One minute, you’re sat in the pub with your mates and this guy you vaguely recognise from the telly talking about the Labour party, in the way that activists from all over the country do all the time over a pint. Then, somehow, it ends up in the paper. How did that happen?!

Stan Taylor, Labour leader of Oxford City Council from 1994-1996, died earlier this week. I didn’t know Stan well, as we were never on the council together, but it’s worth reading Dan’s short piece here. One of my colleagues was telling me earlier this week about Stan being hugely determined to get down to vote for him three weeks ago, despite being very ill, and his pleasure when he realised Labour had held his ward. A real loss to the Oxford party.

Update: Stan Taylor’s funeral will be a Requiem Mass at Our Lady’s RC Church, Hollow Way at 12.30 pm on Friday 6th June followed by a woodland burial at Wolvercote Cemetery.

Forgive me for not posting. I do - for once - have an excellent excuse. After our victory in the local elections, the Labour party is now running Oxford city council again. We are (just - by one councillor) a minority administration. At annual council on Thursday, I was appointed to the administration. I’m now our lead member for social inclusion and young people - in other councils it may be called portfolio holder or cabinet member. I’ve known that this was the role I’d take for a week or so, and spent a fair amount of time discussing our priorities with colleagues and officers.

My portfolio covers: delivering our commitment to refurbish Oxford’s playgrounds; expanding the number and reach of our playschemes; overseeing community centres and facilities; the city council’s grants to voluntary organisations, including those which deliver on corporate priorities through commissioning, such as to the advice centres; the public side of the living wage campaign (the Leader is taking forward the internal agenda of ensuring that all council staff are paid at least $7 per hour as part of the wider discussions around pay and HR); estates regeneration; and community cohesion.

It’s all very exciting, though I’m not under-estimating the scale of the challenge, particularly where it comes to financial management and value for money. There’s a slight holiday atmosphere that comes of not being out on the knocker every night producing an inexhaustible appetite amongst Labour colleagues for dissecting the local elections/the state of the party/what we’re going to do on the council, always over a pint. All of this, plus the continued pleasure of representing Rose Hill and Iffley and continuing to hold down a full-time job means I’m super-busy - and loving it.

This is rather wonderful. Fix My Street is a new-ish project from the boys at My Society who brought us Write to Them and They Work For You. When I heard about it, I subscribed to the feed to hear about problems being reported in my ward, and promptly forgot about it.

This Thursday morning, the pedestrian lights went down at the corner of Cornwallis Road and Henley Avenue. A man called David Sheldon reported it on the site and the site emailed the county council four minutes later to tell them. Someone called Ray Taylor later fed back that they were working again. Doubt it was the service that prodded the council into action, as the lights were back up again in an hour or so, but I really like that the web is being used like this, and think there’s real potential for this service to become a way to report problems in the neighbourhood.

Imprint

Today was a good day to be a councillor for Rose Hill. We had the big press launch of the new housing scheme, replacing horrible pre-fabs with 250-odd new homes (lots of social housing, some part-rent part-buy, some elderly, some for private sale to fund the rest). Councillors, council staff, housing association staff and the guys from Taylor Wimpey doing the heavy lifting, as well as most importantly, local residents who will move into the new homes, gathered in front of the first homes. Another step forward for Rose Hill. Here’s the Oxford Mail’s article.

Tonight Oxford’s south east area committee unanimously supported the redevelopment plans for Rose Hill. It’s now up to strategic development control committee to decide whether or not to give it the final go-ahead. If they do, then we’ll see bricks and mortar in January, and hopefully the first people moving into some of the 250-odd new homes sometime in the early summer of 2008. The much-delayed scheme will also bring nearly half a million pounds of planning gain money for community facilities and infrastruture improvements to the estate. I like being a councillor on days like this.

£20,000 to keep the out-of-school provision open, secured by the Labour group, in the teeth of Lib Dem opposition. (Apparently following the correct procedure is more important than supporting low income families. Well, I guess if you thought that you would be a Lib Dem.)

The back story is here, and here.

Sometimes the Oxford Mail really doesn’t give you the info you need:

A man has launched a roof top protest after climbing on to housing offices in Oxford.
Police have cordoned off an area of Ashurst Way, in Oxford, after the man was spotted on the roof of the Oxford City Council building at about 4.15pm.
A police spokesman said it was believed he had mounted a protest and officers were attempting to persuade him to come down safely.

Be assured that if I find out why he was up there, I’ll let you know.

Regular (long-term) readers will recall that last autumn a bunch of kids rocked up to residents’ and tenants’ association on Rose Hill. Me and Ed and Sgt. Graham Pink met up with them a few weeks later to find out how we could make the estate a better place to live. One of the do-able things they wanted was to get the street sports site floodlit so it was usable outside the summer months in the evenings. After passing the money and sorting the partnerships out, this week we passed the planning application: we’re one step closer.

This is a story about local government, and small victories.

One of the myths about being a councillor is that full council meetings, the big set-piece affairs in the council chamber, are actually a chance to get anything done. Once a year, at budget-setting time, full council is important and meaningful, and the decisions it makes change the lives of people in the city. The rest of the year, it’s a sub-student union talking shop. Give me an hour at residents’ and tenants’ association rather than an hour at full council anyday.

So, you may have gathered that I’m not a fan of full council. But this Monday last, something strange happened: full council made a decision about real people and real people’s lives. We were asked to approve the decision of the executive board about the allocation of some unbudgeted-for income; the officer-led bureaucratic administration decided to spend some on HR and payroll systems, and some on systems thinking (no, I don’t know either).

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Earlier this year, in the allocation of grants to community and voluntary organisations, a number of excellent voluntary organisations in the south-east of the city had their applications for funding turned down. In particular, Dovecote parents’ committee had an application for £20k for preschool and out-of-school children’s activities turned down. Dovecote are based on Greater Leys, in the most deprived ward in the city (which, for comparison, falls into the 10 per cent most deprived wards nationally).

So, when the sections on approving EB recommendations come up, all the councillors were paying rapt attention to proceedings - actually, no, of course they weren’t, as it’s a nodding head exercise. I enjoyed amending the recommendations to give money to the Dovecote; listening to the Liberals attempt to argue against it; Cllr Craft scurrying into the chamber and realising that he was going to have to vote with the hated Labour group; the Greens showing some backbone and voting the right way, for once; and the next morning, calling the manager of the Dovecote to let her know that she doesn’t need to worry about closing down for a bit longer.

The Oxford Mail story is here. Just for once it was worth turning up to council.

UPDATE: what, of course, I didn’t realise when I wrote this is that the Lib Dem-run administration have been silly enough to call-in the decision for reconsideration, and one can only assume, reversal. What they think they’re playing at, I don’t know.

UPDATE UPDATE: have been assured by the deputy leader of the council (who may be wrong, but is rarely silly) that the grant is safe and hasn’t been called in after all. Hurrah!

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: nope, it’s been called in. Sigh.