Finally, Michael Gove speaks about the future of the Ox-Cam Arc

Since February of this year rumours have been circulating that Michael Gove has ‘flushed away’ the Ox-Cam Arc. These rumours arose from a gesture across a crowded meeting room by the Secretary of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). That gesture, and other recent developments, left all the Arc Local Authorities in a state of limbo. Many had committed to the Arc not because they believed in it but because, in the words of Cllr Bridget Smith, leader of the South Cambridgeshire Council, “It was the only game in town.” At the other end of the Arc, Cllr Emily Smith, Leader of the Vale of White Horse District Council in Oxfordshire, evidently felt the same way. She supported the Arc, she said, because it was “… the way councils would be able to access funding for sustainable transport and social infrastructure for our residents locally.”

Stop the Arc has detected a diminishing Government interest in the Arc since Mr Gove took over from Robert Jenrick in September 2021. A 40-person dedicated Ox-Cam Arc unit in the DLUHC was disbanded; no funds were allocated to the Ox-Cam Arc in the October 2021 Comprehensive Spending Review; a ministerial level Arc Growth Body never got beyond the planning stage; and development of the heavily trailered Arc Spatial Framework stalled after the first (of the planned three) spatial framework public consultations, and now seems to have been abandoned. The results of this consultation remained unreleased eight months after it was finished.

If Councils ever hoped to gain from Ox-Cam Arc plans it seems they can now give up hoping, as revealed on the 13th June 2022 by Michael Gove in answer to a direct question about the Arc from Bob Blackman MP (Cons, Harrow East) during a meeting of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee in Portcullis House, London (click on the image here to see both the question and response). Mr Blackman stated “Certainly I have received a lot of correspondence related to the Oxford-Cambridge corridor and the planning around there … because previously we’ve had proposals for a million homes to be developed along it. What’s the current position of that proposed development?”

Although the million houses were proposed for the Arc by the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) and eagerly supported by the Tory Government less than four years’ ago, Mr Gove replied that “some of the figures… bandied around about housing growth related to the Ox-Cam Arc…. have been both inflated and unhelpful”. Mr Gove has only a previous Tory administration and his predecessors to blame for these figures and this confusion.

On the question of the Ox-Cam Arc scheme in general Mr Gove stated that Oxford and Cambridge are “jewels in the UK’s crown” but went on to say that the idea that you can create a ribbon development between them “as intense as that which has been suggested” was, in his view, “over-stated”. Such development, ribbon or otherwise, was another key component of the Ox-Cam Arc plans of the NIC.

Commenting only on the two University cities at either end of the Arc, and not the seven or more University towns in between, Mr Gove stated simply “They will grow. There will be some uncomfortable conversations about how that growth manifests itself, but anyone who thinks we are going to try to constrain that….. I think that’s wrong”.

On the very same day as Mr Gove’s meeting, Stian Westlake, Adviser to the Minister for Science, Innovation and Universities, interviewed on GB News about the Ox-Cam Arc, encouraged the Government to consider building a new mega-city of a million souls on a square mile of “non-descript agricultural fields outside Cambridge” (current population 118,000).

So there we have it. The Ox-Cam Arc is well and truly broken, and the Government is apparently going to do absolutely nothing to stop unconstrained growth of Oxford and Cambridge cities.

The Roman poet Juvenal talked of using ‘bread and circuses’ to distract the masses from political involvement. We may be facing severe food shortages in the very near future, but there’s clearly an abundance of clowns to see us through.