Cllr Gant, Chair of the Scrutiny Committee presented the report. He said the committee had discussed the number of cycling infringements and options for how the Council could persuade cyclists to obey the law.

Cllr Price, Board Member for Corporate Strategy and Economic Development said that once the work at the end of Queen St had been completed, new cycling restriction signs would be installed. This would make it clearer what the rules are and would make enforcement of the cycling part of the City Centre PSPO possible.

Councillor Dee Sinclair, Board Member for Community Safety presented the report.

The Community Safety Service Manager said that as there have been no breaches of the Foresters Tower PSPO, it will not be renewed when it expires. As it doesn’t meet the legal test to have a PSPO.

The Community Safety Service Manager said there had been a reduction in aggressive begging but not begging.  Only 4 fixed penalty notices have been issued under the PSPO, all for illegal peddling.  No cases have gone to the magistrate court.

People ignoring the cycling restrictions on Cornmarket and Queen Street are an ongoing problem and every year officers need to re-educate new students in the city. There are not the resources to effectively control the problem as it requires officers catching people in the act.   Officers don’t know whether people are ignoring the signage or whether they don’t know it’s there.

The Committee discussed the following:

Oxfordshire County Council can’t improve the signage as traffic regulations orders won’t allow any other form of signage

They questioned whether displacement been monitored for the city centre PSPO. Is the Council dealing with the problems or just moving people around?  The Community Safety and Resilience Manager explained that the PSPO did not seek to address rough sleeping (which has generally increased across the city) and that many of the restricted behaviours were only relevant to the city centre (e.g. cycling in certain streets).

They queried how the FAQ system worked and whether if an individual got caught with two FAQs for different issues do they get two FAQs or does it get escalated to a penalty notice. They requested that officers provide data that shows the number of repeat offenders compared to individual FAQs. The Community Safety Service Manager said there were a very small number of repeat offenders; he would create a table of repeat offenders for the Committee.  

They queried the method of data collection given that data was only collected when officers were present to observe nuisance behaviours and issue FAQs. This made it difficult to know how much weight to give the data to determine if a PSPO is the best way to deal with the social problems listed in the report.

The Scrutiny Committee made the following recommendation to the City Executive Board.

Request that Oxfordshire County Council do what it can to improve the cycling signage on Cornmarket and Queen Street in the city centre.

Support more targeted enforcement actions aimed at addressing breaches of cycling restrictions in Queen Street and Cornmarket Street, together with proactive messaging to key groups such as students.