Oxford City Council

Here's a duplicate of my post on my BrookesBlog:

Rumour reaches me that our big planning application for the new library and teaching building has been, as it is termed, "called in" so that the decision will be made once again by all 48 city councillors. So the decision of the Strategic Development Control Committee, whom council elect to make large planning decision on their behalf, is for the second time being challenged and could yet be overturned and the application refused permission.

I have to admit that my own record on this sort of thing is hardly blemish-free - it was I who arranged for the decision in 2000 to allow the Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies the go ahead to build on Marston Road reopened in full council after even full council had approved it narrowly on the very tenuous grounds that because we had had council elections in between and the composition of the council had changed it was potentially a material difference since the decision had been made! My argument was rejected, thankfully, and although I would probably still have preferred for the Islamic Centre not to have marked the start of development encroaching down the green spaces on the Marston Rd that divide the city from the suburb, given the often rather bleak look of what we have built opposite, I do rather find the Islamic Centre architecture a welcome break from 21st century halls of residence!

However, having been involved in the other side of planning now, i.e. from the applicant's point of view, both with Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts and more recently obviously with this Brookes application, I am a reformed character in that respect. As a memorandum put out by the city council's head of planning Michael Crofton-Briggs a couple of years later stated (at the time trying to remind councillors that appeals could be expensive and losing an appeal even more so) the principle of British planning law is that by default property owners should be allowed to do what they want on their property, unless there are well grounded public policy reasons why not.

Planning officers - the professionals whom the council appoints to be the "expert witness" if you like applying the local plan and local development framework to test each application and to recommend decisions to councillors - have twice now recommended approval for the building. The Strategic Development Control Committee has twice now followed the officers' recommendations and approved the application - the last time by the narrowest possible majority in a 12 person committee - 7 votes to 5 - and this time somewhat more convincingly at 9 votes to 3. And both applications it seems will now end up being decided by the whole council.

It seems to me that the way this process works actually turns on its head that fundamental planning principle of allowing property owners to do what they want with their property by default, and implies what is the reality, that councillors feel that they have a right to hold something up until the applicant satisfies them. But I know only too well now what this sort of politicking costs. We are strong enough to be able to bear such costs, but when the applicant is someone, say a small developer, engaged on his main business activity, putting everything on hold, sometimes for years if a protracted appeals process ensues, can be enough to break such a business, which is an appalling price to pay for lay-councillors deciding to play a little politics with that developer's property.

Development control is supposed to be a "quasi-judicial" process. Whilst justice demands rightly that objectors have their opportunity to comment and campaign against something, I do wonder whether ultimately the correct people to make the end decision, to balance, for example, the essentially non-voting applicant - "Oxford Brookes University" per se, does not have a vote in local elections and a very large proportion of our students do not vote (as students tend not to anywhere) - whereas the objectors are people who do have a vote and whose votes councillors must gain or retain when they are up for election.

So the incentives, I'll say no more than that, are for councillors to side with the voters, and the most vocal of them at that, and not with applicants. It should be borne in mind too that their obligation is to all their constituents and not just the most vocal and erudite and some of these councillors have a lot of students in their ward who may not have voted for anyone but are still entitled to their councillors' consideration.

Maybe it's time that all planning decisions were handled by some kind of dispassionate professional service rigourously applying law and policy in a properly judicial setting.

Let us just hope that this time, sense will win out, and those who understand the contribution that Brookes makes to the local economy (which our city council has endorsed previously as part of the South East Plan which is where they should have raised objections if they wanted to I'd suggest) and that jeopardising the redevelopment of our physical facilities to better reflect our academic reputation, will have a majority in full council and that we do not need to go through the tortuous process of an appeal.

Constructions costs are now back on the rise. The longer gaining permission takes the more expensive, potentially, the development becomes, and the more of a diversion of resources that will mean from front line teaching, learning, research and student experience activities.

As many will know, I rarely write about work related issues on here. It's probably generally a good idea not to associate one's employer with my diverse and eclectic other opinions. And, since I am also a governor of the university, I don't want to put myself in the position of making any indiscretions, perhaps where I am in receipt of privileged information.

However tonight's an exception. And be warned, that this post is going to be a real monster - for which I make no apology.

Last week a planning application for a key part of Oxford Brookes University's redevelopment of its campus at Gipsy Lane in Oxford was refused, having been "called in" to full council after it had been approved by the City Council's Strategic Development Control Committee on the recommendation of planning officers. Coincidentally (or not, as one actually suspects) news went round of a meeting of local residents' groups in East Oxford and the Headington area which, in its own publicity was:

"intended to be constructive by bringing together the communities from Headington and East Oxford ,their elected representatives and Brookes University and start a community debate about ways how to restrain the presence of Brookes University in East Oxford."

Well, with such a neutral (not!) intention (I understand that university management were not, in fact, specifically invited, which itself does not bode well for "constructive" debate) this was clearly an event not to be missed, even if I was only going to sit and listen. Now, one would not characterize the meeting as "heated" since most of the people there were of a similar opinion - that Brookes has to be "restrained" in the area, and those of us not of that opinion seemed collectively to decide that discretion was the better part and so on...

But the main impression I got was that, whilst there were some good arguments, quite a lot of the people with the most to say were not, shall we say, in quite the fullest possession of the facts. That is not entirely their fault in many cases (though I suspect some of invincible ignorance because I've heard them previously) - the university cannot always disclose information that might be commercially sensitive to a public audience, and some aspects, such as "what constitutes a student" in counting student numbers, are and have always been, open to some interpretation - a former registrar at the university would always say, if someone asked him "how many students do we have", "well, it depends what you call a student" and indeed, with Brookes in particular with its many modes of delivery through partnerships and so on, it is a tricky question.

But I will try and address the issues I remember from the meeting as best I can, and without disclosing any confidentialities, because this is crucial to countering the campaigners' initial contention - that Brookes needs to be "restrained".

So first, student numbers. One speaker produced figures that purported to show that Oxford University has about 11,000 students and Oxford Brookes around 18,000. He stated that these were taken from publicly available sources. And indeed they are, however it was completely disingenuous of him to make a comparison between those two figures. Brookes does have just over 18,000 students enrolled. But this figure includes everyone - postgraduates, people studying for Brookes qualifications overseas or at partner colleges, part time students, people away in any one year on year out "sandwich" courses, mature students living at home and so on. The equivalent figure for Oxford University is just over 20,000 (pdf).

Brookes has in fact, just over 12,500 full time higher education students enrolled (at all levels, and including "sandwich" courses whose students will be away from Oxford for a year in their course) compared to Oxford's nearly 19,000. Of these 12,500 full time HE students, some 7,000 are based at campuses within the city with the remainder based at other campuses or at partner colleges some way from Oxford. Of these totals, some 3,700 are accommodated in halls of residence or a few (this point was raised, and overplayed I feel) leased houses - 3,500 or so really are in halls, not houses; about the same again, 3,700 and some, live at the family home; leaving a total of 4,700 and change who do not live either at home nor in university accommodation, and 1,300 or so of these live outside Oxford. So just over 3,400 occupy what might otherwise be "family homes" within Oxford of those who "do not pay council tax" (i.e. full-time students): just over 2% of the city's term time population and just under 3% of its non-student population.

Now, it is true, as Green councillor Craig Simmons pointed out that this 3,400 is a higher number than either the university would like, and more importantly than what the university had agreed to get the number down to by this year. However we do have another 400 student rooms in halls of residence coming onstream within the next 18 months, with another 370 or so expected shortly after provided within the city by a private provider. On top of that Brookes themselves are redeveloping both Harcourt and, if planning permission is forthcoming, Wheatley to a higher capacity still. 3,400 is, however, lower than the number in private accommodation when the agreement with the City Council was made in the Local Plan process seven years ago, and, contrary to one claim in the meeting, we have increased halls provision by over 800 bedrooms since that agreement.

So, first conclusion: even if there has been a small increase in the overall number of students, the number "living out" within the city has still fallen in absolute terms, and will continue to do so as new halls come onstream, whatever the perception amongst the local communities.

Second, the "New Student Centre Building" in context. Whilst it was ostensibly the planning application for a new building on the site of a previous very tatty 1950s building at the Gipsy Lane campus that sparked this more general outcry at "Brookes's expansion" and the need to "restrain" the university, it was markedly absent from much of the discussion at the meeting. One might, from the inside perspective, suggest that this is because the arguments are in fact inconvenient for the "anti-Brookes" campaign.

Yes, it is a big building. But it does not mark an expansion in the overall floor space at Gipsy Lane - which was one of the grounds for Green councillors at least trying to prevent it getting planning consent. The widely consulted upon "Master Plan", approved by the City Council over a year ago now, makes it quite clear that this building is the key to reducing overall the floor space and the number of buildings on the Gipsy Lane site. At the moment, because of the age and history of some of the buildings, they are actually pretty badly utilized - in terms of how much of the time any particular room or building is in use for education. The provision of this new building, designed with much more flexible spaces, and more suitable for contemporary teaching and learning activities means that at the end of the Master Plan process, there will in fact be a net reduction of over 30% of built floor space on the Gipsy Lane campus compared with what is there now (i.e. after the loss of the 50s engineering building).

So, second conclusion: setting aside issues of design and neighbourliness, which, yes, are important, especially if you live immediately adjacent to it, on the issue which concerns the agitated community groups most - the perception of an ever expanding university - the present application represents not an expansion, but in fact phase one of an overall reduction in built space. This does not, I believe, give them an argument for refusal of the planning application on the grounds of not having met targets about the number of students "living out".

Now, third, and to my mind the most important issue here, and one in which I think we are in complete agreement, concerns where in Oxford those "living out" students actually live, and what effect they may have on those particular neighbourhoods and how best to mitigate those effects. Yes, it can be clearly seen that those who live out prefer to live out as close as they can to first, the main campuses and second, the parts of Oxford in which they want to spend the rest of their time - socializing, spending money in the local economy (estimates range up to £100 million on top of what the university itself contributes to the local economy) and so on.

What one can reasonably say is that, notwithstanding that the overall number living out is falling, they are getting, apparently inexorably, more concentrated in certain neighbourhoods - in particular within an overall area bounded by about Howard Street in the south-west, St Clement's in the west, Headley Way and the "New Marston" area in the north and parts of Headington in the east. And along with that concentration of where they live, goes all the changes that local communities are concerned about in regard to the "Inner" Cowley Rd in terms of the mix of businesses, concentration of nightlife that causes disturbances and so on.

Now, on this issue, I think it is worth emphasizing one crucial fact: family homes become HMOs and student lets only when an owner occupier decides to sell to someone who is going to rent the property out. It may be true that students are prepared to pay a premium for proximity to their places of study and socializing, but you cannot actually blame the university for the fact that householders in these areas have apparently been all too willing to surrender family homes, presumably at top whack prices, to landlords who have spotted and want to exploit this trend in the market. Such is the nature of the land and property market, whether the demand is from students, or a particular ethnic community, or proximity to a particular employer.

I also think this is key to achieving some of the concerned neighbours' wishes too. Instead of calling for the heavy hand of government to step in and create some arbitrary rules for avoiding what the community is calling, rather unkindly in my opinion, "student ghettoes", there is a perfectly good, voluntary mechanism for putting a stop to any further "studentification" and eventually clawing back some of the property for family owner-occupier use. And in particular, it is a mechanism that will test the real resolve of those communities to do something about it themselves, and demonstrate whether the campaigners are, in fact, representative of the more general opinion in their areas.

My proposal: these campaigners should approach every owner-occupier in their areas and ask them voluntarily to sign up to a restrictive covenant on their home such that they will not sell up to someone intending to rent the property out as a multi-occupancy or student let. If everyone does so, then it is a sure demonstration that the campaigners are representative, and that their own neighbours are willing to help, effectively financially (by foregoing any possible premium they may get from a prospective landlord over another owner-occupier), stop any further encroachment. If they are not willing to accept such a restriction, one can only conclude that, when it comes down to it, that local community favours that price premium over maintaining their community. In such a situation, why on earth should an unrepresentative minority then be able to call upon the heavy hand of government coercion to do the same thing by force or planning regulation? If new halls do release family-homes back into the owner-occupancy market, they to should be encouraged to adopt the covenant and so help those neighbourhoods claw back some of the lost ground.

But this also goes hand in hand with assisting the university itself to help them, by providing purpose built accommodation in areas where students will find it more attractive to choose halls than to choose private lets. There is much debate about this issue - will students ever be tempted into halls rather than the perceived "benefits" of living out? Here we do have a problem of image in Oxford. Because of the history of Brookes all its current halls of residence were built in order first and foremost to accommodate the first year students. We cannot actually demonstrate that halls can be more attractive than private housing for continuing year students because we do not, effectively, have any halls that offer the equivalent type of accommodation.

"First year halls" are geared around people who arrive for the first time, not knowing the city probably, and almost certainly not knowing enough others to decide on their own groups with whom to share accommodation. Rooms are licensed to individuals bundled together in "cluster flats" that preserve enough privacy for individuals who do not know each other, and more rules to make such ad hoc groups function in as civilized a way as possible.

Further halls developed with the aim of enticing continuing year students out of family housing therefore need to be geared to that market: they need to be in the right location so that they are at least as convenient as the private lets with which they are competing; they need to offer a better standard of accommodation; they need to be more directed at groups who have formed a circle of friends and who want to club together and share a flat or house as a quasi-household; and they need to be in sufficient quantity to enable them to compete on price with private lets, allowing for any difference in quality.

And, for those who remain skeptical I can tell you now that I have yet to visit a private let student house that offers as good a standard of accommodation as properly maintained halls of residence. Family homes were not built that way - someone will get a pokey little room, others the en-suite bathroom, some will share a tiny little communal space because a landlord has decided to fit as many bedrooms in as possible, and so on.

Our newest halls of residence are being built at densities in excess of 300 bedspaces per hectare, and yet each bed-sitting room is around 15 sq m (the minimum acceptable for letting purposes in a private house is just 6 sq m) with its own en-suite facilities, and all the little things like sufficient power sockets, TV, phone and internet points in every room, well maintained, if "institutional", furniture, enough communal space such that everyone in the flat can have a place at the same dining table, cupboards and fridge space to keep their own things in and so on. Many halls providers in the private sector now provide facilities such as gyms and even swimming pools to make them more attractive. And in those university towns and cities where they do have a higher number of hall spaces available, whether university provided or by the recently burgeoning commercial providers, they do not seem to have a problem filling them - else it would not be such a lucrative business to be in.

By contrast, I have seen some truly shocking private lets, they are at a density usually way below half of what we can fit in halls - basically landlords can get away with treating their student tenants like something out of the Young Ones - especially perhaps those in truly "family sized" homes which are unlikely to fall under any of the registration and inspection schemes any time soon.

But the real upshot is that if we can build sufficient halls, close into the main campuses and socializing areas of town, for every hectare's worth of halls, we can reduce the land used by student private lets by two or three times that amount. So it's no use everyone moaning about "studentification" of family housing neighbourhoods whilst at the same time selling to those very landlords they don't want to see, and most importantly, whilst trying to prevent, as far as possible, planning for the halls of residence that could and should replace the need for the use of those family homes.

I've gone on far too long here. But I want to address a couple of specific points that were raised at the meeting:

First, several times someone (with whom I have had a most unpleasant brush previously over a Brookes development in which she quite wrongly assumed I was merely a Brookes shill when on the Planning Committee) said that Brookes wanted to get rid of some of its halls - specifically mentioning Crescent Hall and Paul Kent Hall. The only reference to this the university has made is in its submission to the Core Strategy examination in public. And it is quite clear - impossible to misinterpret other than willfully. These halls are, de facto, further away from the campuses and socializing facilities than most students would, everything else being equal, prefer to live. They are therefore not contributing to any possible effect of getting students out of family homes more conveniently located. All the university has said is that if it can be allocated sufficient land in more attractive locations such that it could build as many bedspaces as in these two other halls, as well as its overall aim to have net more halls spaces, then it would be better to build in those better locations and release those sites into the market for mainstream housing land.

There is not now, never has been, and will not be any intention to reduce the overall number of hall spaces available to Brookes students by disposing of those two halls. It is simply a recognition of the facts of the property market and the desire of students to live closer to where they want to be,

Second, on disciplinary issues and taking some responsibility for inculcating a more communitarian spirit in our students, especially those who live out. Someone said that the university does not do anything to help turn what I think they called eighteen year old tear-aways, newly independent, away from home, wanting only to please themselves, into potentially good neighbours. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst I am sure there is more the university could do to make it easier, for example, for concerned neighbours to see that something is done about egregious cases of un-neighbourliness, the whole pastoral and disciplinary effort in halls in their first year is directed at trying to get our students to have consideration for others' needs.

We are assisted also in this by the police - my three local beat officers were in fact onsite when I returned from the meeting last night getting ready to go on rounds with the wardens to start that very process with this year's new intake to halls. This is the second year now of an initiative begun by our local neighbourhood officers and now spreading as good practice to university communities throughout the Thames Valley Police area.

The city council also assists - for example by helping us tailor our recycling system in halls so that it matches as much as possible what students living out will be expected to do. Again, this has only really been fully online for two years now, so should only really now be feeding through to those now living out. Hopefully neighbours will see some improvement.

And lastly - bravo if you have read this far - cars. Cars are big lumps of metal. They take up a lot of space, whether they are owned by students or other residents. With students in halls we can police the city's conditions that students do not bring or use a car in Oxford.

Now I know that neighbourhoods perceive this to be a big problem - that a student house could have four or more cars for example. That they notice when students are back because parking becomes impossible. But it is a simple fact: it is only a minority of students who can actually afford to keep a car. You only need one car per house in much of east Oxford to overload the available on-street parking. If so many of these student houses, as is implied, actually had a car per resident, the problem would be far, far greater than it is.

Many people want the university to make it a condition of study that students do not have a car in Oxford, whether or not they are in halls. I cannot concur with that. They are adults; if they have a car, they are paying for the roads. If it is a controlled parking zone they will have to pay for permits. Nowadays students almost inevitably have to work to support themselves, and for plenty that means work sufficiently far away from their place of residence to need a car - possibly even more so than people living in inner east Oxford and working in town or at the hospitals. If you are going to try and base the right to a permit on whether someone pays council tax, then you had better be prepared to ban anyone in receipt of council tax benefit from having a car as well.

The same woman as was misinformed about Crescent and Paul Kent Hall questioned why students can be given car permits at Wheatley and Harcourt. Well there are sound practical reasons - the only people at Harcourt for example who are eligible to apply for a parking permit are those education students who have to travel to school based teaching placements.

Phew - as I said, bravo if you have managed to get this far. I have to say that the whole tenor of that meeting was far too antagonistic toward Brookes, and many of the reasons for that seem to originate in misunderstandings, or, as in the case of owner-occupiers selling up to landlords, of the communities' own making. Brookes is committed to helping address these issues, whatever the origins of them. But the communities need to work with Brookes to achieve it. Taking the line, as in the advertisements for the meeting, that they wish to "restrain" Brookes, does not seem to me to be conducive to a "constructive debate".

And, since "dark threats" were being issued about the prospects for politicians who are not seen to back these neighbourhoods, I will also say that I for one will be taking a dim view of those politicians who take positions that work to the detriment of students as part of a wider agenda against the university amongst some of their more vocal constituents. Some last week voted, in my opinion, against the best interests of nearly a third of their electorate. It is, indeed, usually a silent third, but I for one will do what I can to get our students to have their say in this city. Whatever problems communities may have with particular examples of student neighbours, there is far too great a tendency in this city to lump them all together as the sole cause for all your distress. Any who go around trying to claim to be "student friendly" when it suits them, but most of the time siding against them on all manner of local issues, deserve to be exposed as cynical and somewhat unsophisticatedly so hypocrites.

I received a little missive through the local community mailing list today reminding members of the notice they had received to the effect that Oxford City Council will no longer, as from 3rd August, collect any extra bin bags left with your wheelie bins or wheelie bins whose lids won't close because of the volume of the contents, and that you will receive an £80 fine for not complying, and reminding you of the "rules of collection" like that you bin must be in a specific place by 7am on bin day and not before 6pm the night before and so on and so forth. I am not subject to this little "customer service" regime since on site my rubbish is collected by the cleaners who service the flats and so on but I replied...

Time to open up waste collection to proper competition I'd say.

These people are your servants not your masters. You are their customers. You pay them. They take these excuses, such as land fill regulations or health and safety assessments, and turn them into rules that have the effect of new laws that can be enforceable with punishment fines and make your life inconvenient.

It seems to me there is plenty of room for a premium service for example

• One that will actually come onto your property, round to your kitchen door if necessary, to get your bin, wash it out when they've emptied it and put it back neatly.

• One that will give you a scale of charges so you know you will be billed by weight or volume (and not "fined" which by definition is a punishment) but will take whatever you leave for them.

• One that promises not to go through your rubbish bins in the dead of night categorizing you, not your rubbish, by some new socio-economic measure and treat you differently as a result.

• Ones that come on different days and you can open accounts with more than one of them so that if you have something particular you want rid of one day that isn't your main collection they will take it anyway and bill you a little.

• One which will pay you for any recyclable waste for which they get money upstream - indeed I know of one firm dealing in a plastic bottle crusher who does just that - sends you bags that you can send back full of crushed PET bottles and get money back off them, eventually paying back the cost of the crusher and then some.

All over the country council bureaucrats are being metamorphosized into "refuse tzars" (nice pun - for of course what they do is "refuse" to take your refuse except under ever stricter rules); and some day these pavlovian conditioned customers are going to bite back. You wait; after the "fines" will come the "SWAT" teams to haul you out and embarrass you, and maybe worse, in front of your neighbours - because monopolies, especially ones with statutory force, can do that sort of thing. "Public servants" - pah!

Ah well, we can but hope. Why *do* all of you who have to work to their rules just roll over and accept this escalation of hostilities, this change of role from servant to policeman? You just watch what happens when you don't pay these "fines" on the grounds that they are no longer giving the service your tax pays for!

Maybe, in future, someone will quip:

"First, they came for the extra bin bags, but I said nothing, because I didn't have extra bin bags"

Oh - by the way - be careful what you flush down the loo too - I was reading this week of some research in Oregon where they were testing equipment intended to check for drugs use by sampling sewer water. By the time they've got us all on their DNA database, they'll be able to match that with individuals and potentially use it for evidence (but don't assume it will stop at drugs - if there's too much sugar shown the diabetes SWAT team will land in your back garden and steal all your cakes no doubt).

Just across the park from my flat is a house, known as Dairy Lodge. It is part of the legacy of the Morrell family who built it as part of their parkland estate which the City Council requisitioned many years ago. Part of the estate was fenced off, became Robert Maxwell's house and is now part of Oxford Brookes University. But the city hung onto other parts of the park, including two of its lodges, Dairy Lodge being one of them.

To my mind it is extremely dubious as to whether they have an ethical right to flog these houses off - being a part of private property they simply purloined from the last owners and clarly a part of the park as a coherent whole, but such is their financial predicament and incompetent financial management that they decided they had no choice but to flog off Dairy Lodge.

And so it's been on the market - you will understand that even Oxford is a difficult market at the moment (someone just reduced their £1.2m property in Old Headington to £995k for example) - for six weeks or so. It was only put onto the agent's website three weeks or so ago, with a closing date for "informal tenders" of 26th January.

Now, personally, I would have sold it leasehold - after all it is an integral part of Headington Hill Park and therefore of public interest as part of that estate. But no, it was sold freehold. It includes in its £425,000 guide price a large barn, almost as big as the house itself, which, the particulars suggest, might be developed with appropriate planning consent.

Guess who grants planning consent? Yep, you got it, the city council as planning authority. Planning consent is like writing a blank cheque to the applicant for the amount of money by which the site will appreciate if it has permission to become a five bed, three reception property instead of the three bed two reception (and downstairs bathroom) property as sold.

So you would think that a local planning authority would have a guess at what sort of planning consent any new owner might apply for and do it for themselves, and knock up the sale price by a hundred grand or so. But no, Oxford City Council, with consummate incompetence and possibly even maladministration, has flogged the house as seen whilst encouraging the new occupier to make a small fortune on it instantly by suggesting they apply to convert the barn.

Great - this is a council so strapped for cash that they are selling a unique building in an historic setting that one has to wonder whether they even have the right to sell. And they can't even get that right! I wonder how the District Auditor is going to view that?

Last year there was an almighty row, aided and abetted of course by politicians taking opportunist (but unrealistic and possibly illegal) positions ahead of elections, about huge rent rises in the five year Covered Market rent review process. A modicum of peace was restored when the city council pledged to spend the paltry sum of £50,000 on some painting and decorating. Today we learn that the cash strapped spending slashing council has withdrawn the funding and, quite rightly, some of the traders in the market are pretty pissed off.

Image copryright SteveBell @ Flickr (I hope I'm allowed to use this!) Not only that, but today we also learned that retail property is at the head of the rush downwards with average values now below those when the rent review period began in 2003. So not only has the council managed to snag peak of the market rents but has now slashed the only sop to the traders it offered.

It's time to realize that the City Council is incapable of being a good landlord to such a sensitive building and it local trader tenants. For many people in Oxford the Covered Market is the jewel in the crown of local retailing. Many suburban centers have lost their fresh food outlets- butchers, green-grocers and so on - and on top of that the market can offer a range of products that only the center of gravity of a city could realistically support.

Whether the Westgate redevelopment goes ahead and when is also critical, as that will move the center of gravity of the city westwards, alongside the redevelopment of the whole south western quarter of the city, and the Covered Market and the surrounding streets need their landlords to plan investment now to try to maintain footfall at that end of the city center when the time comes. It will be a fair trek on foot between Waitrose and the new car parking attached to the Westgate center and the High Street, and the further reduction in scheduled bus services stopping in the High will make things even worse.

Instead of reining in its expenditure on its estate, which is largely to the east of St Aldate's and Cornmarket - the area that will be most affected by these changes over the next few years - the City Council needs to find a way of taking the lead in investing in this part of town. We all know they cannot afford to do so themselves in the current climate as they are slashing away at any expenditure they can so they need to change the way their interests in these properties are handled so that they can attract outside investment.

A Property Investment Partnership would fit the bill. The City Council, and any other landlords who want to participate to keep their estate's value up when all the changes happen, contribute the properties as owner partners, the tenants put in their rent as occupier partners and we go out and find an investor partner or several to put in whatever capital is required.

Ownership is not ceded to anyone else in the long run, the new facilities improve footfall and therefore takings, which is reflected in a higher yield from the whole development, since traders' occupation payments are based on their turnover rather than mere "rent" changing that from a fixed cost to a variable cost at this time of great pressure on retail. Everyone wins. You could even throw in other facilities such as a customer loyalty card, selling small shares to the customers so they also become partners in the thing they value so highly.

Let's face it, the city has finally realized it cannot possibly finance its leisure centers properly and has now given them away in a U-turn since castigating me for suggesting it in 2002 (which would have saved them millions over those years, enough to finance all the projects they are slashing to make ends meet today). So it has no excuse now for not looking at more imaginative ways of dealing with the rest of its non-core operations. And failure to invest now risks their long term future income faced with all the challenges I've already mentioned - which would surely be, foreseeable as it is, maladministration if it comes to pass.

Oxford City Council is set, it would appear, to cut its funding for the City Centre Management Company, OX1 and "repatriate" many of its functions to the bureaucracy of the City Council. In another U-turn from its former support of the idea of a city centre management company the Labour administration thinks that it will be more "transparent" if things are run from the Town Hall again.

New manager 'set to run Oxford' OX1 is to continue as an independent representative body for businesses Oxford city centre is to have a new manager to oversee improvements designed to benefit residents, shoppers, visitors and businesses. Currently £105,000 goes to a company called OX1, a group representing firms which organised events this year to promote the city centre. [From BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | New manager 'set to run Oxford']

When they first pushed the idea back in 1999 I was fundamentally against establishing OX1 as a sort of a "closed shop" of retailers and other economic interests and wanted a much more open structure which would enable users of the city centre, workers, shoppers, citizens, culture groups and so on to take a real stake. I proposed then what I called a "City Centre Management Co-operative".

But in any case, OX1 has never been given the clout or profile it would need to do a decent job. Indeed it has at times become the excuse for a city council not investing in the centre - such as this year when the Christmas lights underwhelmed it was pointed out that it was not the council's job - that it funded OX1 to do that sort of thing (funding which, it would appear, is less than half what the council itself spent on lights ten years ago). Indeed privatizing the provision of Christmas lights was one of the leading drivers behind the CCMC in the first place - we were told that by giving it independence from the council's financial strictures it would be able to produce better investment is such promotional activities.

Oxford city centre is a confusing enough place as it is - not only is the city council responsible for all sorts of statutory administravia, but it is also a significant landlord in its own right. There are competing pressures for its meagre resources there too - it will make a lot of money out of the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre if that continues but will likely in turn lose out on its properties in parts of the centre that will lose footfall - such as the High Street, Covered Market and Broad Street areas.

Perhaps more than most other city centres there are powerful local interests outside the city council - the university and colleges own much of the commercial property, as well as, in a sense, "controlling" much of the consumer side of the city's commercial scene. The county council is not such a significant landlord but does control the access in the form of responsibility for roads, traffic and public transport. So there are real conflicts of interest here that could do with sorting out, rather than, perhaps, exacerbating by re-centralizing more of the administrative functions into the city council. And on top of all that, the city council has been utterly incompetent in its execution of the services it provides in the city centre as well - street cleaning, rubbish collection and so on.

So what is needed is to look again at my original idea of a city centre partnership or co-operative in which all users and providers in the city centre can participate and take a real stake. And all the more so in this frightening time when the economic situation may see our high streets decimated with both chain stores and local traders under real threat of closure.

Landlords could be persuaded (led by the city council itself whose investment ability is hopeless anyway) to put their properties (including, perhaps especially, the Covered Market) into such a partnership, allowing finance to be raised for improvements and changing the rent structure which currently threatens to cripple many businesses, especially the local traders. Traders are also not going to survive without customers, so city centre users could be encouraged to join in solidarity with the business they will no doubt regret losing if they go, with perhaps some kind of city centre dividend paid for out of improved revenues from the resultant customer loyalty.

Oxford city centre is a centre for people from throughout the county and region, who have just as little a say in how things are managed there by the city council as do the businesses OX1 was initially setup to represent. Mutualizing the city centre in such a partnership would enable all of these people, as well as Oxford residents to have a real stake and a real say in how their city centre serves them.

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")

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.