I hope this message finds you all well. Last Thursday Labour-led Oxford City Council's Executive Board were due to vote through their plans to make 'noncompliant' busking, pavement art, begging and sleeping in public toilets a criminal offence using a PSPO. On that same day international human rights organisation Liberty wrote a letter to Oxford Council publicly calling upon them to drop their unlawful plans to criminalise homeless people and buskers. https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/news/press-releases-and-statements/liberty-calls-oxford-city-council-scrap-unlawful-plans The letter from Liberty included a legal opinion from lawyers Jason Coppel QC and Deok Joo Rhee, which concludes that Labour's plans are unlawful on a number of human rights and common law grounds. Specifically, they have concluded that: • The council has failed to make the case for the statutory conditions that must be satisfied before a PSPO can be adopted. • The council has failed to comply with its duties under the Equality Act 2010. • There are further legal flaws in the plans to ban “persistent begging”, sleeping in toilets and busking in breach of the Council’s code of conduct – including disproportionate interference with a number of fundamental rights protected by the Human Rights Act. In response to this intervention Oxford City Council released a statement saying that they were withdrawing their report on PSPOs to give officers time to consider their formal response to Liberty's letter. It is brilliant news that Oxford have been forced to temporarily abandon their plans but our campaign will continue until the plans to criminalise street culture are formally abandoned. We have given Oxford examples of best practise from other UK cities which don't involve the use of PSPOs to criminalise busking such as this example from York: http://keepstreetslive.com/articles/2015/05/1301 Thanks once again for your ongoing support without which we would not have been able to put the local authority under pressure to change its position, Kind regards, Jonny Walker Founding Director Keep Streets Live Campaign http://keepstreetslive.com