How a digital drive could reshape the OxCam Arc

The government hopes that a wide-ranging public consultation on the future of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc will act as a “pathfinder” initiative for a new approach to planning and placemaking. The consultation is the first of three that will feed into a new spatial framework to guide planning and investment across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. “The OxCam Arc is essentially our science and innovation capital,” said Christopher Pincher, minister of state for housing, introducing EG’s Vision for the Arc event. “It’s worth something like £110bn a year in economic output, and we think over the next 20 to 30 years we can increase that economic output.” What the people want The consultation framework is built around four themes: the environment, the economy, connectivity and infrastructure. Participants are asked for their take on what Pincher called “high-level vision statements to understand what it is the community is interested in”, the findings from which will inform policy options that are put to review. “This all comes together into a theme of placemaking – how we can make a very large area of our country the right place to live, to work, to bring up a family,” Pincher said. “What we want to do is identify what people want out of the area in which they live. What are the great environmental opportunities that might exist, as well as the challenges? What sort of connectivity issues do they experience – transport issues and the like? What is it that they want out of their lives in terms of jobs and careers?” The consultation is being carried out digitally, which the government hopes will give it a wider reach than might otherwise be the case. “We want to make sure that we get as diverse a range of voices as possible,” Pincher said. “We’re using innovative technologies; we’re harnessing the challenge that the pandemic has presented to us by using virtual toolkits, proptech [and] apps to reach people whose voices don’t often get heard – younger people, people from ethnic minorities, people from less affluent backgrounds. We want to reach them, find out what their vision is for the place that they live and work and make sure that we’re responding to that.” The approach plays into what Pincher and colleagues want to be a spatial framework for the region that builds on the plans of local councils. “Through our planning reforms, what we are trying to do is speed up the planning process, make it much more predictable and outcome-oriented and certainly make it much more transparent and navigable for people who want to get involved,” Pincher said. “In a sense, the approach we are taking, expanding the number of people giving us feedback by using modern technology, is a pathfinder for the sort of digitisation of the planning system that we want for the future – so more communities get involved in plan-making and that plan-making is done much more speedily, so that the outcomes for the community are better and more quickly understood.” Stress-testing ambition Alongside the consultation, the government has formed a panel of experts to advise it on economic and housing growth within the Arc, led by Emma Cariaga, joint head of British Land’s Canada Water development. The panel will “stress-test the ambition” of the ultimate plans for the area, Cariaga said at EG’s event – “to make sure that whatever comes forward has some sense of commerciality, that it’s investable, but that actually it’s something that we know the market will ultimately want and receive positively”. The launch of the consultation and expert panel comes at a pivotal moment for developers, Cariaga added. “We have hopefully come through a pandemic, and it has given all of us a chance to think about how we live and how we want to work, and new settlements have an opportunity to respond to that new way of living,” she said. “It is not a blank sheet of paper. It never is, because these are places today and there are communities living in or amongst these places. But where there is opportunity to enhance it, to see inward investment, to trial new ways of how we want to deliver growth in this country, I think new settlements are a great way of trying that.” To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews Read more All to play for in the Arc An ‘unrivalled’ regional opportunity for real estate COMMENT Moving the OxCam Arc plans from vision to reality COMMENT A one-off regional opportunity for real estate Photo: Cambridge Biomedical Campus © Liberty Property Trust/Countryside