At last the Arc Spatial Plan!
Several years too late, HM Government released its Spatial Plan for the Ox-Cam Arc on 18th February 2021. What does it say, and what does it mean?
Visitors to this website will probably have been overwhelmed by the number of plans, publications and official documents about the Ox-Cam Arc to date. The National Infrastructure Commission’s 2017 Partnering for Prosperity Report was both the starting gun and an outline playbook for the Ox-Cam Arc, with a collection of ‘wishes’ or ‘visions’ without any overall plan as to how to put them into practice.
We have been expecting for some time a proper Arc Spatial Plan - telling us where all the new roads, railways, businesses, houses and infrastructure will go, to put these visions into action. Will we have gradual enlargement of existing settlements, or several new cities scattered across the Arc? Will existing businesses simply expand on- or near-site, or will new business and industrial centres be created?
HM Government’s ‘Planning for sustainable growth in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc: an introduction to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc Spatial Framework’ (hereafter ‘P4SG’), released on February 18th 2021, presses a sort of Reset button on Arc plans to date. We do not get answers to any specific questions, but we do get a timetable for the future, promising engagement with local partners and the public to deliver a ‘Towards a Spatial Framework’ paper in Spring 2022 and a ‘Draft Spatial Framework’ paper in Autumn 2022, followed by implementation soon afterwards. The P4SG document reads a little like a description of how porcupines mate; ‘slowly and very, very carefully’.
We are grateful for this reset, but we are also left asking many questions about what on earth has been going on in the last few years, and why this document wasn’t produced four years ago? It could have saved an awful lot of mis-direction and heart-ache. In reading P4SG, however, please keep asking yourself the question ‘How much has really changed here?’
Because the answer seems to be very little. We have the same vision as before, but with even fewer details.
We had some inkling of the release date of the P4SG document and sent out a pre-press-release with a set of questions we hoped the new document would answer. Here they are:
· How many houses are proposed across the Arc? The one million the Government originally proposed (a number even Arc developers now acknowledge has made their plans “poisonous” to local communities) or even more?
· Where would they be built? Scattered across existing settlements or in major new towns or cities? Where would new towns or cities be located?
· How many would be socially rented homes to meet real need?
· Is the presently paused Newbury-Cambridge Expressway still part of the plan? Or will it be finally cancelled?
· How much rail-based public transport is proposed apart from the narrow (and already underway) East-West Rail corridor? What’s happened to plans for electrification and greater freight capacity on East-West Rail?
· Are plans to “double nature” in the Arc believable and achievable (the UK having virtually no experience to date of “net environmental gain” - central to “doubling nature”)?
· Do Arc plans involve local communities helping to decide their own futures (e.g. in the form of public meetings or Citizen’s Assemblies)?
· Has the Government considered other, equally good or better places for Arc-type investment? Areas beyond the East and South East regions are more likely to benefit, have fewer constraints and could actually help to “level-up” the economy.
And how many of those questions are answered in the P4SG document? Precisely none, barring a promise to engage with the public; a promise that has been made and broken many times already.
NEG will be giving a considered response to the P4SG document later, but we were involved in some of the publicity on the day of P4SG’s release.
Here you can see an interview with Nick Burton of Woburn Sands NEG on ITV Anglia News on 18/02/21
BBC Radio Cambridge’s Emily Martin had two interviews, also on the 18th February, one with Rt Hon Chris Pincher MP (Cons., Tamworth), Minister of State for Housing (click on the link below to hear)….
Rt Hon. Chris Pincher MP (Cons. Tamworth), Secretary of State for Transport
……….and one in response, with David Rogers, Secretary of NEG.
Having read the document and listened to the media clips, are you any the wiser?