This page was updated in January 2021
An extension of the commuter belt?
The homes in the Expressway plan are not just targeted at the people who live in the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway Arc. According to Savills, 23% are targeted at London commuters.
The 5th Studio/ SQW 2017 Report ‘Cambridge, Milton Keynes Future Planning Options Project, Final Report February 2018 – RevA’ was prepared in response to a request from the National Infrastructure Commission to:
“reach conclusions and make recommendations for the forms of housing development that best fit the needs of the corridor, meeting housing need and supporting jobs and growth.”
Much of the Report is concerned with nine alternative potential spatial distributions, involving increasing numbers of new houses (called ‘typologies’) across the Arc, from town centre intensification, through urban extension to a new city. It acknowledged that it was unlikely to be able to reach the target total number of new houses with the first six spatial options, leaving only the final three, of new town, string city and new city, able to deliver significant numbers of new houses.
The Report builds on previous studies which imagined three growth scenarios, baseline, incremental and transformational, with new house builds across the Arc of 15,000, 20,000 and 23,000 per year respectively over the period 2016 to 2050 (for comparison, an earlier housing Report from Savills, gave a 3-year average actual new house build rate of 12,250p.a. for the region, with a maximum delivery in the previous 12 years of 22,670 houses p.a.).
Because the entire area is considered to require significant numbers of houses, the Report concentrates on the transformational scenario.
In addition to the 23,000 houses p.a. to meet what Savills called ‘indigenous need’ (i.e. houses for those who actually live and work in the Arc area) there is an additional 7,000 houses per year ‘to meet the need from connected economies, principally London’ (Savills Report, p.83).
In other words, 23% of the houses across the Arc are expected to be occupied by long-distance, mostly London, commuters.
These houses do not appear to be in any Local Plans yet and so they, too, should be regarded as expressway-unlocked.
The total of 30,000 new houses per year (23,000 for the transformational scenario and 7,000 for London commuters) for the period from 2016 to 2050 adds up to a grand total 1,020,000 new homes. This is the ‘million homes’ target of all expressway plans. But where will those million homes go? See:
Houses by Regions Across the Arc and Houses Along the Expressway
The ‘aspirational one million’ houses target has become something of a millstone around all Arc plans and, in November 2020, was acknowledged as ‘poisonous’ by a senior partner of Bidwells Property Developers, and as ‘petrol on the fire’ by the Chair of the Arc Universities Group. Despite all such protestations to the contrary, however, it remains a Government target and is repeated time and again in Ox-Cam Arc developer meetings, for example a Built Environment webinar (motto ‘Building Rainbows’) in November 2020 that had the strapline 'Developing the corridor - £billions in Construction Works, 1m New Homes, 1m New Jobs'.