Leader’s Report to Full Council – 17 July 2025

Published Friday 18 July 2025

Cllr David Rouane, South Oxfordshire District Council Leader’s report to July Full Council:

IT Issues

At the end of May and until 10 June, we carried out a major piece of planned essential maintenance work on the council’s IT system. This work was unavoidable and had to take place in order to secure the future of our IT system and the services it enables. We are making a number of IT changes as we move away from outsourced provision and update our servers and software inhouse.

The work impacted on the availability of many of the council’s online services – including planning, mapping (GIS), land charges and online reporting and booking forms.

Where relevant planning consultations were extended by 14 days to accommodate the downtime. We’d like to reassure you all responses submitted during this time will be taken into account. We currently anticipate returning to normal service in September.

I wish to apologise to everyone who has experienced difficulties due to these issues and urge you to check our website for regular updates.

Local Government Reorganisation

We are now at the stage where we are engaging with residents and other interested parties about our proposals for Local Government Reorganisation. I attended two of the four drop-ins which we held for residents so that I could hear first-hand what issues people were raising. I also attended an online meeting with chairs of town and parish councils last week and I understand that we have had around 2,000 responses to our online engagement.

These are information sessions, and some common themes are emerging around connectivity and identity, and opposition to the Greater Oxford proposal. I was able to reassure people that no one is proposing to ‘build a wall’.

We’re number one

It is not unusual for South Oxfordshire to come top of recycling league tables, but South Oxfordshire has recently been independently assessed as number one district in the country for our ‘Planning and Land Use’ work on climate change. Overall, on the climate scorecard we were scored as 5th in the country – a huge tribute to work by the climate team and everyone in the council who is working towards transforming our approach to climate. On ‘Planning and Land Use’ however, South was number one, the absolute top district council, and Vale was number three. This is the first time that has happened and it’s down to the climate policies in the emerging Joint Local Plan as well as Policy DES10: Carbon Reduction.