Notes on the context of The Price of Dormice
Here’s some background to the OxCam Growth Arc (or Corridor), for those lucky enough to have been unaware of it hitherto...
The Labour Party launched the OxCam Growth Arc plan in 2003, to zero fanfare and equal impact. But some blinkered thinkers in the backrooms of the Treasury could see nothing but fantasy future fortunes, and furtively kept the flame burning...
During the fourteen years of Conservative ‘government’, the plan was brought briefly back into the daylight - to the delight of the construction sector, which hopes to make around £0.5 trillion profit (as estimated 2020) from it over the next decade or three. Landowners will make approximately the same. It is sometimes billed as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley, despite being rather belated, wildly over-specified, over-optimistic and under-evaluated, in typical UK Gov fashion (see also HS2).
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 hard to get, but the last time the government was talking numbers, it was going 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, the responsible Conservative government minister mimed 'flushing it down the loo' to imply that the growth arc was dead and buried. But his gesture was as much a lie as the rest of the words that came out of his mouth proved to be.
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. It came back into public view on 29th January 2025, with the then chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement.
*To picture the impact of the Growth Arc, think about where in Oxfordshire you’d build seven new Oxfords, two new Bristols or one new Birmingham. There’s no wonderbiodiversity net gain had to go. In fact, any sort of nature has to go. So gather ye dormice while ye may…