Oldham Borough Council Council Meeting Wednesday 23 October 2013 OLDHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL To: ALL MEMBERS OF OLDHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL, CIVIC CENTRE, OLDHAM Tuesday, 15 October 2013 You are hereby summoned to attend a meeting of the Council which will be held on Wednesday 23 October 2013 at 6.00 pm in the Council Chamber, Civic Centre, for the following purposes: Open Council 1 Questions to Cabinet Members from the public and Councillors on ward or district issues (20 minutes for public questions and 20 minutes for Councillor questions) Formal Council 2 To receive apologies for absence 3 To order that the Minutes of the meeting of the Council held on 11th September 2013 be signed as a correct record (Pages 1 - 28) 4 To receive declarations of interest in any matter to be determined at the meeting 5 To deal with matters which the Mayor considers to be urgent business 6 To receive communications relating to the business of the Council 7 To receive and note petitions received relating to the business of the Council (Pages 29 - 30) (time limit 20 minutes) 8 Outstanding Business from the previous meeting (time limit 15 minutes). 1. Councillor Heffernan to MOVE and Councillor Hindle to SECOND Oldham Council notes and welcomes the recent action by the Office of Fair Trading to regulate the actions of ‘legal loan sharks’. This Council believes that unaffordable credit is socially and economically damaging, extracting wealth from the most deprived communities in our town and causing a myriad of unwanted effects such as poorer diets, colder homes, rent, council tax and utility arrears, depression and poor health. Much of this credit is provided by doorstep lenders, log book loan shops and pay day loan shops and websites, all of which are legal yet charge exorbitant rates of interest. This Council resolves to: - Ask Overview and Scrutiny Board to examine whether Oldham Council should take a similar stance to other Councils in banning links to the websites of doorstep lenders, log book and payday loan companies from public computers located in libraries, community centres, youth clubs and other Council offices. - Ask the Chief Executive to write to the relevant Government minister calling upon the government to: • Implement as soon as possible legislation to cap the total lending rates that can be charged for providing credit. • Provide local authorities with the power to veto licences for high street credit agencies where they could have a negative economic or social impact on host communities. • Recognise the gap in the market for short-term loans at reasonable interest rates, and work with mainstream lenders to promote the development of suitable products. - Ask the Chief Executive to write to the three local Members of Parliament seeking their support for the Council’s position and to make similar representations to government. 9 Youth Council (time limit 20 minutes) The Oldham Youth Council priority campaign of unemployment has been active for 18 months, throughout this campaign work experience has been an issue consistently highlighted by the young people we have consulted. In July 2013 the employability leads organised the YOU event in partnership with Unity. This was a focussed consultation event with young people from across Oldham that aimed to explore what young people feel are the barriers they face to gaining employment and what Young people feel they can do to be better able to move into the world of work. Furthermore as part of the UK Youth Parliament make your mark ballot, we consulted nearly 7,000 young people in Oldham and found that work experience was voted the fourth most important issue out of 15. This reinforces that young people in Oldham strongly believe that the lack of work experience must be acted upon. In September 2012 the Government removed the statutory duty on schools to provide work related learning at Key Stage 4, including work experience. This has lead to some schools in Oldham no longer offering work experience at all, or only offering limited opportunities. Young people have told us that lack of experience is the single biggest reason they are given for not getting a Job. Many young people expressed frustration and concern that they need experience to get a job but can’t get experience without a job. The solution is quality work experience while still in education. We believe that work experience must be of a higher standard and available in all schools and academies, in order to combat the youth unemployment issue in our borough. We propose that there is a scrutiny review of work experience offered across Oldham and that this is used to influence schools to reinstate a quality work experience offer to young people at Key Stage 4. 10 Leader and Cabinet Question Time (time limit 30 minutes – maximum of 2 minutes per question and 2 minutes per response) 11 To note the Minutes of the meetings of the Cabinet held on the undermentioned dates, including the attached list of urgent key decisions taken since the last meeting of the Council, and to receive any questions or observations on any items within the Minutes from Members of the Council who are not Members of the Cabinet, and receive responses from Cabinet Members (Pages 31 - 34) (time limit 20 minutes) :- a) 29 th July 2013 12 Notice of Administration Business (time limit 30 minutes) 1. Councillor Moores to MOVE and Councillor Shuttleworth to SECOND The Conservative Government recently announced a series of proposals regarding parking rules and regulations. These proposals include “banning static CCTV parking cameras and car mounted cameras, instead allowing only visible traffic wardens to film vehicles”. Inconsiderate and dangerous parking is something we all have experience of. Residents who live close to schools are plagued by car drivers who think that they have an automatic right to park their car as close as possible to the school gates; these drivers are lacking in common courtesy and have little respect for other road users. When used appropriately, CCTV equipment - both static and car mounted -plays a vital part in the enforcement of parking restrictions that have been put in place to prevent accidents, maintain traffic flow and to prevent local residents being inconvenienced. It is of considerable concern to this Council that any changes to the law limiting the use of static and mobile CCTV equipment will have a detrimental effect on parking enforcement activities, particularly around schools. This council resolves: • to write to the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin, asking them to reconsider the proposal to ban the use static and car mounted CCTV cameras; • to write to the three local MPs asking them to support OMBC’s position that static CCTV and car-mounted parking cameras are a legitimate enforcement tool. 2. Councillor McMahon to MOVE and Councillor Sykes to SECOND This council notes • that England is now widely recognised to be the country with the most centralised system of government in Europe; • that devolution has brought decisions about tax and spending, and the quality of public services, closer to voters in Scotland and Wales, while English voters have not gained comparably greater influence over decision-making that affects their taxes and services; and considers • that the likely scale of change in how public services are funded and provided makes it democratically unsustainable for those changes to be decided within the existing over-centralised model; • that services need to be reformed and integrated across local agencies to enable them to prevent problems rather than picking up the pieces; • that voters should be given back a meaningful say on a wider range of tax and spending decisions, through place-based budgetary arrangements, the abolition of the discredited Barnett formula and the reinstatement of fair financial distribution agreed among English councils, the re-creation of a municipal bond market, and the certainty of multi-year funding settlements for the life of a Parliament; • that central government should enable that local decision-making by joining up and reducing in size Whitehall departments in order to facilitate local place-based budgets, by reducing Ministers’ powers to intervene in local decisions, and replacing bureaucratic tick-box inspection regimes with local service users champions; and • that such a new more mature settlement between central and local government should be put beyond future revision by giving formal constitutional protection to local democracy; and and resolves • to support the Local Government Association’s Rewiring Public Services campaign, which embodies these objectives; • to ask the borough’s Members of Parliament to support the Rewiring Public Services campaign to improve local voters’ influence over services, tax and spending; and • to ask the Chief Executive of the Council to write to the Secretary of State to make the council’s position on this issue clear . 3. Councillor Jabbar to MOVE and Councillor Wrigglesworth to SECOND This council notes • that Oldham residents are currently being contacted by companies offering to have their Council Tax valuation band lowered for a substantial fee; • that this service is in fact already available free of charge from the Manchester Valuation Office Agency; • that the Manchester Valuation Office Agency is signposted on the Council Tax section of Oldham Council’s website, but; • that many residents who are unaware of this free service may be persuaded to part with their money unnecessarily. And resolves • to continue in its financial exploitation awareness-raising campaigns; • to further promote the work of the Manchester Valuation Office agency through the Oldham Council website, Borough Life magazine, social media and Neighbourhood Teams 13 Notice of Opposition Business (time limit 30 minutes) 1. Councillor Blyth to MOVE and Councillor J.