UPDATE: July 2021
Our Campaign Name Change and the Arc Spatial Framework Consultation
It is only three months since our last Newsletter to you, but a great deal has happened in the meantime. This Newsletter will bring you up-to-date with news of our campaign against the excesses of the Ox-Cam Arc plans which are being developed rapidly behind closed doors in various branches of Whitehall.
Our Campaign Name Change
In the last newsletter we reported that our No Expressway Group supporters suggested over 170 different new names for our campaign following the official cancellation of the Expressway in March of this year. The great variety of suggestions didn’t make the choice easy, and we realised that whatever we ended up calling ourselves would clearly not please everybody. Within the various No Expressway Committees, we whittled the new name choices down to 20 and then to 10 and finally to four that we sent around to you all to vote on in a four-question survey, the results of which are shown below:
Notice that the first two questions were about whether or not you think the Arc already exists (the majority thought that it doesn’t, except in the minds of the planners); the third question was about the direction of our campaign; and the fourth involved the choice of an appropriate new name for our campaign. A significant majority (197, or 57.4% of 343 respondents) voted for the new name of Stop the Arc, with the closest runner-up being the No Arc Group, with fewer than half the number of votes, only 75 (21.9%). Thus, we have democratically renamed ourselves the Stop the Arc Group with the new logo you can see at the top of this newsletter. We thank Roger Carey of BEAG for helping us to design and run this survey. Welcome to the Stop the Arc Group!
We still need your support!
If you wish to continue to support us under our new name you need do nothing. Your contact details that you left with the No Expressway Group will be retained under the same strict security as before, within our MailChimp mailing software (in fact you may still see No Expressway signs and links in some of our communications with you; changing all of these will take some time). You are also able to donate to our Stop the Arc campaign in exactly the same way as before - look for the red Donate buttons on our website (our campaign account at Lloyds Bank also keeps the No Expressway name for the time being), and you can use our original email of noexpresswaygroup@gmail.com , or our new one of stopthearc@gmail.com, to contact us about any campaign issues.
If you wish to withdraw your support from our new campaign, please click on the ‘unsubscribe from this list’ link at the bottom of our Newsletter in your MailChimp email from us. This will remove all your contact details and postcode from our database. We would ask you to do this before the end of August this year, so that we can keep an up-to-date list of our campaign contacts.
We do hope that you will continue to support us! There are considerable challenges ahead – as the rest of this Newsletter shows – and the threats to our communities and environment have, if anything, increased as the Government has ramped up its enthusiasm for Arc development.
Our new web-site
We have created a new website for Stop the Arc. You can find it under both our old url of https://noexpressway.org and our new url of https://stopthearc.org . Much of the No Expressway Group material is now under the ‘No Expressway Group Archive’ tab (top of our web-pages) and these pages obviously contain a lot of non-expressway material that, if still relevant, will be migrated to new pages.
Our website now begins with our mission statement and campaign aims and then gives a brief overview of the Government’s plans for the Arc. If you like our mission and campaign aims, then please stay with us, spread the word, and get your relatives, friends and colleagues to join us as well.
For the most up-to-date information on our website look under the News tab that records new developments, reports, press releases, or webinars that we have given to local communities (more details below).
If you have any comments about, or suggestions for, our new website please contact us at stopthearc@gmail.com.
Consultation on the Arc Spatial Framework
This very important consultation, flagged in our previous Newsletter, was launched on 20th July and runs until 11.45pm on the 12th October 2021. It is vital that as many people as possible respond in one way or another to this consultation which – Government claims – will allow the affected communities to shape their own future. If this is the case, then surely communities should be able to say how much development they are prepared to accept? But this is never explored or explained anywhere in the consultation. We are not asked to vote for 100,000, or 500,000 or one million more houses across the Arc (for example); or to double, triple or quadruple the local economy; and we are not told what will be the community and environmental consequences of each level of development. In fact, we are given the impression we can ‘have it all’; unlimited development, better, safer, more beautiful and energy-efficient buildings, clean and plentiful water and air, sufficient green power supplies to electrify a vastly increased road fleet and a (minimum) ‘doubling of nature’, with protected wildlife corridors and networks somehow threading through (and totally unaffected by) road and rail corridors designed to open up new greenfield spaces for development across more or less the entire five Arc Counties. Well, of course we can’t ‘have it all’ and there are some very difficult decisions ahead that this consultation (the first of three) totally fails to address.
It is difficult to know where to start with such a naïve consultation. Example consultation questions include “"Should new developments be built in sustainable locations?”; “Should the natural environment be protected, restored and improved?”; “Should we make better use of resources and managing waste?” Surely only an idiot would say ‘No’ to such questions?
The Stop the Arc Group immediately issued a press release pointing out that positive responses to all consultation questions may be taken by the Government to indicate full public endorsement of its plans to develop the Arc, when not a single detail of these plans is ever given in the consultation document. Turkeys would vote for Christmas with the level of information this consultation provides.
What you can do now…..
The Stop the Arc Group will look at the present consultation and offer ways to respond. Whilst many of the questions themselves have obvious responses, there are also opportunities to respond to ‘Is there anything else you’d like to add?’ text boxes, and even the opportunity to suggest new topics under some headings. Here a co-ordinated response from all of our supporters is likely to have the biggest impact. We will put together a list of suggested responses and topics and circulate it later for you to use. It is unlikely you will be able to fill in the questionnaire twice, so please do not fill in the consultation before you have more information, unless you are already sure how you wish to respond.
…. and please fill in our own consultation.
Stop the Arc is so concerned at the weakness of the official consultation that we are working together with other campaigning groups to set up our own, more informative consultation, to which we’ll soon ask you to respond. We’ll ask you the real questions that the official consultation does not; and we’ll make it as clear as we possibly can that development involves a whole set of compromises on which we’ll ask your opinion. We have approached CPRE (in Oxon, Beds and Cambs), BBOWT, RSPB, Friends of the Earth, Cambridge Approaches, the Buckinghamshire Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and others to help with this, and initial responses have been enthusiastic and supportive. We have some in-house survey expertise, but if any of our supporters are experienced in market research, we’d be happy to hear from you, if you feel you could help us set up our own consultation (probably using Mail Chimp’s Survey Chimp facility). Please contact us for this at david.rogers@zoo.ox.ac.uk.
Spectacular Results from our Social Media campaign in the Local Elections
During the May Local Elections, Stop the Arc targeted those Local Councillors up for re-election who were both strong supporters of Ox-Cam Arc plans and members of the key Arc Leadership Group (ALG). The message we wanted our campaign to send to voters was that this was about the only time they could express their disquiet about the high growth agenda of all Arc plans; a disquiet shared by some candidates and parties opposing the incumbent Councillors. We used a variety of social media messages, and our Facebook adverts were seen by over 135,000 people! The results were spectacular and four out of the seven targeted Councillors lost their seats, either because they were voted out directly, or because their parties lost overall control of their local Councils (hence their seats on the ALG). For more details, please read our News page here. Our social media election campaign was run with very significant help from Hatty Taylor who guided us through the intricacies of ‘paid for’ Facebook adverts.
Can you help Stop the Arc keep up our social media presence?
Hatty has now moved on, but our social media campaign shows the power of this method of communicating with an audience far wider than our supporter base. We lack many social media skills within our core group and would be grateful for any help from our wider supporters’ group. You can help us here in two ways. First, please re-post, re-tweet etc. any information we produce that helps boost our campaign profile. Second, if you can spare some time, please think about forming or joining a small group/groups for taking our campaign more actively and permanently into social media. This would involve crafting the appropriate messages (we can help here and there’s lots of relevant information on our website) and then sending them out to a wide audience.
Even MPs are now alarmed at the scale of Ox-Cam Arc development
A common factor all the way across the Arc is the great public unease with the high rates of growth of Local Plans, many of which have been obliged to accept the Ox-Cam Arc as a ‘given’ without this ever being discussed, let alone decided in Parliament, or by any democratic vote of the people. This unease is now being expressed openly by many Arc MPs, and a debate in Westminster Hall on 13th July, called by Steve Baker MP (Cons. Wycombe; favourite film ‘Brexit: the Movie’), revealed the concerns of over-development of many essentially rural constituencies in the economically over-heated South East. For once, this Hansard report is well worth reading, if only for the verbal contortions of Housing Minister Christopher Pincher MP (Cons. Tamworth), responding for the Government, as he tried to explain that the Government’s Arc development targets of 1.1 million more jobs and an increase in economic output of £163 billion per year would somehow NOT involve building the one million more houses that the Government’s own ‘careful research’ had previously shown to be essential to the delivery of those jobs and that economic target. It was like expecting to see the grin without the Cheshire cat. It can happen only in fiction. The Government has been absolutely consistent in stating its job and economic ambitions for the Arc but somehow dissembles on the significant matter of the number of houses needed to deliver them. Houses in turn require infrastructure; roads, water and power supplies; and their residents need decent schools, hospitals and clinics, as well as healthy green spaces in which to exercise. Development comes in a package, and you can’t simply cherry pick the package.
Three days after the Westminster Hall debate, Stop the Arc wrote to Minister Pincher, pointing out the inescapable connection between jobs, houses and economic output. This letter is on our website: if ever we receive a reply from the Minister, we’ll put that on our website too. Unfortunately, the debate was reported in local newspapers as the Government having abandoned its one million houses target for the Arc. Please do write and correct any local newspapers where this view is expressed and direct them to our website.
Come and support us at the Hound of the Baskervilles!
The Watermill Theatre’s highly acclaimed touring production of The Hound of the Baskervilles will be performing near Brill, Bucks on Monday 16th August with all proceeds going to support the Windmill Players and the Stop the Arc Group. From the website, about the show:
“A mysterious murder, an ancient curse and a legendary detective…
Join us on the wild moors of Dartmoor and prepare for cryptic chaos! Three actors play all the characters in this madcap version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most celebrated Sherlock Holmes story.”
(Gosh, can they also solve the curse of the Ox-Cam Arc do you think?. Ed.)
It’s important you book well in advance please; seat numbers are limited and the venue may need to be changed if demand is overwhelming. Tickets from Charles cpither@gmail.com or Michele michele.giles@hotmail.com . The postcode of the venue is HP18 9TQ - it’s near the real windmill on top of Brill hill.
Other News in brief
Levelling up
Much has been written about how the UK is one of the most unequal countries in Europe. There are many reasons for this, the main one being the dominance of London and the South-East in the national economy, where half of all the UK’s R&D spending is directed. In March a Centre for Cities report by Lord Sainsbury added another reason – the lack of regional levels of Government, with very few city exceptions. England had experimented with regional assemblies in the 10 years from 1998, one for each of the eight regions outside London, but these were abolished between 2008 and 2010, and their functions passed to Regional Development Agencies which in turn were abolished by the Coalition Government with their functions passed on to unelected Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). Each LEP promotes the business interests of its relatively small local area so that any levelling up must now be done from the centre. Because London and the South-East and East regions are the only net contributors to the UK Treasury, it is tempting for the Government to invest even more in these regions in the vague hope of a trickle down effect to the rest of the UK. The Arc has been justified in these terms and also in terms of levelling up within the Arc itself. There is no evidence for the now discredited trickle down effect and we shouldn’t need an Arc to address the inequalities within the region (inequalities that are particularly pronounced in both Oxford and Cambridge with their high house prices, but are even more pronounced in the capital city which has the highest level of childhood poverty of any UK region). In fact, such inequalities are likely to become worse with yet more of the same sort of development. A UK 2070 Commission report in February 2020 shows how increasing investment in the over-crowded South-East results in a ‘lose-lose’ situation, with the North ignored and the South creaking under yet more traffic congestion, inadequate infrastructure and high house prices. The Commission argued that investing in the North takes the strain out of the South and both parts of the country benefit – a ‘win-win’ situation. This report, ‘Make No Little Plans’ from Lord Kerslake, should be required reading for all Ox-Cam Arc enthusiasts.
85% of greenfield newbuilds in the South East and South West are in AONBs
In April CPRE released a report ‘Beauty Still Betrayed’ showing how some of our most precious landscapes – the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, AONBs – despite a modicum of legal protection are being encroached upon by housing. In both the South-East and South-West (where housing pressure is very high) 85% of new housing units built on greenfield sites since 2017 were in AONBs. In such areas, the housing densities averaged just 16 dwellings per hectare (approximately half of many Local Authorities’ minimum recommended density) and most units were executive houses, with only 16% affordable by the Government’s definition (i.e. of 80% of market price or rent). Building executive homes on protected sites is effectively an Act of Enclosure of the present century, with publicly-enjoyed land passing into the exclusive ownership of the rich and powerful. This must stop.
The Environment Bill makes slow progress, and offers minimal protection
In May the Environment Bill went to the Lords and an amended version was completed in July. There are only two more Parliamentary steps before the Bill becomes law. The Bill will require 10% net biodiversity gain on all new planning applications. Although this sounds like an environmental ‘win’ in fact it involves an important loss – that of the stock of land on which development takes place. The relationship between Stock and Yield was explained in detail in the Dasgupta Report referred to in the previous newsletter, a report that defined Wealth, which comes in three forms (economic, environment, human), as the sum of both Stock and Yield (thus Wealth = Stock + Yield). It will only be when the total of all three forms of Wealth is stable or increasing that human life on Planet Earth can claim to be sustainable. Presently our obsession with only one form of yield (economic, in the form of GDP or GVA) is obscuring the fact that we are achieving this at the cost of diminishing the Earth’s environmental stock on which everything else ultimately depends.
Much has been written on the dubious benefits of the net gain idea, and even senior environmentalists are now expressing doubts. Some of our webinars explain the problem in full. So, not so much a ‘net gain’ moment as a ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ moment. And, when it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
Climate Change action; very little and is it already too late?
In June the Climate Change Commission reported to Parliament on the UK’s progress in adapting to climate change, with a message not only of ‘could do better’ but of ‘must do better’. Very recent wildfires and flood events globally, following the hottest decade on record, show that we haven’t much time left to avert catastrophic climate and environmental change. In the UK we have to maintain the recent rate of reduction in carbon outputs from the electricity generating sector and achieve similar reductions in the emissions of other sectors that have stubbornly remained high (e.g. transport, agriculture). England’s Economic Heartland’s (EEH) Regional Transport Strategy that covers the Ox-Cam Arc involves reducing to zero the carbon output of the region’s entire transport system by 2050 at the latest, but this appears to be an ambition not backed up by intermediate targets or any clear way to produce the level of implementation required (e.g. the switch to EVs or an overall reduction in car journeys).
UK Biodiversity: Bloom or Bust?
Also in June the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee produced a report titled ‘Biodiversity in the UK: bloom or bust?’ . Against a background of global decline in biodiversity (also reported on in June) the UK, one of the most wildlife-impoverished countries in Europe, since 1970 has experienced a 60% decrease in the abundance of its priority species; 15% of all its species face extinction. According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), the UK has failed to meet 14 of the 19 assessed Aichi Biodiversity Convention targets (the RSPB is even more pessimistic). Once again, it’s a case of ‘must do better’.
Roads: pick any corridor for environmental damage
Again in June, England’s Economic Heartland announced the first two of its consultations covering connectivity between Oxford and Milton-Keynes and between Oxford-Northampton-Peterborough. This, like the spatial framework consultation, involved questions that were either simplistic or un-answerable; for example “What are the key themes for the study area?” and “What do you consider to be the key movements in the area?” We are not exactly sure what a ‘theme’ is, and no individual can possibly know the ‘key movements in the area’; something that only traffic surveys can establish. Stop the Arc submitted a longer version of a response to the July 2020 EEH consultation that appears to have been ignored. One relatively well-hidden fact in all of the EEH documents is that all 20 of EEH’s assessed connectivity corridors were judged to have either uncertain or definite negative effects on biodiversity, the environment and natural capital, landscapes and townscapes, the historic and the water environments, air quality and climate change, soil and land-use, and noise and vibration.
Biodiversity Metric v.3.0; fit for purpose?
July saw the launch by DEFRA of its Biodiversity Metric v.3 calculating tool, that will be used to implement the net gain requirements of the Environment Bill. As in the earlier versions of this metric, habitat is used as a proxy for biodiversity, which it is considered too expensive and time consuming to measure properly. Hence the metric is designed to avoid what the Prime Minister has called ‘newt-counting’ delays in the push for growth at full speed, at untold cost to the environment.
Bidwells’ bidding-up wars….
July will also be remembered for an Estates Gazette webinar titled ‘Vision for The Arc’ in which Patrick McMahon, a Senior Partner in Bidwells (Property Developers) announced that the development of the Arc could quadruple its economic output (you can see the webinar video here). This is a higher multiple than even the Government’s own ambitious 2.8-fold increase as enshrined in the highest growth, ’transformational scenario’ of the ‘Partnering for Prosperity’ report from the National Infrastructure Commission that involves those one million houses. If you need a million houses to increase economic output three-fold, how many might you need to increase it four-fold? Bidwells have form here. In January of this year, Bidwells’ Oxford to Cambridge Arc team leader, Rob Hopwood, wrote in the on-line journal Planning, BIM and Construction Today (pbctoday); " The region has been singled out as the location for 1.5m new homes as well as new road and rail links, making it an area of immense potential for economic growth." 1.5 million houses? Really? This piece was only corrected after challenge by Stop the Arc and others, and now appears with no mention of any target of any sort whatsoever. But it does make us wonder what the Bidwells senior partners are smoking at present………
Newts are “off”. Property developers can look forward to no more ‘newt-counting delays’
In July the Joint Nature Conservation Committee launched the 7th quinquennial review of Schedules 5 and 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981); information pack. For those who were still awake by the time these credits had rolled, the consultation proposed removing protection from all species except those 'in danger of imminent extinction’. Red squirrels, pine martens, adders, slow worms, water voles, mountain hares and many others would lose protection, the only possible beneficiaries being property developers for whom newt-counting delays would become a thing of the past (yes, all UK newt species would lose their present protection). There was a predictable if delayed outcry against these monstrous proposals that had been all but hidden away on a remote website; the consultation closed on 7th July and it is to be hoped the Government will change its mind here; but the fact that it even suggested these changes in the first place casts doubt on its environmental credentials.
“Money makes the Arc go around…”
Also in July two articles, one in The Guardian and one in The Spectator (see how well-balanced we are!) drew attention to the amount of foreign money flowing into the two major Arc Universities of Oxford and Cambridge from regimes with very dubious human rights records: in the red corner; and in the blue corner. The Spectator article ends with “But (Cambridge) has also shown itself to be truly world-beating when it comes to accepting Chinese money with few questions asked.” It is these Universities and it is this foreign money that are ultimately driving most Ox-Cam Arc ambitions and developments. Politicians who went to Oxbridge, and our most senior learned institutions such as the Royal Society, are turning a blind eye to the means by which the Ox-Cam Arc ambitions are to be realised. Cecil Rhodes must be spinning on his plinth.
Tune in to our webinar series!
Stop the Arc has now produced a number of webinar videos that you will find on our website. Here are the links, with hints on the major subjects covered:
Housing, Transport, and its zero carbon ambitions:
‘Doubling Nature’, Biodiversity, Net Gain and Natural Capital Accounting:
Economics of the Arc proposals:
https://www.stopthearc.org/news-updates/2021/5/6/neg-talk-to-the-oxford-extinction-rebellion-group
Biodiversity and Net Gain:
Houses, Roads, the Economy and Doubling Nature:
If you’d like an Ox-Cam Arc Zoom talk to your local group or community, please contact us!
David Rogers, Secretary, Stop the Arc Group. 26/07/21