Notes on context
Background to the OxCam Growth Arc (or Corridor), for those lucky enough to have hitherto been unaware of it...
The Labour Party launched the OxCam Growth Arc plan in 2003, to zero fanfare and equal impact.
During the 14 years of Conservative ‘government’, the plan was revived - to the delight of the construction sector, which hopes to make around £0.5 trillion profit from it over the next decade or three. It is sometimes billed as the UK’s (rather belated) answer to Silicon Valley.
Though often seen as focusing on the cities of Oxford and Cambridge, the plan will have an enormous impact across the five counties of Oxon, Bucks, Beds, Northants and Cambs. Details of its current incarnation are unclear, but at last count it was set to add 1.1 million houses to the existing building targets of the constituent authorities, some 400,000 of them in Oxfordshire, and a mass of workspace, shopping space, infrastructure, etc., to meet the needs of more than 2 million new inhabitants.
This new housing is in addition to pre-existing targets, and is intended for the new workforce coming into this already busy area - NOT for the many people here now, who desperately need affordable housing.
When it became apparent that there was incompatibility between the 'levelling up' rhetoric of the time and their plan to concentrate 35% of UK growth over the next 30 years in five quite small counties, a Conservative government minister mimed 'flushing it down the loo' to imply that the growth arc was dead and buried.
What in fact was dead and buried was any open discussion of the plans, and hence any democratic control. The project has continued, in cryptic and apparently unconnected pieces, under subsequent administrations, but came back out into the daylight on 29th January 2025, with the chancellor’s announcement.