Consultation on housing sites includes car park

A preferred options paper is going to be considered by the City Executive Board next Wednesday. It has information on sites proposed for housing and development and many are in Headington Ward or will affect Headington Ward residents.  These include (preferred option in brackets):

  • Churchill Hospital site (reduce car parking provision on site)
  • Dorset House site
  • Gipsy Lane campus
  • Headington car park, Old High Street (car-free residential and/or student accommodation)
  • Headington Preparatory School (do not allocate)
  • Headington School (do not allocate)
  • JR Hospital (reduce car parking provision on site)
  • Manor Ground (100% affordable housing)
  • NOC (healthcare and medical research – reduce car parking provision on site)
  • Old Road campus (hospitaland medical research – reduce car parking provision on site)
  • Park Hospital (medical teaching and research – reduce car parking provision on site)
  • Ruskin College (main academic site)

Library use of the Dorset House site has been rejected

For a full list and commentary please click here

Advice to residents waiting for new bins

The City Council has been swamped with requests for brown bins or the new bags and demand had outstripped supply.

Officers advise that

We now have bins back in stock and delivering with upto four crews instead of the one. All should have their new bin within 10 working days of ordering by the end of the month. In the meantime crews will empty the hessian bags until the residents new bin arrives until the end of the month when normal delivery times will be being met (10 WORKING days from clearance of payment)

Osler Road public meeting

The public meeting for Osler Road residents was well attended and a number of agencies have taken away actions to try to address issues including:

  • traffic congestion
  • parking issues and lack of enforcement
  • damage to roads
  • near misses and accidents
  • specification of buses
  • need for a transport strategy for Headington

We are circulating the list of actions to all residents in Osler Road and will convene another meeting in three months time to review progress. We are grateful to Stagecoach, Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford City Council, the JR and Thames Valley Police for assisting us in trying to resolve local issues.

We are also delighted that Osler Road residents are setting up a new Residents’ Group and will helping to facilitate this

If you would like a copy of notes taken at this meeting please contact us

Oxford City says YES! to AV

The referendum results for individual district councils has been released. Once again, Oxford City bucks the trend amongst the district councils that form the county

The result for Oxford was:

No. of Votes
Yes 21,693
No 18,395

Rejected ballot papers: 113

Total number of ballot papers counted: 40,201

Turnout: 37.9%

Interestingly, the other areas of the UK that voted YES! were as follows:

  • Cambridge
  • Edinburgh Central
  • Glasgow Kelvin
  • Hackney
  • Haringey
  • Islington
  • Lambeth
  • Southwark

Countdown to Oxfordshire Cycle Challenge 2011 begins

Schools, colleges, and major businesses have signed up and are raring to go for the county’s largest ever cycling competition: The Oxfordshire Cycle Challenge 2011.

However, there is still time to sign up to the challenge. All you have to do is visit the dedicated website

The challenge begins on Monday 9 May and ends on Sunday 29 May. It aims to encourage as many people as possible to discover the benefits of cycling as well as logging their details of the journey on the website when they get on their bikes.

It’s a fun, free competition which saw over 1,300 people take part last year.

Workplaces and community groups can compete in six size categories to see who can get the most members of staff to ride a bike for at least 10 minutes.

The Oxfordshire Cycle Challenge is being organised in conjunction with CTC Challenge for Change, NHS Oxfordshire, Go Active, Oxfordshire County Council and the Oxfordshire District Councils.

There are ‘weekly spot prizes’ which will be presented during the three weeks of the competition which include a lunch time river cruise for two from Oxford River Cruises, a pair of theatre tickets from Pegasus Theatre or tickets for Cotswold Wildlife Park.

Why I’ll be voting Yes to AV on 5th May: it’s all about choice

 By Stephen Tall | Published 28th April 2011 – 10:45 am

I will be voting ‘Yes’ to the alternative vote in the referendum on the 5th May. Here’s why.

For me, this referendum is all about choice. The ‘Yes’ campaign stands for giving voters greater choice — the choice to rank candidates standing for election according to our individual preference.

But, in fact, the ‘Yes’ campaign stands for more choice than just that. If you prefer, you don’t have to rank your candidates by preference. That’s right, under the alternative vote, you can express as much preference, or as little preference, as you choose:

  • If you love only one party — let’s for sake of argument, call that party the Liberal Democrats — you can quite simply mark a numeral ’1? on the ballot paper next to that party’s name. And, if you choose, you can leave it at that.
  • But if you hate just one party — let’s for sake of argument, call that party the BNP — you can ensure they don’t get elected by expressing your 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc preferences for other parties.
  • And if you’re a floating voter — let’s for sake of argument, call you a progressive, liberal, moderate voter — then you can express your preference for the parties you think best represent your views in your preferred order, perhaps Lib Dems ’1?, and then any combination of Conservative/Labour/Green as ’2?, ’3? and ’4?.

It’s a simple system, one which places control firmly in the hands of you, the voter.

The ‘No’ campaign wants to withhold that choice from you, to deny you the choice that the alternative vote offers. The ‘No’s want to boil down all your thoughts on politics, all the nuanced views you hold, all the arguments you’ve ever had with family and friends, to a single, crude cross against one party’s name.

It’s absurd that we as voters — with our increasing expectation of consumer choice, and of the responsiveness of institutions, private or public, to our aspirations — should have our only expression of political power trampled into such a blunt, meaningless anachronism as a single ‘X’.

The referendum campaign has, sadly, generated more heat than light. And nor should those of us who are voting ‘Yes’ heighten expectations unreasonably. Our politics will not be magically transformed overnight by a new voting system, even one that’s fairer than at present.

But it will improve things. It will remind the elites in power that we citizens value our vote. And it will give us all as much — or as little — choice as we individually want.

That’s why I’m voting ‘Yes’ on 5th May. I hope you will consider voting ‘Yes’, too.

For more articles by Stephen and others, please click on LibDem Voice

Labour axes area committees

Headington Ward  is “missed off”  the new planning recommendations! Do they know we exist?

Sadly the Labour Group voted against Ruth’s amendment at Monday’s Full Council meeting  which said

This Council deplores the exclusion of Headington Ward from the proposed changes to democratic arrangements, and refers the proposals back to City Executive Board for the necessary amendments to be made to include Headington Ward in the East Area Planning Committee

This proposal was defeated in a named vote in which all the Labour councillors in the North East Area of Oxford voted against it.

The necessary amendments will be made by council officers to cover up the administration’s  embarrassment.

Just think! If 9 members of Labour’s City Executive Board can’t check officer paperwork well enough to spot an entire ward missing from democratic changes, how effective will the introduction of Single Member decision-making be when there’s just the one of them working on their own!?

Despite huge opposition in the public consultation (up to 80% voting against taking local planning decisions away from local area committees, 159 out of 196 with 9 don’t knows!), the last meeting of the North East Area Committee will take place on 17 May.

After that, planning applications on properties in Headington Ward and the South East and North East areas that have not been delegated to officers will be decided upon at the Town Hall by a group of councillors from across Oxford. There will be just three places on the East Area planning committee for Lib Dem Councillors and only one Green.

There are likely to be quarterly Area Forum meetings but no decision has been taken about what those will look like yet. Ruth has been nominated as one of the two members attending all planning meetings for area forums across the City on behalf of the Scrutiny Committee, so will find out what is happening where.

If you have some good ideas about making area meetings better attended and more effective, please contact David and Ruth by the end of the first week in May. We’d love to hear from you.

And we promise WE will listen!


Flooding in Cuckoo Lane

Photo: courtesy of Stephanie Jenkins and the Headington Forum

Several of you have commented on the intermittent flooding in Cuckoo Lane and one resident has asked if it could be resurfaced. Our latest information is that

There have been a couple of incidents where pedestrians have struck their heads on the tunnels that cross the footpath.  These tunnels form part of the Grade II listed Headington House so cannot be interfered with, although some sort of application for Listed Building consent is not out of the question.

The only positive drainage in this section of Cuckoo Lane is by two gullies, one opposite the end of Stephen Road which drains to Thames Water’s surface water sewers, while another between here and Old High Street has to be assumed to go to a soakaway.  By normal standards, 2 gullies for just over 400m2 is just about adequate, but this really doesn’t work for such an elongated site.  The provision of further gullies would almost certainly have to be to soakaways and these would constitute fairly substantial amounts of work.

You can find out more about the history of Cuckoo Lane here