This page was updated in January 2021
The story so far…
In early 2018 Highways England revealed three broad corridors, A, B and C, that it was considering for developing the Ox-Cam Expressway. These corridors ran from the M4 junction with the A34, North of Newbury, all the way to Cambridge. The corridors were up to 15km wide in places, and two of them encircled Oxford City which, along with parts of the Otmoor region, was in a ‘hole in the doughnut’ of Corridors B and C.
Only one corridor would be taken forward for further study.
Preferred Corridor Selection
During 2018, Highways England held a number of meetings with the stakeholder group to discuss Expressway plans and to invite feedback on each corridor’s advantages and disadvantages. Corridor choice was to be based on Highways England’s seven strategic objectives (i.e. connectivity, strategic transformation, economic growth, skills and accessibility, planning for the future, innovation and the environment). Each strategic objective was spilt up into a number of categories, called ‘intervention objectives’. For example, the strategic objective of ‘connectivity’ had five intervention objectives; reduce journey time, improve journey time reliability, promote resilience, safety performance of the project delivery, and safety performance of the finished product.
In September 2018 Highways England announced in its Corridor Assessment Report (CAR) that a modified version of Corridor B had been selected as the preferred Corridor for future study, within which several routes would be identified during the next stage, routes selection. This preferred corridor is shown in the map below.
The Corridor Assessment Report, with its nine Appendices, runs to over 1,000 pages in total and lays out in some detail how each one of the intervention objectives was determined for each Corridor in turn. Assessment was on a qualitative scale, from ‘highly advantageous’ to ‘highly disadvantageous’, and the overall performance of each strategic objective was determined by giving equal weight to its constituent intervention objectives.
Final corridor choice was based on giving equal weight to each strategic objective.
Preferred Corridor B has three components; sections of ‘common corridor’ at either end; corridor sub-option B1 initially running West of Oxford City; and corridor sub-option B3 running South then East of Oxford City. The two sub-options overlap considerably, and the corridor narrows in width, from Buckingham eastwards.
That ‘hole in the doughnut’ that originally included Oxford city and only part of greater Otmoor was extended to include all of the greater Otmoor region (including Bernwood Forest and Meadows), right up to the M40 in the East. Other parts of the western Otmoor region are still within the preferred corridor, however, whilst important contributory habitats (such as the River Ray catchment area, North of the M40) are also within the corridor.
Highways England and the High Court judgement in the BBOWT case made it very clear that development of the routes’ options was not restricted to the preferred corridor B boundaries. If satisfactory routes could not be found within corridor B itself, they would simply go outside the boundaries. This explains why, in the preferred corridor map, corridor B is shown as ‘indicative only’.
So that’s the corridor selected. What was next?
Between September 2018 and the Autumn 2019 Highways England explored up to one hundred or more route options within the preferred corridor. These were sifted and filtered down to a much smaller number of six or so routes that were due to be released for non-statutory public consultation in Autumn 2019. This would have been the very first time in the evolution of the Ox-Cam expressway proposals that individual members of the public would have been allowed to comment on anything at all to do with the expressway.
The Autumn 2019 consultation, however, was delayed by the announcement of the December 2019 elections, during which period the Secretary of State for Transport announced a ‘review’ of expressway plans should the Government be returned to power. Although it was, nothing further was heard until the official pausing of expressway plans was made public in March 2020. This is still the current status of the expressway, although we expect further announcements in early 2021.
Lack of further progress here should not be taken to indicate a lack of enthusiasm for the Arc proposals in general. In 2020 there were many developer or interest-group (e.g. Arc Leaders’ Group, Arc Universities’ Group, EEH, the various LEPs etc.) webinars discussing all other aspects of Arc development. We expect a major document covering the spatial plans for the Arc in early 2021.