This page was updated in May 2021

One million new houses across the Ox-Cam Arc by 2050

The aspirational one million new homes along the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway is made up of a combination of approximately 230,000 houses already in Local Plans, most of which run to the mid 2030s, 240,000 for London over-spill, and 550,000 ‘expressway unlocked houses’.

Across the Arc the total number of new houses is set to increase the existing housing stock by:

  • Over 100% in Oxfordshire

  • 66% in the affected parts of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire

  • 74% in parts of Northamptonshire

  • 81% in parts of Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire.

These figures are between 4 and 6 times the Office of National Statistics’ predicted average increase of 16% in the UK population over the same period of time. Highways England’s Corridor Assessment Report imagines that many, but by no means all of these houses will be developed around expressway junctions. In other words, it is building car-based solutions into the Arc plans.

Click the links on the left to find out more about the housing targets along the Expressway.

As explained elsewhere on this site England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) is developing a Regional Transport Strategy for an area slightly bigger than the Arc itself, and including Hertfordshire and Swindon. EEH has a rather different housing target (of 862,000 new houses by 2050) and a very different housing distribution to the one million houses proposed by the National Infrastructure Commission. These differences are illustrated in our webinar here, from about minute 11:00 on.