OXford-Cambridge ARc
This page is an archive of updates posted on our Welcome page. Please refer to the following resources to learn more:
Stop the ARC Newsletter May 2022
Many of you will be aware that the future of the Ox-Cam Arc proposals has been thrown into doubt following the appointment in September last year of Michael Gove as the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. A scheduled meeting last December between Mr Gove’s Ministry and Local Authorities was cancelled at short notice, leaving all Local Councils across the Arc ‘in limbo’ over the future of Government plans for it. Earlier this year, in response to a question from a fellow MP, Mr Gove indicated by a gesture that the Ox-Cam Arc has been ‘flushed away’.
Mr Gove’s mimicking skills are no substitute for an official announcement from the Government; an announcement which is now many months overdue. Why do we have to wait so long to hear about the future of the Arc that will affect its 3.7 million residents? What will our Local Councils do about the housing targets in present and future Local Plans that have been over-inflated in the expectation of the Arc going ahead? Will they be allowed to reconsider these targets, or will high growth ambitions be forced through by compliant Councils lobbied by the property development sector?
We have a chance, very soon, to try to get the Government to make its plans for the Ox-Cam Arc’s future very much clearer. For this, we need your help please…….
URGENT ACTION
On Monday 13th June, Mr Gove and the Housing Minister, Stuart Andrew, are answering questions from the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Select Committee in Parliament. The committee intends to focus on Levelling Up and cladding, but if a lot of people write as soon as possible to committee members about the Arc, we should be able get this topic onto their agenda as well.
So we are asking you now to write to (or tweet) one of the following MPs on the committee:
Clive Betts MP (Labour, Sheffield SE), Committee Chair-man, email: officeofclivebettsmp@parliament.uk
Bob Blackman MP (Conservative, Harrow East), defacto Vice Chair-man, email: bob.blackman.mp@parliament.uk Twitter @BobBlackman
Ben Everitt Arc MP (Conservative, Milton Keynes North), email: Ben.Everitt.mp@parliament.uk Twitter @Ben_Everitt
Andrew Lewer Arc MP (Conservative, Northampton South), email: Andrew.Lewer.mp@parliament.uk Twitter @ALewerMBE
Mohammad Yasin Arc MP (Labour, Bedford), email: Mohammad.Yasin.mp@parliament.uk Twitter @yasinforbedford
You can also email the whole committee on luhccom@parliament.uk or tweet them @commonsLUHC
Please send something along these lines;
A: If you are NOT a constituent of the MP you are writing to:
“I am writing to you as a member of the LUHC Committee to ask you to ask Michael Gove a question when you see him on 13 June. “Will he make a clear, official announcement about the future of the OxCam Arc? Hundreds are stuck with unsaleable homes due to the threat of compulsory purchase and many thousands more are affected by the Local Plans currently driven by high Ox-Cam Arc housing targets involving massive new developments. While Mr Gove vacillates, the environment is under threat and food production in the most fertile farmland in England is at risk.”
OR
I am writing to you as a member of the LUHC Committee to ask you to ask Michael Gove a question when you see him on 13 June. “Will he confirm that he is committed to correcting the investment balance in England in order to achieve Levelling Up and that his department will therefore cancel the special treatment so far given to the Ox-Cam Arc?”
OR
I am writing to you as a member of the LUHC Committee to ask you to ask Michael Gove a question when you see him on 13 June. “Mr Gove has recently spoken about the excessive influence of large-scale housebuilders that has distorted the private housing market, likening them to a cartel. Will he therefore refer them to the Competition and Markets Authority?”
B: If you ARE a constituent of the MP you are writing to then just change the first sentence of any of the above to:
“I am writing to you as my constituency MP to ask you to ask Michael Gove a question when you see him on 13 June…” You also need to include your address so they see you are a constituent.
There are six other MPs you could write to, although they may not be as concerned about the Arc as those listed above. You can find a list here
OTHER NEWS
1. In other news, Stop the Arc achieved, or contributed to, the removal of two more Arc Leaders at the local elections on 5 May. We are very grateful to all those who helped, particularly to those who distributed our leaflets:
⦁ Ryan Fuller failed to be re-elected as Leader of Huntingdonshire District Council and his party lost control of the Council
⦁ Michelle Mead was removed as Leader of West Oxfordshire District Council because her party lost control to an opposition coalition
⦁ Barry Wood (also chair of the Arc Leadership Group, ALG) nearly lost his seat in Cherwell and his party’s majority was significantly reduced (in total, far more people voted against than for Cllr Wood, but the opposition vote was split three-ways). Cherwell is now the only Conservative-controlled council in Oxfordshire.
2. Several recent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have revealed the proceedings of Arc Leadership Group (ALG) meetings that included statements acknowledging the public’s concerns about high housing growth levels. The ALG decided that:
“If we can stop using words like ‘growth’ and ‘sustainable’ and start talking about things like ‘doubling nature’ and the ‘green arc’ we might start getting over this huge hurdle of public acceptance of the Arc.”
Stop the Arc has talked for a very long time about the danger of ‘greenwashing’ the Arc. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t persuade anybody that it’s really not a pig!
3. The formal approval for the East-West Rail section from Bedford to Cambridge has been further delayed significantly, to beyond the next General Election.
4. We are still waiting to hear the results of the first official Arc Spatial Framework consultation that ended in October last year. The FOI documents referred to above reveal that the Arc Leadership Group saw the analysed results of this survey in January of this year. Why is it taking the Government so long to make the results public? Other News reports suggest that Government has now abandoned its Arc Spatial Framework approach. Again, why has no official announcement been made about this? Did we all waste our time filling in the official Government consultation?
5. Due to the lack of Government interest in the Arc, the Arc Leadership Group is now developing an ‘Arc Internationalisation Plan’ with the Department for International Trade. But foreign investors in the Arc will not provide the infrastructure that all Arc documents claim is essential for Arc development. We might end up with yet more growth and no supporting infrastructure. Will the Arc Leadership Group specifically avoid seeking foreign investments from countries with dreadful human rights records and recognised by our own Security Services as a threat to our national security? Cambridge City Council is only now reconsidering its previous policy of allowing sales to overseas buyers of up to 25% of houses built on public land. Property developers are still offering for sale Arc houses priced in a variety of foreign currencies. Housing numbers should be based on local need, not developer greed.
6. The unpublished minutes of the Arc Leadership’ Group secret meetings, and other papers obtained under FOI, will be made available on our website.
7. We are currently studying the latest Levelling Up Bill, which includes a great deal of new legislation on Planning. One of its provisions would allow the Government to impose a Spatial Strategy across the Arc or similar area with any right of public consultation specifically excluded. Such top-down Government would override any Local Plans. So much for local democracy or giving a voice to people affected by developments.
PLEASE CONSIDER
Lastly, we are grateful for your support in any form, but please consider becoming a Stop the Arc Member if you haven’t already signed up. Life membership is only £1 - and you can sign up using this link
Stop the Arc December 2021 Newsletter
Current status of Ox-Cam Arc plans
As we write this Newsletter, we hear that the Government has re-deployed members of the Ox-Cam Arc team within the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG, now the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, DLUHC). Kris Krasnowski, the ‘Portfolio Director of the Ox-Cam Arc’ within the Ministry, has left altogether to join the Office for the Secretary of State for Scotland. There was no funding for any Arc project (neither East West Rail nor any major housing development within the five Arc counties) in the Autumn spending review. Michael Gove, the new Secretary of State within the DLUHC, has called or held back for re-consideration some of the Growth Deal and other funds targeted at the Ox-Cam Arc. And, finally, Emily Smith, Head of the Vale of White Horse DC in Oxfordshire and a member of the Arc Leaders’ Group, paused all her Local Authority’s work on the Arc, following abrupt cancellation of an Arc Leaders’ meeting ‘with the new ministerial team’ in early December.
The vanishing Ox-Cam Arc targets
Ox-Cam Arc plans really are in chaos at the moment. With the Expressway cancelled in March of this year and the lack of much-needed funding for both the middle, Bletchley to Bedford section and the controversial Bedford to Cambridge section of East West Rail, the Government went silent on the one million houses target for the Arc some time during the year, partly because it was recognised as ‘poisonous’ to most voters but also because Bev Hindle, the Executive Director of the Ox-Cam Arc, had simply told the Government to stop talking about any Arc housing target at all ‘because it wasn’t helpful’. When he was appointed, it was said of Hindle that he would “lead the call to Government to make the Arc a national priority.” In a public meeting with Hunts DC last month, however, he announced "We don’t think that growth is good" – this from a man about a scheme that has a founding principle that housing delivery across the Arc must double for the next 30 years if Arc ambitions are to be met. Without an ambitious housing target there can be no jobs target and no economic benefits target either. So just exactly where are all those Ox-Cam Arc plans at present?
Our Alternative Ox-Cam Arc Survey
Our last Newsletter mentioned that Stop the Arc was working with others on an alternative to the Government’s official but entirely vacuous Arc Spatial Framework consultation – one that failed to address some of the difficult choices ahead. Our own survey, created with the help of the Oxford POETS (Planning Oxfordshire’s Environment and Transport Sustainably) and supported by eight other campaigning groups, did ask the difficult questions and – importantly – asked people to rank features of Arc development in their order of importance to them. Our own survey ran for the same length of time as the Government’s and received 43% more online responses. 90% of respondents would say ‘No’ to the Arc if given the chance to vote on it today and only 7% would vote ‘Yes’ (the remainder are undecided). The top three priorities for the respondents were clean air, enough water & healthy rivers (80%); green spaces & thriving local nature (77%); and climate change action (70%). The bottom three were jobs for everyone (16%); economic growth (11%); and mobility, quick travel (8%). Respondents wanted decisions about their future taken as locally as possible, either by referenda (65%) or locally elected representatives (61%). Only 6% wanted them taken by Central Government, 4% by unelected regional bodies such as Growth Boards or Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), and just 2% by those who will profit from Arc development, i.e. businesses, land-owners, Universities and property developers. One PR expert with 40 years of experience reported that he had never before seen such clear-cut results in any survey.
Stop the Arc organises another event in Westminster
While our alternative survey was on-going we organised another drop-in event in Parliament, following an important Westminster Hall debate in which the Secretary of State for Housing, Christopher Pincher, denied any housing target for the Ox-Cam Arc. Speaking from a ‘Yes Minister’ playbook he said “When I hear talk from the Chamber of 1 million additional homes, points that were made in a report of some five years’ standing, I reply by saying that is not a Government target and it is not a Government policy.” A mere three sentences before, Minister Pincher had said of the Arc “We believe that with the right collaborative support from the ground up, not the top down, by 2050 we could see economic output in the area doubling to over £200 billion a year, with the addition of 1.1 million further jobs.” – both figures from exactly the same Report ‘of some five years’ standing’ that he dismissed a few moments later. Those economic and jobs targets the Minister was so keen to embrace need the one million extra houses according to the careful research that went into that five-year-old report (that has never been revoked, replaced or updated).
Our own Parliamentary event, due to be held in Portcullis House, fell foul of Covid restrictions re-introduced the evening before our event. The result was that we interviewed our supporting MPs on the Embankment pavement outside Portcullis House; a short video on our website records the event, with speeches by MPs Anneliese Dodds (Lab., Oxford East), Richard Fuller (Cons., NE Beds), Greg Smith (Cons. Buckingham) and Layla Moran (Lib-Dem, Oxford West and Abingdon).
But it’s still business-as-usual for Ox-Cam Arc developers
Apparent Government reservations about the Arc, and the shifting of personnel away from Arc planning activities, did nothing to dent the enthusiasm of property developers and others who are still talking up the Arc as a wonderful business opportunity for investors. The annual Built Environment/Bidwells’ (the latter’s motto ‘the Ox-Cam Arc: We’re All Over It’) conference took place as usual in the Milton Keynes DoubleTree Hilton Hotel on the 16th/17th November. Those interested in Stop the Arc’s attempts to have our voices heard at this meeting can read the saga on our website here. Our response to several attempts to thwart our presence at this meeting involved one very large Italian van and a White Elephant driving/parading up and down outside the meeting venue (and hence our Xmas card here!).
Stop the Arc and the Buckinghamshire Environment Action Group’s ‘Alternatives to the Ox-Cam Arc’ conference
On the second day of the above conference, we organised our own meeting to discuss real alternatives to the high-growth agenda of the Government’s plans for the Arc. At very short notice, some excellent speakers offered to come and talk at our meeting, from subjects as wide-ranging as farming policy to climate change, housing developments to alternative Arcs. All available videos of the talks are now on our website here.
The Stop the Arc campaign in 2022
We are already gearing up for the Local Elections in May 2022, hoping to repeat our successes in the May 2021 Local Elections where four out of our seven target Councillors (selected on the basis of their membership of the Arc Leaders’ Group) lost their places at the Arc Leadership table. Thank you to all who have volunteered to help strengthen our social media presence in preparation for these elections.
If the present Arc timetable is followed, a second Arc Spatial Framework consultation will be held in Spring 2022. We expect more information next time around compared with this year’s consultation documents that were devoid of most details, and distinctly misleading in others (for example on the projected population growth across the Arc). Postponement of the Levelling Up White Paper from ‘late 2021’ to ‘January 2022’, however, may affect the timetable of this and other future Arc plans.
Climate change issues will become increasingly important for all development plans. Rather alarming analyses carried out by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change showed that at current rates of carbon emissions most Arc Local Authorities will exceed within six or seven years their fair share of the Paris Agreement emissions required to restrict global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050. Reaching those targets will require year on year reductions in carbon outputs of the order of 15% or more. Any development over and above the nation-wide average will require an even greater rate of reduction.
Councils which supported the Arc are now 'in limbo'
Councillor Emily Smith probably spoke for many other Arc Councils when she reported on December 8th “Despite reservations from the very beginning about this top-down government scheme, this council has engaged with government as ministers told us they were committed to working with us to achieve net zero and that the Arc was the way councils would be able to access funding for sustainable transport and social infrastructure for our residents locally.” Following cancellation a few days before of the expected meeting with the Arc ministerial team she concluded “To be blunt, Councils across the Arc have now been left in Limbo.” It is a limbo that has involved many Councils signing up to impossibly high growth levels, sweetened with minimal Government Growth Deals. Failure to meet the high housing targets of such deals has already found Local Councils falling foul of the requirement of a rolling five-year supply of land for new houses. This in turn means that any developer can submit development proposals for any plot of land (even outwith current Local Plan approvals) and these must be approved under the ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ of the National Planning Policy Framework. The Government’s absolute determination to build 300,000 houses per year (a number not justified by any objective research on housing needs) over-rides any challenge from our local, elected representatives.
Meanwhile........
Eager property developers and those who stand to gain from the increased values of land granted planning permission – including several Oxbridge Colleges – will continue to push high growth targets. With a failing master-plan for the Ox-Cam Arc, and a diminishing interest from central Government, our five counties will be exposed to all the worst aspects of development and none of the constraints that a master-plan should involve.
Stop the Arc will be watching developments in 2022 very closely.
LARGEST EVER SURVEY SHOWS 9 OUT OF 10 PEOPLE REJECT THE OX-CAM ARC (POSTED OCT 20)
A message from the Stop The Arc (STARC) Group:
Our alternative Ox-Cam Arc spatial framework consultation reveals that more than 9 out of 10 people would vote ‘No’ to the Ox-Cam Arc if a vote were taken today. This is a stunning result, and a complete rejection of all of the Government’s plans for the high-growth future of the five Arc counties (Beds, Bucks, Cambs & Peterborough, Northants and Oxon). Thank you to the more than 3,800 people who responded to our alternative survey! [Over 30% more responses than to the concurrent Government survey.]
Professor David Rogers of the Stop the Arc Group said “The Ox-Cam Arc was identified for a high-growth future by Government diktat despite studies showing better locations for such developments elsewhere. Investing in the high-employment Arc denies such investment to other parts of the country and denies workers there the dignity of jobs in the places where they were born and grew up. It’s the wrong project, at the wrong time in the wrong place.”
The Stop the Arc survey is STILL OPEN and all replies count. Complete the survey.
Email from the Stop the Arc campaign group (posted Oct 7)
We are the Stop the Arc Group campaigning to raise awareness of the Government’s plans to increase the total population of the five counties of the Ox-Cam Arc (Beds, Bucks, Cambs + Peterborough, Northants and Oxon) by at least 50 to 60% by 2050, a period when the Office of National Statistics expects the average population growth of the country to be only about 16%.
Putting so much growth in the five Arc counties will increase the strain on all our resources and infrastructure. It will increase road congestion and pollution, contribute massively to climate change and will do untold damage to our natural environment, already among the most impoverished of Europe. There are more details of the Government’s plans on our website.
As you are probably aware, the Government is currently running until the 12th October a public consultation on the Oxford-Cambridge Arc Spatial Framework. This consultation, the first of three, has been widely criticised. The Consultation document contains absolutely no information about the scale of development proposed for the Arc; nothing at all on the number of extra houses, or jobs or economic output expected from all this development. Yet we know from earlier documents that the Government plans to add up to one million more houses to the Arc, almost one quarter of which are earmarked for London commuters. Embarrassed by the public outcry, the Government has simply stopped talking about the additional houses planned but keeps talking about its ambitions for both jobs and the economy which, its own ‘careful research’ has shown, require one million more houses!
The Stop the Arc campaign has created an alternative Ox-Cam Arc consultation. Our alternative survey makes clearer some of the hard choices that lie ahead for the Ox-Cm Arc and gives the public the opportunity to say just how much development, and of what sort, it wants for the five counties; including an opportunity (denied in the official consultation) to say ‘No’ to the Arc altogether.
Read the Stop the Arc position statement and subscribe to our newsletter to receive periodic updates on our activities.Please donate. We pay absolutely no-one for any campaign activity but we do need funds to pay for our website, mailing and financial software and display posters and leaflets.