Stop the Arc suggests responses to the Arc Spatial Framework consultation
A previous News item highlighted Stop the Arc’s initial response to the first Government consultation on the Ox-Cam Arc Spatial Framework that is now open until October 12th.
Here we look in some detail at what the consultation documents do and do not reveal about the Government’s plans for the Arc. And we suggest a range of responses that you might like to use when you fill in that official consultation.
As mentioned before, the consultation is remarkable for its total lack of any detail of Arc plans. Yet we know some details have been worked out, ambitions defined and Growth Deals struck with Local Councils. How could Government possibly approach international investors to put money into the Arc without such details?
Ask yourself the question: if you were in charge of a Sovereign Wealth Fund, or some other form of investment, would the consultation document provide you with enough information to invest in the Ox-Cam Arc? Of course it wouldn’t! And yet we are told international investors are queueing up to pour money into the Arc. What is the Government telling investors about the Arc that it is still not telling the people who actually live in the Arc at present?
The Government needs to be much more open and transparent with all its Arc plans. Pretending, now, that we can somehow influence the size and shape of Arc developments by our responses to this consultation is like telling turkeys they can vote for an alternative, meat-free Xmas. We are already committed by all Government plans to date to some level of Arc development, whether we like it or not. This is your first opportunity to express your feelings about those plans.
Please click on the image on the right to open up a pdf document with all the official consultation questions listed in order, with some background notes from Stop the Arc about what each question topic implies, and finally with some suggested responses that you can use in the free-form text boxes in the official, online consultation. Please express any ideas in your own words (or re-arrange the words given), and do not simply copy and paste what is written there because this will probably be detected and ignored when responses are machine-processed later on.
It is probably best if you fill in the official questionnaire on a computer rather than a smartphone; a larger screen will allow you to have both our crib sheet and the official questionnaire open at the same time.
The consultation should be of interest to all UK residents, since investment in one area is investment denied elsewhere.
Once you have completed the official consultation please do also complete our alternative consultation, which you can find here, and which will only take 5 minutes because it is much clearer and has many fewer questions! This alternative consultation was put together by the Oxfordshire POETS and Stop the Arc Group with input from CPRE Bedfordshire, CPRE Buckinghamshire, CPRE Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, the Wildlife and other Trusts, the RSPB, Smart Growth UK, Friends of the River Cam, the Federation of Cambridge Residents Associations (FeCRA), Cambridge Approaches, the Buckinghamshire Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and Need not Greed in Oxfordshire (NNGO). Those happy to have their official logos associated with the alternative consultation are shown in alphabetical order in the gallery on the right here.