This page was updated in October 2021
The government’s overall vision for the Ox-Cam Arc promotes ‘richness’, ‘secure and good quality housing’, ‘sustainable travel options’, ‘well-skilled, high value jobs’, and communities ‘resilient to climate change’, these are lofty ambitions indeed, but we see no clear plan on how they will be delivered.
The Arc Leaders Group (ALG) promised a public engagement on its plans during Summer 2019, but this never happened. ALG and others produced an Economic Prospectus for the Arc in October 2020, again without consulting any of the communities who live along the Arc. Highways England’s route consultation was delayed indefinitely following the official pausing of expressway plans in March 2020 and was only finally cancelled in March 2021. In the meantime, England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) was working on a ‘replacement road service’ that immediately stepped into the breach when the Expressway was cancelled. EEH plans improvements to the road network system across the Arc that are associated with very specific numbers of new houses (totalling >860,000) by 2050, as outlined in its decarbonisation strategy. There are therefore lots of different players in the Oxford to Cambridge Arc, none of whom consulted with any public community anywhere across the Arc until the Ox-Cam Arc Spatial Framework Consultation in July 2021 (the EEH 2020 Draft Transport Strategy did invite public comments on EEH’s plans, but only after they had been formulated; there was no consultation beforehand). But that Framework Consultation was totally lacking in details, as other pages on this website explain. Is it any wonder why, in meeting after meeting, those who dreamed up the Arc, and those developing it, complain that as yet there has been no public ‘buy in’ to any aspect of Arc development?
Our question is: who is in charge?
Project planning to date, where roads might go, where housing developments are best sited, how and where nature might be improved, has all taken place been behind closed doors, and the results are presented more or less as a ‘fait accompli’ in a variety of usually industry-sponsored meetings or webinars. Road projects seem disconnected from any planning of housing targets by the Local Authorities along the Arc. The government or National Infrastructure Commission repeatedly state an ambition for 1 million new houses along the Ox-Cam Arc by 2050, an ambition most recently confirmed in November 2020.
We want to be confident that whoever is in charge knows the answers to these questions…
Can the proposed increase in housing stock be justified?
Who has done the maths and on what basis are those calculations justified when they are SO far adrift from the Office of National Statistics’ own forecasts of the increase in the UK population by 2050 (an increase of about 9% in the population and 16% in the number of households)?
Is this the right location for such economic investment when so many areas of the UK find themselves in economic decline?
The South-East and East regions are already over-developed and their infrastructure and natural resources, including their water supplies, are already under pressure. If we invest more broadly across our country, won’t the whole country be more likely to benefit and thrive? Trickle down economics (the idea that the North might somehow benefit from investment in the South) is now discredited, and Arc proponents desperately try to justify Arc investments on the grounds that we need to ‘level-up’ between different sections of the Arc itself, as if the much more significant, deep-rooted and widespread North-South disparity never existed.
What are the environmental costs? 2020 was the year in which the idea of ‘Doubling Nature’ across the Arc was launched; but the Arc group charged with this task have no idea precisely what ‘doubling nature’ means, nor how it can be achieved. All we do know is that the task will be funded by developments. You want to save some bits of nature? What other bits are you prepared to sacrifice to houses, factories, roads etc. in order to achieve this?
We know that the key environmental groups that are active across the Arc are playing ‘catch-up’ with Arc proposals. They feel that if they do not sign up to significant developments they will simply be ignored altogether, and will not benefit from any net biodiversity or capital gain funding that will become available. We strongly feel that we need to shout out, as a fully independent voice, to protect our bio-diversity, environment and landscape for future generations.
Who is responsible for understanding and managing the impact on the communities that will be affected? Villages will become rat-runs, and over-development will erode their “sense of place”, and make them towns with historic landscapes lost forever. The heritage that these communities are so rich in will be damaged beyond recognition.