First Government consultation on the Ox-Cam Arc Spatial Framework

In July the Government launched the first of three public consultations on the Spatial Framework for the Ox-Cam Arc, open until 12th October 2021. The official website with three important accompanying documents and a link to the online survey is here. One would have hoped, more than six years after plans for the Oxford-Cambridge Arc were first made public, that we would be given some inkling of the scale and location of what is planned for the future of 3.7 million people and the five Arc counties. We should at least be told what is the ambition for jobs, houses and the increase in economic output arising from them. But there is absolutely nothing in any of the accompanying documents about any of these.

Without any details of the plans, what sort of consultation can there be? Several words spring to mind but ‘vacuous’ and ‘bland’ are top of the list. You can see a full list of questions as they will appear on your screen/smartphone here. They ask if you would like to make sure “the natural environment is protected, restored, and improved.”; or that “new growth leaves the environment in a better state than before.”; or that “new development can respond to the current and future effects of climate change.”; or whether “making better use of resources and managing waste” is important to you. Surely only an idiot would say these things are really not important, so what is the point of asking them?

That the Ox-Cam Arc is all, and only, about growth is made clear in the section on the Economy. Every single question under that heading includes the term ‘growth’ or ‘growing’. For example in the Jobs & Businesses section it asks how important is it for you that the Spatial Framework focuses on “Making sure that the Arc keeps growing as a place for business, science and technology, and innovation.” or on “Making sure that existing industries keep growing within the Arc.” You are only allowed responses to such questions ranging from ‘Not important’ to ‘Very important’. The idea that you may be against growth, or against the never-revealed scale of growth planned for the Ox-Cam Arc, is not available as one of the response options.

Stop the Arc was so alarmed at the quality of these questions that it immediately issued a Press release stating that it was creating an alternative questionnaire to ask the key questions that the Government consultation simply refuses to ask. Questions such as “Is the Ox-Cam Arc the right way to reduce inequality across the nation and to ‘level up’ the regional economies?” or “Should we put one quarter of all the expected growth of England in the next 30 years into less than 10% of the nation’s area?”.

More details of Stop the Arc’s alternative survey will appear as a separate article in this News tab, but a link to it is already available on our Home page.

Stop the Arc also commented on the consultation in a BBC TV South Oxford news item that you can see on the right.