elsewhere only appoint a handful of central portfolio holders on their executive board, and then appoint one member of each area committee as ex officio executive members. Bound by collective responsibility each area committee executive representative can take a decision on a local issue, but which would normally fall under the competence of the executive board, there and then at the area committee meeting, advised by the open discussion amongst councillors and interested public at the area committee. Further, when they are at the executive committee, these area representatives can carry a majority, so if they are mandated by their areas in respect of a proposal by one of the core portfolio holders, they can overrule the core portfolio holders; effectively giving real positive control to those local community meetings collectively.

So, Oxford Labour, I'm sure there's more than just me out there, even if we do not often attend your City Council branch committee meetings, who appreciate the fact that they exist for us if we want to have our say on something, who will be very disappointed if you dismantle this structure and, Jack Straw like, leave it half reformed and more centralized.

Who wants to join a campaign to parish Oxford city then?

...I know we do in Oxford, and I also notice that at least three of the surrounding councils use it, so I presume this is de facto the "market leader" in public access planning application systems on the web. At least at Oxford City, very little appears to have been done to the system since they implemented it six years ago - and that MAY be the council's fault for not upgrading or whatever. However I have two big issues with it that I would like as many councillors from as many authorities as possible to complain about in the hope that their authorities will start to pressure for these changes, one of which would be an enhancement but the other definitely a fix for a non-compliant system in my opinion.

1. It has never worked properly with any browser other than Internet Explorer. In particular, the mapping system does not work in Firefox (2 or 3) or Safari. It may load the first, whole borough map, but if you want to start zooming in to the site you want to look at it refuses to play. In my opinion whilst IE may be the most frequently used browser, it limits users to Windows operating systems now. It will not work properly on any other type of machine - Mac or Linux for example. If yours does work correctly, perhaps you could let me know so I can continue to nag Oxford City Council to get updates or whatever would be needed to get it working. As far as I am concerned by excluding anyone other than Windows users it does not comply at least with the spirit of e-Government.

2. RSS feeds please! At the moment the closest you can get to a regular list is a weekly application list by going through several pages of the site. Here in Oxford apparently they are planning on piloting an e-mail alert system which will necessarily involve people submitting yet more personal information to the council in order to get alerts, and it will no doubt be difficult to change the alert you want (it may for example simply mean sending out the weekly applications list for a ward or some such simple response).

RSS feeds would be far better. They can be made infinitely variable - some people might only want applications in a post code, others for telecoms masts only but borough wide, others for a ward or area committee bundle of several wards. All this should be possible with RSS feeds. Also, many councillors like to keep their constituents in touch by copying "long hand" the weekly list applicable to their ward onto their websites. RSS feeds would allow them to automate this tedious process. I myself am planning a non-council local website, ox2online.net, to complement the area's e-democracy forums and so on, and RSS feeds would be ideal.

So please, if you are reading this and work or are a councillor in any authority that uses this system for public access to planning applications, can you think about these and have a nag at your planning/IT/eDemocracy officers and see if we can't get these changes.

(Oxford City Council appears to be on "Version 7.4")

This is more than a little parochial for me, and just a tad conservative with a small "c" - it reminds me again why little changes can deeply affect people in all sorts of ways. And whilst my own thoughts on this are probably unprintable, and not only because the decision has been made by my employer and landlord and I wouldn't really want to find myself sleeping under a hedge next week, I cannot let this little bit of Oxford's history disappear without some commemoration...

Headington Hill Hall, mark II (mark I is to the far left of this picture), built by James Morrell.

When John Henry Brookes was entering his job as first principal of the Oxford City Technical School in 1928, which, by a circuitous route is the fore-runner of Oxford Brookes University (and so allows us to celebrate our "150th anniversary" in 2015), the Morrell family, already an unusually important non-university influence in Oxford had, six decades previously, built not one, but two grand houses on this side of Headington Hill and had laid out the arboertum/park in their grounds that is now Headington Hill Park, Oxford's most beautiful urban park, if I do say so myself.

Indeed, their estate straddled what is now the main Headington Road out of town, encompassing what is now South Park, Cheney Lane, Cheney School and Oxford Brookes University's main Gipsy Lane Campus, its sports centre and the Cheney Student Village (another hall of residence). They built the land-mark iron bridge across Headington Road on the hill when it replaced what is now Morrell Avenue and Old Road as the main London road, and they owned a farm and other properties on the north west side of Headington Hill Hall that are now allotments and, until yesterday at least, "Morrell Hall" of residence.

The family, which included I believe two Liberal MPs and of course the famous Lady Ottoline Morrell (who started the nearby Garsington Opera which will also, once again, be coming to an end soon I gather) had not lived in Headington Hill Hall since before the second world war, during which it and its park was requisitioned as a wartime psychiatric unit and in 1953 the family sold the hall and park to Oxford City Council until Robert Maxwell started renting it off them ("the best council house in Britain" I believe he used to describe it).

But they retained some of the land around, including that set out by then as allotments on the Marston side of Headington Hill and when the last of the family directly connected with the hall died in 1965, James Herbert Morrell (son of Emily, the last occupant of the hall, and George Herbert Morrell) they made available part of the allotments to the City Council for the development of residences for the students of the now named Oxford College of Technology which had some twenty years previously managed to acquire some of the other Morrell family estate on the other side of Headington Road, which is now our Gipsy Lane campus.

New signs, no sign of Morrell Hall (I'm not sure I'd put the lavatorial status on a road sign!

And those halls have been called Morrell Hall ever since. Until now.

Ten years ago the by then Oxford Brookes University bought land adjacent to Morrell Hall that had been used by government offices since before the war and built what is now called "Clive Booth Hall", named for Sir Clive Booth, the last director of the Oxford Polytechnic and first Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University who left office the year after I arrived at Brookes. It seems right and fair to want to commemorate the person who managed that momentous transition from polytechnic and council ownership to fully fledged independent university. Indeed I like Clive, for all that he has made his later career out of high office in some of the most powerful QUANGOs in the country - first SEEDA and now the Big Lottery Fund, he is down to earth and always friendly and happy to stop and chat. He was telling me last week in fact how flattered he was, or he thought he maybe ought to be, that there was now a bus running around Oxford with his name on the front (it stops at the halls on Marston Road)!  One of the nice things about working in a university community is that the chief executives, in my experience at least, are nowhere near as remote as they probably would be in private sector businesses of a similar size.

But the university has decided to extend the Clive Booth Hall name to the adjacent, Morrell Hall, site - they were already functioning in terms of management as one site with two identities - with the utilitarian description differentiating the two halves of the hall of either "Clive Booth Hall (ensuite)" and "Clive Booth Hall (non ensuite)".  One might wonder what these titles may be shortened to in the sometimes wicked humour of students!

In a very real sense, we're not talking about a family who happened to live on this hill side but who quite literally made the hillside, in a similar way to the Churchill family or Cavendish family created the landscape of Blenheim or Chatsworth. And so we have to say goodbye to the university's only commemoration of the family without whom the university might still be looking for a suitable home.  You could say that wittingly or unwittingly the Morrells have been the university's biggest benefactor.

"Here lies James Morrell Esq, who died at his bedside at Headington Hill Hall, Sept 12th, 1863, Aged 53" - the grave near the entrnace to St Clement's Churchyard which the family used to reach through the park via the gate on Marston Road.

New blocks are replacing the old at the former Morrell Hall, and they are to have some kind of green energy plant. Little did I suspect at the time that what was intended was to harness the power from over the road in St Clement's churchyard where James Morrell lies no doubt a-spinning in his grave!

You can find lots more information about the Morrell family and Headington Hill Hall and its history at Stephanie Jenkins' very informative Headington website (which also has other links to more information).

And in other news about destruction of historic local interest, here's now what's left of the the majestic old chestnut tree the City Council have just killed in the Headington Hill Park grounds that James Morrell planted 150 years ago:

Felled horse chestnut in Headington Park - apparently this was dangerous. Or something.

Up and down the country local authorities, independent retailers and residents complain that rents are squeezing out interesting independent retailers and creating "Clone Town Britain".

Well, I have an idea. This week the Co-operative Group agreed terms to acquire Somerfield supermarkets. There are some, say management, which directly compete with existing Co-op shops and so one or other may be up for sale. One of these is in Headington in Oxford where there is a fairly recently refurbished MidCounties Co-op store on one side of the road and a Somerfield on the other.

Some people are all excited that someone like Waitrose might step up and buy it - and in a sense there could be no better buyer as far as the Co-op goes - the other end of the market and a sort of a worker co-operative in its own right.

But as I was in a social enterprise meeting earlier today my mind wandered to Headington supermarkets (!) and I wondered if, given it is the Co-operative who have bought them, there might be mileage in proposing a sale to a more local group - perhaps a permanent base for an indoor/farmers' market, or a space which, like the Covered Market in town, could provide "protected space" for independent retailers we wanted to see revived in Headington, set up say as a secondary co-op or a community land trust type structure (or even bought by MidCounties from Co-op Group) enabling local people a say in its management, policies and ownership.

It would require some work of course actually to work out whether the relatively recent decline of independent fresh food retailers in Headington for example has been, as often claimed, because of rent and rates issues where such a facility might be able to help by lowering the cost of access. But if it does seem viable would it be worth trying?

Or would Waitrose or Sainsbury still be a more attractive offering?

It comes as little surprise to me personally that businesses in Oxford City Centre have voted not to pay an extra one per cent on their rates to create a "Business Improvement District":

And who can blame them when the basic standard of cleanliness in the city centre is currently appalling. Here's a photo I took on Saturday of an overflowing and hanging off bin attached to one of their £30,000 benches. Every other bin I saw in the city was full and many were overflowing, but that was the worst. This was early afternoon on a Saturday, the main shopping day, in a city that attracts millions of visitors a year and the place is heaving on a Saturday.

But when I was on the council, and was involved in economic development when the OX1 City Centre Management Company was established, I wanted it to be more wide-ranging than just the "corporateization" of the city centre. I wanted to create a multi-membership co-operative type organization that would involve the users of the city centre as well as the businesses and other stakeholders such as landowners.

Something does need to be done about the city centre, especially the area that will be economically depressed when the new Westgate Centre opens up attracting more and more people to the western end of the city. Although the city council are also landowners of the Westgate Centre, or most of it at least, they also own a significant number of business premises, including the Covered Market and shops in both the High and the Broad, in this eastern end of the city centre. They need to get together with the other landowners in that end of town and ensure that it remains an economically attractive place to do business.

But in the meantime I shall be writing to Mr O'Dell about my idea presently.

I live next door to Headington Hill Park in Oxford, which I think is the nicest park in the city, laid out as it was a century and a half ago now by the Morrell family as part of the parkland setting for Headington Hill Hall, which is now occupied by my employers at Oxford Brookes University. The park was split from the hall grounds some decades ago before the Hall was rented to Robert Maxwell to house his family (the "best council house in Britain" he apparently used to say) and has been managed by the city council ever since.

For a couple of weeks now there has been tree felling going on in all the city's parks as part of a biennial survey of trees that might be getting sick or dangerous. Anyway, I went round the park carefully checking all those with red crosses on, which I assumed were the ones that were going to be taken out and was quite sanguine about it - about a dozen out of several hundred trees in the park and all had either been obviously damaged in last year's heavy storms that felled on in our grounds next door or were clearly lifeless.

However on our daily lunchtime walk I was appalled to see this:

The second most interesting chestnut tree in the park has been hacked around - I don't know yet whether it is actually pollarded (can you do that to something as slow growing as a chestnut?) or in the penultimate stage of being removed completely. But I'm bloody fuming. I am sure there was no red cross on it. A few weeks ago they did cut off one of the most precarious looking branches (but no worse than some other beautiful chestnuts nearby) and whilst I was annoyed by that I thought the pain was all over for this majestic example.

Here's the best photo I have of it from last year.

And in case you are interested, here's one of the one I think is the most interesting tree, possibly that I've ever seen, but certainly in the park.

I have to say, whilst I initially dismissed the notion that trees were being cut down specifically to provide benching for the "promenade" production of Midsummer-night's Dream that's going on in the park this summer, clearly the few trees with Xs on previously would not have been enough to provide the amount of seating space they needed. I am now suspicious that might be the case. If so, it's gross. Who on earth would imagine it would be a good idea to cut down trees to assist a performance of probably the greatest drama set in a magic wood?

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)

I don't blog about work much, but this is exciting news you all ought to share! Last year, here at Oxford Brookes University we got terribly excited about being only the 17th UK Higher Education Institution to have appointed a female Chief Executive , in the form of Vice-Chancellor Janet Beer, who's now had her feet under the desk for nine months or so.

Shami Chakrabarti, new Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University

Originally uploaded at Flickr by martinstabe

In the interim we've been looking for a chair designate of the Board of Governors (I am one of the two elected staff governors), and have selected Joanna Simons, the chief executive of Oxfordshire Councty Council, and of course, another woman.

Today, we are very pleased to have announced that our new Chancellor, a position currently held by Jon Snow, is to be another woman very much in the ascendancy and particularly in the news in the past couple of weeks leading up to last night's vote to abolish Habeas Corpus for people the Home Secretary doesn't like the look of, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty (whose "new members pack" I received yesterday by chance!).

We were doing quite well actually with gender balance amongst the top echelon of staff here, but I thought it was important to mark that the top three offices are now all held by women right at the top of their respective careers.