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.

Dear Cllr Mitchell and friends at the county council,

I see your party’s leader, Mr Cameron, has today accepted that inequality between the rich and the poor matters. He even noted in the Guardian (which you may not have seen, so I’ll quote), “there are parts of affluent Oxford, for instance, which rival parts of Liverpool in terms of deprivation”. We’ll forgive him a little hyperbole, but it’s close to the mark.

Mr Cameron (thankfully) doesn’t have any power to put his proposals into action. But you do, running schools, youth services, Sure Starts and social care services for our city. Perhaps, following Mr Cameron’s lead, you could take some action to start implementing the vision: withdrawing the threat to funding for the advice centres on Blackbird Leys and Rose Hill, for example. Picking up the funding slack at the Dovecote Centre for families on Blackbird Leys, maybe. Opening up a bidding cycle for new voluntary youth provision for young people on our estates, perhaps. Or even just making sure someone from the county council turns up at meetings of the regeneration partnership on Rose Hill, like all the other agencies do, perchance.

None of these are state interventions, which I know you’re dubious about. None will change the world, but they’d be a start. And Mr Cameron needs a bit of a boost right now, I gather.

I remain, etc.

How do you find out what young people want? It’s a question that preoccupies lots of well-meaning politicians. On the estate I represent on the council, the answers are always the same: more sport, somewhere to hang out such as a youth cafe or a well-lit youth shelter, someone to talk to about any problems I have, something for girls to do, a safer and better environment on Rose Hill so I’m not ashamed to bring my friends here.

As part of our ongoing battle to secure more funding for Rose Hill’s young people, the city council recently commissioned a report about what young people on Rose Hill want, what’s available now, and what opportunities there might be. It’s a fascinating piece of work, and highlights some of the real problems: that we have a county council which spends just £53 per head per young person on youth services, compared to a national average of more than £100; that the number of NEET young people on Rose Hill estate is comparable to the numbers on some of the toughest estates in Tower Hamlets, where the consultant working for us has just completed a similar project; that unlike Tower Hamlets, there’s not a single youth support team specifically working with identified at-risk teenagers on Rose Hill, as there’s a shortage of youth workers wanting to work in the evenings. (Forgive me, but if you’ve trained as a youth worker, perhaps you might have thought that evening work came as part of the territory?!)

I need to say that our youth workers on the estate are great: they get no funding apart from one or two of their salaries, and have to fundraise for everything else. We would have many more problems than we do if it wasn’t for Maggie and her team’s hard work, and nothing I say here is to criticise them. They work incredibly hard - but all they can do is attempt to divert young people from trouble, with no-one to call on to provide in depth support to young people at risk. The more I think about it, the more furious I get.

I’ve given up arguing for what we thought might be a reasonable deal: county council funding so that the youth club can open every night for a few hours. It wasn’t clear to me what the problem was: the police say it’s utterly vital, we have two massive surveys of opinion on the estate talking about how there’s nothing for young people to do, and the city would have put some money in too. But it’s not going to happen - the county are impervious to argument, and if they haven’t an answer, they just don’t call you back or reply to your letters or emails.

But this year, £5 million is coming to Oxfordshire County Council for the service to replace Connexions, the youth advice service, and another £1 million or so is coming for specific young people-led projects. It’s all new money, and fantastically, it’s all been ringfenced by government for youth services of one sort or another. I’d like the leader of the council, Keith Mitchell, and the portfolio holder for children’s services, Louise Chapman, to tell me exactly how much of that cash is coming for the 387 young people aged 13-19 on Rose Hill who they have so far failed. And while they’re at it, I’d like a breakdown of wards in Oxfordshire, ranked by disadvantage, and a breakdown of how this extra money is being allocated to make the most difference. Cos until I started shouting last autumn, Connexions had never run any services on Rose Hill estate, and I’m convinced they don’t do any work on any of the other estates either, just sit holed up in their office on Gloucester Green in the city centre. And cos I don’t trust the county council not to spend it in bloody Henley and bloody Wallingford and bloody Bloxham, when it would make so much difference to spend it on the young people of Rose Hill, and Blackbird Leys, and Barton, and Wood Farm. Our coppers know this: just ask Inspector Phil Standish, whose team deal with young people getting into trouble every day on Rose Hill. The local community knows this. And yet, for partisan political reasons, money keeps getting put into leafy rural villages in pretty Oxfordshire, leaving our estates with no bloody resources. It’s a scandal - not one the Oxford Mail will cover as once again they failed to get a journo to area committee - but a scandal nonetheless.

But, you know, what do you do when you’ve a county council who manifestly fail in their responsibilities and don’t give a two hoots about young people on Rose Hill? As a city councillor, you fund whatever you can, however you can, through the city council. Just before Christmas, six young people came to the residents’ and tenants’ association. They wanted to talk about what should be different on Rose Hill. Lots of their ideas were way beyond what’s possible (though they shouldn’t be - why can’t we have a swimming pool on Rose Hill? Barton has one), but one wasn’t. And tonight at the area committee, we found the money for a small thing: floodlighting the streetsports area so it’s usable all year round. £12k, but it’s exactly what the young people who came to that committee meeting said they wanted. I’ll text them all tomorrow and tell them. One thing accomplished, but once again the city council picks up the pieces for an incompetent uncaring rural-dominated city-hating county council leadership. I’m almost angry enough to say that I’ll stand for the county myself next time, not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference.

I feel like I should blog reflections on my first year of being a councillor. But I’m tired and it’s late, so instead here’s me in my element, glass of wine in hand and dignity flying out the window as I try out twirling in councillor robes at mayor-making last week…

Update: more silliness over at the Deputy Lord Mayor’s place, where he has a You Tube clip of the sub-medieval pageantry of the Lord Mayor’s Parade on Saturday - not the bits where it poured with rain. At 00:24, you see me walk through the picture in a very fetching bonnet…

You may read in the Oxford Mail at some point in the coming days about how those dreadful south-east councillors couldn’t even turn up to a crucial area committee meeting, so it couldn’t go ahead ‘cos it was inquorate. Just so you know, I’d like to point out that one Rose Hill and Iffley councillor was discharged from hospital earlier today, and the other was fifteen minutes late having rushed from a meeting in the city centre about rebuilding Rose Hill estate. Oh well. (NB: I’m not the one who’s been in hospital, thankfully.)

This may not be a councillor-blog, but this is certainly a councillor-post, aimed at the few local Rose Hill residents who read this blog.

On 24 April there will be a joint meeting of the Rose Hill Regeneration Partnership and the Rose Hill Residents’ and Tenants’ Association at 7.30pm at Rose Hill Community Centre. All local residents and tenants are invited to come along and find out more about the plans for the building project, the wider estate regeneration, and all the other groups and services who are active in our community.

For once, most of the organisations delivering services on the estate will be in one place at one time, including:
Rose Hill and Littlemore children’s centre
Imagine Nursery
Learning Communities
Rose Hill neighbourhood action group, our local police beat team and PCSOs
Streetwardens
Rose Hill estate manager
Oxford City Council housing development team
Oxford Citizens Housing Association
The residents’ and tenants’ association
Oxford Healthy Living and the Rose Hill health trainers
Rose Hill Primary School
Rose Hill youth club
Rose Hill community association and social club
Rose Hill advice centre
Rose Hill News

It would be great to get a really good turnout, and make sure local people get to have their say about the redevelopment and regeneration.

From tomorrow’s Oxford Mail:

A teenager has been banned from most of Oxford’s Rose Hill estate after a string of complaints about him drinking and abusing and harassing residents.
Ricky Byles, 17, from Barton, has been given an antisocial behaviour order, which bans him from the area for two years.
He must keep out of most of the estate until January 12, 2009, after the police and Oxford City Council secured the Asbo against him.

Well done to Graham Pink, our neighbourhood sergeant, and his team and to the CANAcT team at the City Council.

Update: there’s more detail in today’s full report, including a photo.

It appears that I have won the Bloggers4Labour award for best blog by an elected representative. Thanks for that, folks! Very flattering. Though, as Stuart points out, it’s not really as though this is a true councillor-blog. After all, I don’t really post about my ward or the bin collection (though that may change when the bi-weekly collection is rolled out to Rose Hill and causes chaos…) I’m never convinced that many people in Rose Hill actually read this blog, though I know that fellow councillors, council officers and local journos do. /waves

This isn’t a councillor-blog. But you lot know a little about the ward I represent, right? In case you’ve forgotten, here’s some information about the ward and here’s some about the meetings I have been to every week since I was elected.

Rose Hill has been through a rough couple of years. It’s a pretty deprived area, particularly in terms of housing and facilities. We’re in the middle of a huge project to knock down 150-odd prefabs and replace them with new homes, but it’s been beset with delays. We’ve got a few difficult young people who entertain themselves with criminal damage and joyriding, and we’re had some pretty appalling serious incidents too. Lots of people on the estate are working hard to make it a better place to live, but sometimes you wonder whether everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet when the county council decides to cut nearly £14k from the advice centre, meaning it will probably open only three mornings a week next year.

So, why do I feel cheerful tonight? Well, we’ve had eleven arrests on the estate over the past two weeks, including some for drugs; for an attack on the flat of an elderly person; for breach of the dispersal zone; for breach of an ASBO banning a former resident from the estate. Our beat team has four excellent officers, and their oddly-named Operation Boodle is getting results. Following the problems we’ve had, we’ve got a pair of officers on foot guaranteed to be on the estate every night of the week until midnight, up til the end of December, and around the 27th, our new pair of PCSOs start. Last night at the area committee we approved two CCTV cameras to go up in a notorious trouble spot near the shops, and in a few weeks the police team will be reviewing the dispersal zone to see how it’s working. We’re finally sorting out the stick.

And the carrot? Well, at the same meeting last night, we passed brand new floodlights for the recreation ground, so that the Football Foundation-funded youth work and sports development work can finally restart. The SEEDA Learning Communities project which came on stream in May has refurbished part of the Community Centre and will do up part of the Sure Start building to finally get IT suites on the estate. They’ve set up a regular group meeting with Brookes University on the estate, and five residents are being supported to apply for next year. They’ve persuaded the different agencies to get on board and run a weekly careers information and guidance session on the estate, and started entry-level courses running in ESOL, literacy, numeracy, beauty and IT. Learning Communities has set up a young learners’ group, Asian women’s group, an at home learning project and is supporting the development of the Sure Start cafe as a social enterprise. They’ve got the BBC RaW project coming to run a pilot on the estate.

And there’s more. Our local school was taken out of special measures last week. Nine teenagers came to our residents’ and tenants’ meeting last week, and they want to sit down with us and our beat team to try to work out together how we make things better for young people and reduce trouble on the estate. Not to count chickens, but we may finally have an agreement on how we develop the community centre with the planning gain money from the redevelopment. And, last but not least, the tenders for the developer to build the new homes are in - a huge step forward.

From Strong and Prosperous Communities, the local government white paper published by DCLG today:

The way councils best govern themselves will be different in different parts of the country. [...] We also recognise the potential gains which unitary status can offer, in terms of leadership and efficiency. Councils in shire areas will be able to seek unitary status; we have published information on how to submit proposals and how we intend to handle the small number of proposals conforming with the criteria which we expect to receive.

(Why I think having one council for Oxford would be a good idea here; also mentioned here and here)