Headington Headlines #255

TonyOX3

Your weekly round-up of local news for 22 – 28 February.

The first exhibition of the latest plans for Access to Headington was held on Saturday, and was well-attended. The plans have been modified since the initial proposals, but there are still bound to be some problems with the details. I will post more under the Access2H tab when I’ve got something ready.

The function room refurbishment @TheMasonsArmsHQ is complete.

Headington Quarry Nursery School is looking for a new Head Teacher to replace Lesley Carrington, who retires at the end of the academic year.

Oxford University’s Big Data Institute on the Old Road campus was topped out on Friday. It is Make Architects’ @MakeArchitects fifth building on the campus. Here is their description of the building.

Not strictly Headington, but if you saw the announcement a few days ago that Oxfordshire’s District Councils and MPs are backing the idea of abolishing the County Council and creating four Unitary Authorites you might like to know that there is now a websiite under the name Oxfordshire Vision and a twitter @oxonvision.

Active posts on the Headington & Marston e-democracy forum this week:

  • Empty ground-floor premises in Headington centre
  • Possible Extension to Car Spaces in Bury Knowle Park
  • Access to Headington – gloves off for round 2!
  • New School for Headington

Access to Headington – Who Decides?

TonyOX3

We know that a series of public exhibitions on the latest version of the Access to Headington (A2H) project starts on Saturday 27 February (see previous post). What I didn’t know until a few days ago is that the final decision to go ahead with this project is expected to be taken on Thursday 28 April this year by the County’s Cabinet Member for Environment, David Nimmo Smith, acting alone under delegated powers.

This strikes me as another potential public fiasco by the County Council’s Highways Department. I would have thought they would have learned from their handling of the Headington Heatpipe that openness and involvement of the local community would save them much embarrassment. Whatever emerges from this round of consultation the A2H project is bound to be controversial, balancing the demands for improved transport systems with the wish to retain visual and environmental amenity, mitigate noise and air pollution, and find alternatives for lost parking places.

I have nothing against Cllr Nimmo Smith, but he is not local to Headington or even Oxford. He cannot be expected to know the strength of feelings that will emerge over the coming weeks. He will be relying on his officers’ summary of feedback and their recommendations of a course of action. But given the heatpipe project failings how confident can he and we be that he will have enough information to take an informed decision?

Our local County Councillors will be closely involved and are approachable and easy to contact. They should be given the chance to express their views in an open forum before a final decision is taken. Ideally members of the public should be able to have their say too. For these reasons I believe the final decision on A2H should not be taken by the Cabinet Member alone, but at least by the County’s full cabinet (19 April or 24 May would be appropriate) or even better by Full Council on 17 May (5 April is probably too early).

Energy Project: 14 – 20 Feb 2016

TonyOX3

The Heatpipe Liaison meeting, or to give it its official title the Headington Liaison Group Stakeholder Meeting, held its latest monthly session on Thursday 18 February. Pressure of time at the venue (All Saints’ Church House in New High Street) restricted it to an hour, which was no bad thing. By my count there were five members of the Headington twitterati there among the local residents. The Oxford Mail reporter OxMailSophieM was also there.

As anyone who follows this saga will know, the pipelaying through the residential streets is on hold. The problem at the heart of it all seems to be one of land ownership. It is possible that the County as Highway Authority does not own the actual land and subsoil beneath the roads. The County itself seems to believe it only controls the surface as far down as necessary to provide a highway.

It’s all rather complicated and I can’t be sure I’ve got everything that follows right, but I’ll do my best! If you know something I’ve got wrong or left out please let me know.

Obviously the lawyers for all parties are working on this: we were told that two ‘diametrically opposed’ opinions have been given. If the land doesn’t belong to the County, it probably belongs to the frontagers – the people whose land fronts onto the street. If that is the case their individual permission will be needed, with the question of payment for wayleaves following.

Meanwhile, the City Council is saying that Vital Energi’s planning application is still not valid as required notices haven’t been given. They also say they haven’t yet received a valid Construction Traffic Management Plan. The situation here seems to be that Vital have satisfied the County’s requirements but not yet the City’s. Consequently, the planning application is on hold and the consutation period still has no definite end date.

I suspect that whatever shape the traffic plan takes it won’t be what local residents, particularly Highfield, want. They want a full traffic plan covering not just construction traffic but mitigation and safety measures for all the traffic that works its way through the area between London Road and Old Road, cars, bikes, pedestrians, commercial vehicles and all.

The other development last week was the meeting of the County Council’s Performance Scrutiny Committee, also on Thursday, to discuss their handling of the project. The minutes aren’t published yet, but from the live tweets at the time I gather there was strong criticism of the way County officers had carried out their duties. My interpretation is that the officers followed written procedures rather than using their brains. They treated the several separate road closure and excavation applications from Vital as individual applications and granted a licence for each one instead of linking them together as one project. As a result, each part of the project failed to register as significant, so never triggered the need to inform councillors and residents, or to have a consultation.

I don’t know what the final outcome of the meeting was, but we do have the paper from the agenda with the officers’ recommendations.  This seems to accept that the ‘rules’ need changing, but wants to replace them with other equally definitive rules – for example

In future when the Council receives a section 50 application which will extend beyond 300m of the longitudinal length of the road and requires a full road closure then officers will make the Strategic Manager, Traffic Manager and the local County Councillor (s) for the affected area aware of the application.

This seems to me just to perpetuate the problem. If a closure of 300m is ‘strategic’, so is one of 299m. These should be guidelines, not rules – officers must be told to use their heads, their local knowledge (if any), and their professional expertise and discretion in judging when and how to seek the wider participation of councillors and local representatives.

Energy Project Newsletter – February

As part of their plans for local communication and information the OUH NHS Foundation Trust is gooing to produce a monthly newsletter about the Energy Project. The first one is out now, and you can download a copy here.