Jock's Place - Is this Oxford Labour's "double devolution"? - Comments

Parish Council Headington

nicholas fell — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:49:52 +0000

Hey Jock why don't we arrange to meet and talk shop about a Civil Parish Council for Headington.
Call me on 07517479233. We seem to want to achieve the same political objective.
Area Committees are a waste of space!!!.

Interesting...

Jock — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:41:15 +0000

...we'll have to just disagree on planning and area committees. As you can gather anyway I'd much rather reparish. We have one of the highest ratios of representation on average that most of the rest of the democratic world in Britain I believe.

Personally I'd prefer to go much further . But you raise an interesting point about parishes and inequalities. Just thinking about the current North East Area, if that happened to be a town council in its own right, it would probably justify a full 25 town councillors, and instead of with the current city wards which all seem to be made up, crudely in places, of a wealthy part and a less well off part, these would all get their own representatives, and I'll bet even in the North East Area the "not so well off" areas' representatives would be in the majority. At the moment the wards are big enough to be multiple neighbourhoods

With my experiences of two of Oxford's four parishes, I'd trust them much more to eke out their income more efficiently and be much more reactive to local needs and requests. Case in point; the city is large enough to need to set an annual timetable for grants applications and so on, the parishes react whenever an application comes in mainly. That time difference could be make or break for local initiatives.

Hi Jock, I haven't been

donpaskini — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:40:13 +0000

Hi Jock,

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

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

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

Is this Oxford Labour's "double devolution"?

Jock — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:41:23 +0000

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?