UPDATE: April 2021
This is an electronic form of a Newsletter sent out by email recently to all our supporters.
Many things have been happening on the Ox-Cam Arc front since our November update.
NEG has already written to all of you to thank you for your part in getting the Ox-Cam Expressway finally cancelled on the 18th March.
This was a fantastic achievement especially because, when we started, we were advised that we stood no chance at all!
Well, we won that particular battle, as you can read here, which also includes some of the TV and radio coverage on the day of the announcement:
Talk by NEG on the 28th April on saving the Arc’s Nature
If you are interested in the natural environment across the Arc please do sign up to a Friends of the River Cam webinar next Wednesday 28th April, details here:
This is a free event (tickets via Eventbrite, click the link above, or the icon on the right).
This will be an opportunity to hear NEG’s take on what is planned for the natural environment across the Arc area. Are these plans realistic, believable and achievable? Please do come to this virtual meeting and bombard it with questions!
Two key documents outline the future of Ox-Cam Arc plans
Significant events in February included the release of two key documents, one from HM Treasury/the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), dealing with spatial planning, and the other from England’s Economic Heartland (EEH), dealing with transport. There are a couple of ways you can get up to speed quickly with these:
1) read NEG’s reaction to the document from HM Treasury/MHCLG here, with further comments here; and to the document from EEH here.
In each case you can click on the document icon on our webpage to open up the full official document. In the case of EEH it’s not a single document but a whole raft of them, totalling more than 600 pages in all. The link on our webpage is to the main report; all documents are available from here, which includes a link to the earlier, July2020 Pathways to Decarbonisation document that was not updated in February:
2) listen to a talk NEG gave to Coalition for Healthy Streets and Active Travel (CoHSAT) webinar on the 15th April (click on the right here).
The talk briefly covered the history of Ox-Cam Arc ideas and then outlined the important features of the two key documents and their implications for development across the five counties of the Arc (Cambs, Northants, Beds, Bucks and Oxon) or of the slightly larger area covered by EEH (the Arc counties plus Herts and Swindon).
Events since the cancellation of the Expressway show that we still have a mighty battle on our hands to prevent the over-exploitation of our environment and the effects this will have on all the communities who live along the Arc at the moment. The CoHSAT talk reveals that the one million houses targeted for the Arc (that occupies less than 5% of the UK area) represent approximately one third (33%) of the total number of ALL the houses needed nation-wide by 2050 (i.e. approximately 3 million by that date). Squeezing 33% of growth into less than 5% of the land area just doesn’t make any sense at all; and yet this is still the plan at present, despite the many denials from those who presented the key documents at webinars following their release. And, yes, this is a Whitehall Plan, freely admitted by the MHCLG that is nominally in charge of developing the spatial framework. It’s a Whitehall Plan with the Prime Minister’s personal support and approval. What could possibly go wrong? (?Garden Bridge, Airport-on-Thames, Operation Moonshot, Boris’ Burrow from Scotland to Ireland…?….stop when you’ve had enough, Ed.).
Sign up to be kept informed of progress on the Arc’s Spatial Framework
The Arc Spatial Framework document (the first of those two key documents mentioned above) talks of consulting with the public about the spatial plan, beginning this Summer. You need to sign up to receive notification of this consultation, and you can do so via the Ox-Cam Arc homepage here.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to click on the ‘Sign up for more information’ link that will ask only for your email address to keep you informed. It is very important that as many people as possible sign up to this. As the consultations are launched we will be putting information on our website, or writing directly to you, about how to respond.
Local Elections in May
NEG is actively campaigning across the Arc, concentrating in those areas where an incumbent Councillor or Mayor who supports the Ox-Cam Arc ambition is up for re-election. If you get the chance, please do ask your candidates some really tough questions about all the Arc plans.
It is so important that we all raise questions and concerns about the Arc sooner rather than later. History shows that once plans have gone beyond a certain stage they are more or less unstoppable (e.g. HS2). Ox-Cam Arc plans are not yet at that stage. Developers and others admit that ‘2021 is a critical year for the Ox-Cam Arc’. We still can make a difference here, if we all work together and make as much noise about over-development of the Arc as we made about the Expressway.
How you can help our future campaign
NEG is often asked ‘What can we do to help out here?’ The answer is the same as it has always been. Continue to support NEG. Continue to visit our website periodically to see updates (mostly in the News section; occasionally in the Events section). Why not set up a Zoom meeting and ask NEG to present something to your local community? We are always available and always happy to share what we know about the Arc plans with others.
If you feel able to do so, please contribute financially to our campaign (Click on the ‘Donate’ link on most of our web pages). We are trying to raise our profile on social media and this, plus paid-for FaceBook posts for the election, are eating into our resources.
NEG’s name change
You’ll be keen to hear about our campaign name change post expressway cancellation. Many of you wrote in when we asked for suggestions for a new name for NEG. We ended up with more than 170 suggestions and most people suggested completely different names. That makes choosing the ‘right’ one very difficult, and we are still struggling a bit here. We’ll be writing again very soon to get your thoughts on a very few key alternative names. Please do think carefully about this. What name do you want to see on a banner that you would be proud to carry in any group events we organise in future?
News in brief
Other developments since our last Newsletter include the following:
In November HM Government issued a revised Environment Bill that – if passed – will enshrine an obligatory net biodiversity gain on all local development projects (currently Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) are excluded).
It also issued a ten-point plan for a green industrial revolution, and a brand new approach to costing Government projects that will take into account the non-monetised benefits of any proposal rather than – as historically – simply a cost-beneficial approach. This change should encourage investment in socially important things such levelling up that would not have passed the earlier, purely economic test.
December saw further discussion of changes in the Government formula allocating housing numbers to Local Authorities (i.e. the number of houses each Local Authority will be required by Government to build). The earlier version of this formula (dubbed the ‘mutant algorithm’) inflicted massive numbers of extra houses in areas of very high house prices. This caused outrage in the well-heeled shires. The formula was rapidly revised and is now very similar to the current formula with the added twist that 20 of the largest urban areas will be expected to deliver 35% more houses than the current formula requires. The largest of all urban areas is, of course, London, currently delivering only 36,700 new dwellings per year but expected to deliver 93,600 p.a. under the new formula. It seems almost impossible for London to deliver these houses locally and the Government – determined to deliver 300,000 new houses per year nationwide – may well look to the Ox-Cam Arc to take up some of the slack here, especially in light of the fact that the new algorithm expects the Arc to deliver ‘only’ 21,000 new dwellings per year. Currently the region is delivering just over 22,000 per year, above the new algorithm’s figure but well below the National Infrastructure Commission’s ambition of 30,000 houses p.a. for the next 30+ years. Lichfields produced a useful blog post on this.
Proposed changes to the current planning laws continued to appear in January 2021 with the release of National Model Design Codes – basically a set of instructions on how to build better-looking houses. These codes arose as a result of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission (BBBC) Report, predicated on the BBBC Chair’s idea that ‘We all know what beautiful means, don’t we?’. If only…..
Building more beautiful houses (new Planning Laws) to a better standard of insulation (new Building Regulations) and achieving Net Biodiversity Gain in the process (new Environment Bill requirements, if passed) are a triple-whammy for the building industry that will increase the cost of house-building and, inevitably, the price of new houses. NEG is concerned that house-builders may try to wriggle out of these requirements in the same way that, at present, they wriggle out of their obligations to provide a certain percentage of affordable houses in all current schemes above a certain size; on grounds that providing these ‘cheaper’ houses makes the whole scheme unviable commercially. These are facts that often strangely come to light only after plan approval, when the digging has started. Local Authorities obliged to deliver a certain number of houses per year are then victims of developer blackmail, and often cave in, accepting a smaller proportion of affordable homes in order for development to continue (in Manchester not a single one of the c. 15,000 new houses built in 2017/18 was ‘affordable’ by the Government’s definition).
In February, Catapult Connected Places and CentreforCities added to an increasing list of studies showing that there are in the UK alternative economic growth hubs to the Ox-Cam Arc. The report identified one new hub for each region outside the overheated South East/London. This and previous studies adopted a comparative approach, looking at several options and identifying the best ones. How different from the choice of the Ox-Cam Arc, made on the basis of no comparative analysis of any sort, but only on the basis that several of those taking the decisions had been to either Oxford or Cambridge University?
In the same month the Centre for Policy Studies released Jake Berry MP’s study ‘A Northern Big Bang’, making the case for a new, green industrial revolution to be located at the heart of the original industrial revolution in the Midlands and North of England. The report has a swash-buckling ring about it, asking Government to introduce a few enabling laws but then to step aside to unleash a tsunami of private investment into the green industries of the future: an approach, after all, rather like that of the original Industrial Revolution which was financed mostly by private capital, not Government handouts.
Also in February HM Treasury released ‘The Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review’ an economist’s guide to how to value Nature. The abridged version comes in at just over 100 pages. The unexpurgated version comes in at over 600 pages. You may prefer the hour-long video of the Royal Society event launching this review (with HRH Prince Charles and the PM introducing Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta). Click on the right here.
Also in February Bob Colenutt gave a talk to the Oxford Civic Society titled The Property Lobby (based on his book of the same name). The talk and the book are an indictment of property developers and others who have hollowed out the planning system and now they influence politicians via political donations amongst other things (one third of the >£45 million Tory party funding since the 2019 elections comes from this lobby alone).
In March CPRE issued its fascinating ‘Every Village, Every Hour’ document, putting forward the case for a bus service that does just that – i.e. visits every village (above about 200 souls) every hour from early in the morning until midnight (with additional arrangements for late-night revellers). The report has costed this bold suggestion, and it seems remarkably cheap – at between £3 and £6 billion per year. Compare this with the 5-year road investment programme budgeted at £27 billion.
This was followed later the same month by the Department for Transport’s ‘Bus Back Better’ report, with much more of an emphasis on urban rather than rural transport. It is not clear what relationship, if any, there is between the DfT report and CPRE’s bus suggestions.
You know how it is. Wait forever for one bus report to come along….
Also in March, the Environment Working Group (EWG) of the Arc Leadership Group (ALG) released a report titled ‘Shared regional principles for protecting, restoring and enhancing the environment in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc’. Greening the Arc is central to the ALG’s (and others’) ambitions for Ox-Cam growth. The document combines the twin ambitions of achieving a net zero carbon Arc by 2040 and delivering a 20% biodiversity net gain on all Arc developments, with a minimum of 10% even for NSIPs.
Continuing a Government obsession with three-word titles, HM Treasury also released in March its plan for growth, titled (wait for it) ‘Build Back Better’ In the Foreword, the Prime Minister bemoaned the fact that ‘Invented in Britain’ too often translates into ‘made elsewhere’. The PM continued “Our mission is to unleash the potential of our whole country and restore the energy and confidence of the Victorians themselves”.
Well, up to a point Lord Copper. Much of the wealth of those “confident Victorians” was based on childhood poverty, poor health and living conditions of the workers and on zero-hour contracts – in fact the 19th Century equivalent of the 21st Century’s gig economy.
So here’s another three-worder for the Government to consider: “Build Future Better”