Public Health and Community Safety

These are two of the issues I pursued at today's Cabinet at the County Council. The Public Health Report for Oxfordshire has been published and it was interesting to hear it reported on the news this evening as the 'demographic time bomb'. I sat on a scrutiny review commissioned by the Joint Health Scrutiny Committee where we spent many hours of the last 18 months looking at all aspects of this. We made many key recommendations which were reported to Cabinet in January. You can read the review here

Today, however, it was time to revisit the problems and highlight the concerns made about the challenges we face to deal with this in the future. Certainly, I was pleased to see the reference made to carers and how current health services and social services would collapse without them. It is time their role was officially recognised and they are given the support they need. Government is slow in ackowledging this. The full Public Health report is available to read online.

The County's Audit report was also looked at and it is well known that the 'excellent' 4 star rating was lost some time ago, especially due to their poor record on Children's Services. However, today I highlighted aspects of community safety which need to improve especially with regard to deaths and serious injuries on the roads. Funding for community safety schemes were taken out of the budget about 2 years ago and this would have helped to fund schemes like zebra crossings and road safety measures which may have helped to improve this. It will also be interesting to see how implementation of 20 mph speed limits in Oxford will go ahead, which is up for a delegated decision on Thursday. I know there is a debate about police enforcement on this.

Speeding is known to cause accidents, and certainly, Cllr. Jenny Hannaby and myself have been looking into the reduction of the speed limit on Mably Way as the doctor's surgery had contacted us after a resident was badly hurt on the crossing recently. This followed a fatality there just over a year ago. This will be discussed on Thursday at the Traffic Advisory Committee in Wantage. We arranged for a speed survey to be undertaken there, so it will be interesting to hear the results.