This page was updated in February 2021
England’s Economic Heartland
England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) is a sub-regional transport body responsible to the Department for Transport (DfT). Its membership includes the District and County Councils across the EEH region and four Local Enterprise Partnerships (the LEPs for Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, South East Midlands and Swindon & Wiltshire) and its interests cover the Ox-Cam Arc region plus Hertfordshire and Swindon.
In December 2017 the Government commissioned England’s Economic Heartland “to analyse how communities not on the route of the ‘missing link’ (i.e. the expressway, especially the section between Oxford and Milton Keynes) will be able to benefit from it." Thus, if the expressway is the back-bone, EEH was to provide the major and minor bones to help it work properly - the feeder road system into the expressway.
By August 2020, however, (by which time the expressway had been paused for almost a year) EEH had changed its mind and seemingly re-written its own Terms of Reference. The 2019-2020 EEH Annual Report states
“The Expressway – we engaged with DfT throughout the year on their proposal for an ‘expressway’ between Oxford and Milton Keynes. We set out the case for reconsidering the proposal within the context of our work on the draft Transport Strategy, noting that as conceived it would be inconsistent with the long term strategic direction for our transport system. Subsequent to the Government’s decision to ‘pause’ the scheme we have sought to set out to the DfT an alternative approach to ensuring the infrastructure requirements of this part of our region are identified and taken forward into delivery.”
If only they had come to this conclusion earlier the vast expense might have been saved of Highways England investigating the case for the Expressway and producing a >1,000 page series of Reports confirming its choice of Corridor B for further investigation of an Expressway route.
EEH’s Alternative Proposals
The current version of EEH’s vision for the Arc road system is shown below as a series of ten ‘corridors’ (labelled A to J, with dashed outlines) for creation or enhancement. This version is from EEH’s Regional Transport Strategy document titled ‘Connecting People, Transforming Journeys’ released in February 2021. NEG’s news item about this can be found here. Highways England’s preferred Corridor for the expressway is also shown on the map below, for comparison (shaded, with a continuous outline).
There are several additional EEH corridors (not shown on EEH’s map) that survived critical examination of an original 60 corridors. Corridors A and B on the map below, for Oxford - Milton Keynes (i.e. the old expressway corridor) and Peterborough - Northampton-Oxford, are EEH’s two priorities for 2021.
Why these corridors?
Most of the corridors identified above indicate EEH’s intention to improve the existing road network, rather than to create brand new roads, but it is important to ask ‘Why these and not others?’ The answer is the same as that given for ‘Why an expressway?’ - to open up land for development, or to increase the level of development in existing settlements, euphemistically called in the new Planning White Paper ‘gentle densification’. These road corridors were selected at least partly on the grounds that they offer more opportunities for settlements than alternative corridors.
Make no mistake. You won’t get more roads, or better roads, at no cost at all to the countryside or existing settlements. Every road has its price.
And what about railways?
EEH has another map showing the existing and enhanced railway network, shown below. East West rail is included on this map (pale turquoise, dashed between Bedford and Cambridge), together with feeder lines into it from Aylesbury and Milton Keynes. Mostly radial rail routes from London are connected East to West by East West Rail (EWR) and the Felixstowe to Nuneaton line (purple) which needs enhancements to relieve the regional roads of freight traffic The rail map also shows additional East West links, one North and one South of EWR. If all road and rail schemes were completed as proposed there wouldn’t be a great deal of room left for nature, wild places and wildlife.
Is there another way?
Many previous road building programs have adopted a ‘predict and provide’ approach, a sort of status quo modelling in which the future is imagined to be a continuation of the past (the “We’ve always built roads. We’ll always build roads” mentality). But experience shows that building yet more roads to handle yet more cars arising from yet more new developments only makes matters worse. There are very few road schemes that actually reduce journey times in the long run (the usual objective of building more roads, and a key ingredient in calculating the benefits of them, and the Business Case for them).
A more enlightened approach to adopt would be a ‘decide and provide’ one, in which decisions are taken about what precisely a transport network is for, and whether or not there are alternatives to the ‘more of the same’ demands of the powerful roads lobby. Travelling by car is incredibly inefficient and the cause of much congestion. If the objective of a transport system is to deliver workers into a city centre from the suburbs (or points beyond) investing in public transport is a much better option than building more roads. Most large European cities have metro or similar systems for this, but relatively few British cities do outside of London. Birmingham has only one metro line for a city of 1.15 million people, something that makes the effective size of the city (the number of people who can reach the centre in a 30 minute journey time) much smaller than its total population.
EEH’s strategy appears to be one of ‘predict, provide and decarbonise’ with improvement in public transport to produce a modal shift from private cars to buses, trains and, in a few places, rapid mass transit systems. EEH imagines growth between 2020 and 2050 to add an additional 860,000 houses across its region. At the same time, it plans decarbonisation of the entire road system (i.e. of both existing cars and the additional cars from all those extra houses; plus all of road freight) to achieve net zero carbon by 2040. Reduction in car use is part of the plan, but decarbonisation would be so much easier if the level of growth was more in line with the national average figure rather than with the excessive growth ambitions of the Ox-Cam Arc plans.
A Final Word about EEH
EEH is in a minority of one when it comes to consulting the general public about its plans, and it should be congratulated for this. Its 2019-2020 Annual Report says the following:
“Our approach as EEH is to be open and transparent in our work. All papers relating to the Strategic Transport Forum are public documents, and meetings of the Forum are open to members of the public to attend. This year we introduced a slot on the agenda of each meeting whereby members of the public are able to address the Forum on matters of concern relating to its programme of work.”
If only the other agencies involved in Ox-Cam Arc plans were as open and transparent.