This page was updated in May 2021
What was the Oxford to Cambridge expressway?
A minimum dual carriageway road, up to a three-lane motorway, linking the two cities. It would effectively have been another link between the M4 and M1.
But it wasn’t just an expressway. The project was also designed to support urban development, with a proposed total of one million new houses overall, an increase in population and private transport that would immediately fill up the new road. Oxfordshire’s share of that total would be more than 300,000 houses; the county’s total housing stock was only 286,000 in 2017. For the area around Cambridge, the proposal is to add another 270,000 new houses to an area that had only 334,000 in 2017.
What were the key moments in Expressway planning?
In September 2018, Highways England announced it had selected Corridor B - a wide strip of land between Oxford and Cambridge (see map below), as the ‘preferred corridor’.
Following this study, Highways England looked within the corridor at perhaps 100 or more alternative routes for the expressway itself, filtering this number down to about half a dozen that were due to be released for public comment in autumn 2019. This release was first delayed by the 2019 election and then the expressway project itself was officially ‘paused’ soon after the March 2020 budget. Work carried on behind the scenes during much of the rest of 2020, with work on road connectivity being taken over by England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) that produced its final report on a Regional Transport Strategy in February 2021. You can find details of EEH here, and more details of the February 2021 announcement, here.
Where exactly might the Oxford to Cambridge Expressway have been built?
The “Preferred” corridor B, chosen in September 2018, was “indicative only”. Had there been insurmountable barriers within the chosen corridor, Highways England could have chosen an expresswway route outside the preferred corridor
Which route might the expressway have taken around Oxford?
Corridor B was split into sub-option B1 going West of Oxford City and sub-option B3 going first South and then East of the city. According to Highways England’s Corridor Assessment Report (CAR) a route within corridor B1 was likely to follow the A34, from Abingdon to the M40, with a by-pass around the Botley ‘pinch-point’ involving the A420 Swindon to Oxford road (see maps). At M40 J9 the expressway first would have gone South of Bicester town and then run more or less parallel to East-West Rail.
A route within B3 would first have come South of the City (running near Grenoble Road) and then headed for the M40 J8A services, after which it would either have followed the M40 for several kilometres to a new junction somewhere in the Oakley/Boarstall area, after which it headed NE towards Calvert/Twyford, or else it would have run directly across country from the M40 J8A, again towards Calvert/Twyford. Maps on our website show several of these options East of Oxford; none was definite but each one conformed to one or other statements within the Corridor Assessment Report.
East of Bicester most route options were very similar because the corridor narrowed considerably from there to Cambridge. There were, however, significant potential problems even here, especially the risk of community severance in the Woburn Sands area, near to Milton Keynes.
The map below, which we pieced together from information in Highways England’s Corridor Assessment Report (CAR), shows these options. We stress that all options shown here were always indicative only.
The expressway was ’paused’ in March 2020 and finally cancelled in March 2021. England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) had already started investigating road connectivity across a larger area than ‘just’ the Ox-Cam Arc and between 2019 and 2021 produced a series of Regional Transport Strategy documents, the final version of which you can read about here.
Not necessarily all plans for the expressway have been abandoned. The South Oxford District Council Local Plan involves a series of road improvements South of Oxford city which some have interpreted as a South Oxford by-pass, more or less following the route here originally proposed for the expressway.
What happened next?
Two key documents appeared in February 2021. The first was the final version of England’s Economic Heartland’s Regional Transport Strategy, and the second was a Framework Spatial Plan for all other Arc developments. Both sets of key documents make little explicit mention of the scale of development, but it is quite clear that the ambition for very high levels of growth remains, as outlined in our News items for EEH and for the Ox-Cam Arc.
Road schemes unlock land for development
Improved road and rail schemes across the Arc are designed to ‘unlock’ areas of countryside for further development. The Highways England expressway plans involved siting major housing developments around expressway junctions such that a five or ten minute journey time could deliver commuters onto the expressway for commuting to distant workplaces. The number of workers that Highways England imagined housing developments around each junction could support is shown by the blue histogram bars in the map, above; some of these involved major settlements (for example one about the size of Oxford city just East of the M40 near Oxford itself). England’s Economic Heartland’s alternative road connectivity schemes also involve identifying road corridors that could be used to support more than 860,000 new houses across the Ox-Cam Arc area by 2050. Railways are of course a sensible, low-carbon alternative to roads, and the construction of East West Rail (EWR) is likely to involve major housing developments near to EWR stations.
And is it really one million homes along the route by 2050?
The short answer is ‘Yes’, but it’s important to separate houses in Local Plans that would be built anyway (i.e. in the absence of the expressway) and houses uniquely associated with the ‘transformational development’ of the expressway. The plan is that Oxfordshire will have an additional 300,000 homes by 2050; about 100,000 of these are accounted for in current Local Plans with the remainder associated with expressway development. Thus the county’s housing stock and population will increase in size by 105% by 2050. For comparison, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reckons that England’s population as a whole will grow by about 9% and the number of households by about 16% by 2050 (household numbers increase more than populations because the ONS predicts a reduction in household sizes, i.e. people per household, by 2050).
Similar growth figures apply across the Arc. For example the parts of Buckinghamshire affected by the expressway will grow by 66% by 2050; of Northamptonshire by 74% and of Cambridgeshire by 81% (all figures derived from the 5th Studio Report).
Local politicians and others frequently deny the ‘aspirational one million new houses’ figure but it is repeated time and again by developers during Ox-Cam Arc conferences (several per year) and was confirmed as the target by Bridget Rosewell of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) as recently as November 2020. Until some senior Government Minister says otherwise, it is still one million houses.
England’s Economic Heartland (EEH), covering a larger area than the Ox-Cam Arc, imagines an additional 860,000 houses across its region by 2050. Both the distribution and timing of the houses in EEH’s plans are very different from those of Highways England (you can hear just how different they are in one of our webinars here, minute 11:00 on), but there is a great deal of secrecy about such key information. In their recent documents, both EEH and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) seem deliberately to be hiding details of their housing ambitions from general public scrutiny and disussion.
And what about East West Railway?
The Oxford to Bedford section of East West railway is due for completion by 2023. The final rail route from Bedford to Cambridge is yet to be decided (a ‘corridor’ has already been identified), and the finishing date for this section is 2030. You will be able to travel by train from Oxford to Cambridge by 2030 more quickly than you’ll be able to drive by car along either an expressway or a series of road improvement schemes. The original intention was to electrify East West Rail throughout and to improve its freight carrying capacity. Both ambitions appear now to have been abandoned (along with originally planned links to both Milton Keynes and Aylesbury), although the line will be built with ‘passive provision’ for electrification at a later stage. There is clearly the hope that either hydrogen- or battery-powered trains will come to the rescue here. EWR was awarded £750 million of one-year funding in January 2021 to continue its work.
Why have we not heard much about this? How are the decisions being made?
Good question! Normally a project this big would involve public consultation. But so far there has been none at all (bar an insignificant web-based survey in late 2020, with fewer than 700 respondents) although, to its credit, England’s Economic Heartland did encourage public comments on its Regional Transport Strategy in 2020. Otherwise, however, decisions are being made about the future of an area in which 3.7 million people currently live, but there has not been a single public meeting held by any group, Ministry, Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), or Local Nature Partnership (LNP), or by the Arc Leaders Group (ALG) or the Arc Universities Group (AUG), all of whom are busy developing plans for the region, and most of whom pay some sort of lip service to ‘involving local communities’. It looks good in the various documents but it simply isn’t occurring on the ground. Early discussions between Highways England and key stakeholders (mostly businesses, but also Local Authorities across the Arc) involved Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), ostensibly to protect commercial confidentiality but also with the effect of preventing any information at all from reaching the general public. We wonder just how many other NDAs are in operation elsewhere in this massive programme.
Isn’t the Green Belt protected from development?
This is a common misconception. Green Belts supposedly protect from new housing, not new strategic roads. Recent Local Plans have seen housing encroachments even on the Green Belt, on the grounds that ‘exceptional circumstances’ in nearby towns (unable to reach their own housing targets) result in them ‘exporting’ their unmmet housing needs to the surrounding Local Authorities. The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) ‘permits’ green belt destruction in such ‘exceptional circumstances’ that are now becoming all too frequent. The present Secretary of State for Housing has also shown robust support for over-ambitious housing targets that will eliminate green belt areas around Oxford and elsewhere.
Aren’t you just NIMBYs? Aren’t there always winners and losers with any new road?
We are not NIMBYs when it comes to opposing wasteful, environmentally damaging, polluting, congestion-causing road schemes. We are NIABYs – Not In Anyone’s Back Yard.
I still see NO EXPRESSWAY signs in my area. What are they doing?
Our signs are designed to raise awareness of the threat to our beautiful countryside of any more road schemes, and to maintain that awareness in the months ahead. Even though the expressway is now officially cancelled some ‘No Expressway’ signs will stay up to remind people of the threat to their countryside, wildlife and natural environment of the excessive developmnent of the rest of the Ox-Cam Arc plans, all of which are still in place.
What can I do?
Many organisations in the planning framework are non-governmental; they act in an advisory capacity. We need to target elected politicians to convince them that the whole Ox-Cam Arc idea is politically toxic. Email your local MP, or local Councillors.
Follow us on Facebook, share our posts to spread the word here.
Here are some key websites with information and contact details:
Buckinghamshire Expressway Action Group, BEAG.
Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust, BBOWT.
Campaign to Protect Rural England, CPRE.
Highways England, Ox-Cam Expressway Site.
Highways England direct project email address is: OxfordtoCambridgeExpressway@highwaysengland.co.uk