Role of the city councillor video description.

The opening titles say: "Sue Roaf, city councillor, Wolvercote, Oxford." Sue Rolf is standing in front of a blackboard facing the camera. She begins: "Hi. My name is Sue and I'm a local councillor as well as an architect. Now this means that, as a councillor I take part in the planning process and I'll show you where I fit in both as architect and councillor planner."

"You see, the building process starts with a client and here we'll put a lady in a skirt and she can be our client." Sue draws a picture of the client on the blackboard.

"She will approach me as an architect and here I am, I'll put myself in a bow tie, and she'll ask me to do an initial sketch design for her." Sue draws a picture of an architect on the blackboard and draws a line linking the architect to the client.

"So I will go away and I'll do a drawing with her house on, and it's only a rough drawing, it's not fully detailed because I want to know if the local authority will allow me to build this plan." Sue draws an icon, which represents a plan, onto the blackboard underneath the architect.

"So I then approach a planning officer." Sue draws a picture of a planning officer on the blackboard and links him to the sketch design.

"Now he is actually employed by the local council and he will say whether it is possible to build that house, because there are alot of laws that say 'you're not allowed to build houses in this area, but you can build them in other areas'. So he says, 'no, that's fine, this house will be OK on the plot of land you've got'. But I have to then take this plan of a house and I have to show it to the councillors, because the planning officer in any of the larger schemes doesn't actually decide whether a building can be built, but it's the elected people of the council like me, the councillor for Wolvercote in Oxford."

Sue draws a picture of a table with eight councillors sitting around it and links to this picture from the picture of the planning officer.

"They'll be about eight of us who sit down and nowadays we actually sit down in front of a crowd and that will be all the people from the local community."

Sue draws an icon to represent the local community next to the table of councillors.

"We will have the plan of the house and put it on the table in front of us, and we will discuss with the public whether we think that house should be built in our community. This can sometimes get a little tricky. Sometimes if you've got a very dubious scheme that nobody in the community wants to be built. But, let's say we decide that that house can be built. We go back to the client and we say, 'yes, you can build your house'."

Sue draws a link from the table of councillors back to the client.

"Now at that point the architect will then do all the detailed drawings, so we do exactly how the roof is built or how the foundations go in and we take it to show the building regulations officer."

Sue draws an icon to represent detailed plans and links them to a drawing of a building regulations officer.

"He will have a look and he will say that all these detailed plans are fine. So he will then OK it. So we've got 'OK' from the buildings regulations officer and we go to the builder and he will build the house."

Sue draws a picture of the builder and links the builder back to the building regulations officer.

"He spends a month, three months, a year building the house for our client and that's how the whole process works."

Sue draws an icon to represent the built house and links it back to the client.

"But sometimes, if you get a difficult decision here," Sue points to the councillors," it makes it very difficult for us as councillors to represent all the people. I'll give you an example of this. Many of you young people like to go skateboarding. Well, the other day we had a skateboard park given to us for us to decide whether it should be given planning. There was a canal and a lovely park, but there were lots of houses on the other side. The children actually wanted the skateboard park in here."

Sue draws a semi-circle to represent the park with a canal running alongside the flat edge of the semi circle and houses situated on the other side of the canal. She points to the middle of the park.

"What happened was, we had half the people in the audience who lived in the houses and they were very noisy about the fact that they didn't want the skateboard park because, as you ride a skateboard you ride up the ramp and you land with a bang, and it's a very intrusive noise. So they are very concerned that this would be too noisy. And suddenly we're sitting in the village hall and the back door of the hall opens and silhouetted against the light in the hall were children of all different sizes. Children from three years old, to thirty years old, all with skateboards under their arms, all dressed in skateboard shorts and tee shirts and hats back to front and they all marched in and sat down. And they said, 'we want our skateboard park'. So all of us sitting around here (the table of councillors), we represent all of these people, so we had the difficult decision, 'do we allow them to build here or do we move it somewhere else'. What we recommended in the end, because the noise of the skateboard ramps is so extreme, was that, instead of building it across the canal, that they take it slightly out of town, a bit further away. We suggested that the council built them a really first class skateboard park there. So everyone was quite happy. The children would have preferred the skateboard park nearer to where they lived, but in the end we got a compromise solution. So we were able to make that decision."

Tomorrow night I have to sit on this planning panel and we will have five or six different schemes given to us to decide on. So it is not the planning officer, who's employed by the council who decides, but us as councillors who are elected representatives of the people of that community who decide, in the planning system."

"It may be that we make a decision that they don't agree with. If we make a decision and the planning officer doesn't like it or anybody really objects we can go to appeal, in which case those plans are taken to central government, to the deputy prime minister's office and there will be an appeal which is judged at the highest level of government about whether we should have that scheme passed."

"All in all, it's quite a tortuous system to get the client, to get the architect to design the building, that is seen by the planning officer and judged by the councillors and then if it's passed goes again through regulations before it's built for the client. But, all in all, it is a safe system that ensures that the requirements and the desires of the whole community are taken into account when we give permission to build a building."

End.