CONTROVERSIAL measures to alleviate homelessness in the city will be considered by senior councillors – even though officers fear some would be illegal.

A cross-party city council group was set up in July to look at services provided to homeless people with no local connection to Oxford.

It has now come up with 25 recommendations, but council officers have said many are either already being done or are unworkable.

In one case, the group said it felt people who had spent six of the last 12 months or three of the last five years in prison, hospital or rehab should not be penalised when applying for housing.

Council officers have said that would be illegal.

And scrutiny committee and Labour member James Fry said he felt it would be better to correct recommendations rather than waiting for senior councillors on the authority’s executive board (CEB) to reject them and order them to be reconsidered.

Mr Fry said: “If you look at [some recommendations]: ‘not possible under law.’ There are things like that that I assume are not just plucked out of thin air [by officers]. I don’t like any document to be corrected. Otherwise it will be sent back for revision… to be consistent with the law.”

Despite concerns, the scrutiny committee agreed to let the CEB decide on what to do with the recommendations at a meeting next week.

Other proposed measures include relaxing the rules on 'no local connection' so homeless people who have volunteered in Oxford for six months could be accommodated in city council shelters.

Shaista Aziz, a Labour councillor who was a member of the review group, said her research had found no more homeless people were likely to be attracted to Oxford if the group’s changes were adopted.

She said changes like the ones the group want to adopt in Oxford have been rolled out in the London borough of Islington.

Ms Aziz said it had shown ‘no evidence other people are coming from different boroughs’ to be homeless there.

But a fellow Labour councillor Alex Donnelly said the comparison was a faulty one.

He said: “In terms of the magnet effect, I was concerned that much of the data is coming from London... That seems to be completely different to Oxford, a small city of 150,000 in the most rural county in England.”

The council said 74 beds will be available for rough sleepers who don’t have a local connection this winter.