Trick or treat?

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In readiness for Halloween the Neighbourhood Watch Office has obtained a stock of “No trick or treat” notices which may be displayed at your home if you so wish.
If you would like a small supply of these notices for your neighbourhood they may be collected from the front counters of St. Aldates or Cowley Police stations.

Planning alert website under threat

As some of you may already have spotted in the news, Planning Alerts has
been effected by legal action by the Royal Mail: see this link.

Tom Watson MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament calling on
the Royal Mail to allow non-profit organisations to use the postcode
database for free. If you feel strongly about this, please write to your MP asking him to sign this Early Day Motion (number EDM 2000) and protest at the actions of The
Royal Mail.

You can write to your MP here

–You can also sign the petition —

Nearly 1,200 people have so far signed a petition on the Prime
Minister’s website, if you wish to add your name, please click here
I have!

Have your say on landlord accreditation

Landlord Accreditation is a set of standards, or a code of conduct, relating to the management and physical condition of privately rented accommodation. Landlords who join the scheme and abide by the standards are ‘accredited’.  

The overall aim of the accreditation scheme is to improve the condition and management of privately rented homes and reduce the need for intervention for the Council. It will also enable tenants to recognise private landlords and agents who are committed to providing good quality accommodation.

A possible problem is that the scheme is entirely voluntary so there is every possibility that bad landlords won’t sign up to it

The City Council would like your comments on the proposals, to complete a questionnaire please click on the website for the scheme. 

Applications for community grants

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There is a limited pot of money allocated to the North East Area Committee to spend on Area Committee grants to local projects. The total amount of money allocated to areas outside those eligible for social inclusion money e.g. Headington, Marston is £8553 for this financial year.

The closing date for this round of applications is 16 October

If your group wishes to apply for a small community grant, the relevant application form should be completed and submitted by the end of the month.

For all information on grants, please visit the council’s web page here.

Proposed changes to Margaret Road junction

The County has proposed to make some alterations in Margaret Road: they are asking for comments on proposed changes to the junction of Margaret Road and Wharton Road, and also on a build-out in Margaret Road.

County Cllr Roz Smith and City Cllr Ruth Wilkinson are making a site visit at 6 pm tomorrow Friday 2 October to discuss these proposals with local residents. If you would like to come along and give us your views, you will be very welcome.

If you cannot come to the meeting but would like a copy of the proposals, please email Ruth for details

Declaration of interest in planning applications

As several residents have asked us about declaration of interest with regard to the decision-making on the Brookes application at last week’s full council meeting, I felt I should publish this reply.

 I gave my apologies for the full meeting of Council for the following reason.  Councillors are bound by a code of conduct which is available for you to see on the council’s website. Where the subject for debate is a planning application, any councillor who has an interest must declare it. If the interest may be deemed to be prejudicial to any decision that councillor may take in the eyes of the general public, then the advice to councillors is that they should formally declare a prejudicial interest and withdraw from the debate, and that they are ineligible to vote on the application.
 
This item had already come up at Area Committee for comment. I sought legal advice about whether I should declare a personal or a prejudicial interest, and was advised that members of the public might be led to believe that I would not have an open mind on the merits of the application because I am employed by Oxford Brookes University (as Site Services Librarian at the Wheatley Campus). I declared a prejudicial interest and withdrew from the meeting at the point that the planning application was discussed.
 
The special council meeting called at short notice had only one item on the agenda – the Brookes application. If I had made the decision to attend, I would have walked into the Chamber, declared a prejudicial interest, and been obliged to withdraw again.  I made the decision that this would not be in the best interests of the ward I represent, and chose to spend the time instead making ward visits and completing casework.  I duly sent in my apologies on the grounds that I would have to declare prejudicial interest in any case, but this was not reported in the Press.

So if you are wondering why Cllr Wilkinson’s name was missing from the list of those present, this is why!

Trial Road Closures: the facts

A large number of residents who live south of London Road have contacted us about the newspaper stories concerning planned road closures in Lime Walk and Latimer Road. We have been looking into this and have written to all residents with an update. Here’s the text: 

We were as surprised as many of you to hear from the press that it had been decided to close Lime Walk and Latimer Road for a trial period of a month. The press story has created a lot of controversy and we have been investigating exactly what has been decided. Here are the facts:

 

  • There has been no decision made to close any roads.
  • Highfield Residents Association has, for a long time, been rightly raising the traffic problems in the Lime Walk / Stapleton / Bickerton Rd area. One of their suggestions, among many, has been to close Lime Walk and Latimer Rd.
  • The County has agreed to look at the feasibility of trial closures but made no commitment to do them. There is no timescale or detailed plan for them.

 

We have talked to residents regularly and know that some of you are keen to see road closures and others are dead-set against them. Whatever your view, you have all been let down by the way the press was persuaded to run with an inaccurate story. It has only served to heighten both expectations and alarm.

 

But we need to look ahead and consider what are the next steps. Our position, as your local councillors, is clear: road closures should not be the only proposal on the table. And any proposal must go to proper consultation with all affected residents between London Road and Old Road.

 

There is, of course, a danger that a trial closure could prove a dead-end. The County could judge the experiment a failure. If no other proposals were on the table, Highfield area would be left back at stage one, with no answer to the real problems residents endure. The solution that will work is one which helps Highfield but does not put extra strain on Windmill Road, which is already congested, or on smaller residential roads. We are committed to working with you to find that solution and get it put in place.

 

We have also been in contact with the traffic group of Highfield Residents Association to discuss with them their meeting with the County and how best to get a result which works for all of Headington. This is, of course, a big issue that won’t be decided with one news story: we’ll be here to carry on working with all residents on the very real traffic problems in our area.

Nat West pavement issue

Many of you have let us know that you are unhappy with the appearance of the area in front of the Nat West Bank in the London Road, which has been fenced off with orange and white boards for quite some time.  Having talked to the Manager, it would appear that there is an ownership issue between the bank and its landlord; which of the two owns the land that is affected? We have discussed this with the manager of the Nat West Bank and he has kindly agreed to contact his Legal Dept. and let us know the latest. Watch this space for further information!

Can you imagine a life without books?

Have you ever seen a five year old child who’s never seen a book before?

I have. When I helped at the primary school in my local area, I gave a lad a book and he looked at it suspiciously. Then he shook it, to see if it made a noise. When it didn’t, he kicked it, to see if it made a good football. It didn’t.  So he left it on the floor and walked away.

Together with a group of volunteers, I am helping to start a library in a community centre on an inner city estate. It’s a very different sort of library because the people we hope to attract are those who don’t ‘do’ reading, or are scared of filling in forms to join, or of working out complicated numbering systems to find a book or magazines they would like to look at. Our aim is to get books into people’s houses and promote a reading culture in an area of cripplingly poor educational attainment and social deprivation. It’s about adding value to the quality of people’s lives.

The local volunteer helpers at this library like to talk about ‘stuff’, not books. They want their place to be called “Read/Swap”, not The Library. (“Library” is a scary word). They want material to have interesting pictures on the covers. Categories of stuff are called “Things to do outside” (sport, woodwork etc.), “Things to do inside” (cake decorating, sewing etc.), “Stories about people” (Biography), “Stories for grown ups” (Yes! That includes literature as well as novels) etc.

I would like to thank the New Headington Residents’ Association for donating unsold books from their Headington Festival stall to Read/Swap, and for the donations from individual residents who have got to hear about the project. A story on the Read/Swap library is featured in the Oxford Mail on 2 September. If you have any good quality “children’s stuff” or picturebooks that you would care to donate, I should be very grateful to receive them, or they can be left at Rose Hill Community Centre, The Oval, Rose Hill, OX4 4UY  between 10.00 and 12.00 weekday mornings.

Thanks!  Ruth (Chartered Librarian in my working life. Or should I say “Stuffperson”?!)

Pavement Trips Cost Council

 County Cllr Altaf Khan inspects a pavement in Franklin Road    franklin-altaf.JPG

Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats under Freedom of Information show that Oxfordshire County Council spent half a million less than the average last year on pavement maintenance, compared to the other 19 county councils who provided figures. Perhaps as a consequence, there were 88 claims for compensation in Oxfordshire last year, 56 of which have not yet been settled.

These figures come as the Liberal Democrats reveal that 90 councils have paid out over £82m in compensation following pavement trips and falls over the last five years.

Cllr Purse, Shadow Cabinet member for Growth & Infrastructure, said, “It is not just the compensation that councils have to pay out that concerns us, but the additional costs of treatment that inevitably fall on the health service if people are injured by falling on uneven surfaces. And even more important for the individual concerned is the potentially serious loss of mobility and confidence. It is for that reason that the Liberal Democrats have proposed additional sums for road and pavement maintenance for each of the last four years in our draft budgets – it is a shame that this has not been taken up by the administration.”

Cllr David Turner, Shadow Cabinet member for Transport Implementation, said, “The failure of the Conservatives to support our proposals for more weed control on pavements is creating a big future bill to repair pavements crumbling under the pressure from uncontrolled weeds.”

Leader of the Opposition, Cllr Patrick added, “National studies show that the average time spent walking is no down to just 11 minutes day. We want to encourage more walking and good quality and well-maintained pavements are just as important as road surfaces. We have welcomed the concept of increasing pedestrianisation in Oxford City, but we hope that people are taking particular care whilst the works for this are going on in Queen Street. We don’t want to see the figures for falls and trips increase dramatically this year.”