Where is the opportunity in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc?

You could almost hear the relief from developers, planners, advisers and investors with an interest in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc when the Budget documents landed on the HM Treasury website earlier this month. The section on the arc may have run to fewer than 200 words but the fact that it was there at all was a relief. “The Budget announces plans to develop, with local partners, a long-term Spatial Framework to support strategic planning in the OxCam Arc,” the Treasury said. “This will support the area’s future economic success and the delivery of the new homes required by this growth up to 2050 and beyond.” There was acknowledgement too that the arc’s success is intertwined with UK plc’s success – reference to the importance of “improving connectivity to the world-leading research facilities of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (pictured), the largest cluster of medical and life sciences research in Europe” for instance – quelling fears that the arc might not be northerly enough to suit the government’s levelling-up agenda. For many, this was the most explicit government commitment to the arc since 2018, although (speaking before the chancellor delivered the Budget) Nigel Tipple, chief executive, Oxfordshire LEP, disagrees that 2019 was a lost year. “If you look at it from a local enterprise partnership perspective, that momentum didn’t stall,” he says. “What we took forward was local industrial strategy work. We came together and we began to develop a series of interventions around productivity, looking at what are the common challenges that we all face. How do we work together in order to support a dynamic economy that’s anchored in those communities that already exist? You’ve got to look at infrastructure as part of that. You’ve got to look at the quality of place. “There are three LEPs, a business board and 31 local authorities all pointing in the same direction. I think government recognises we’ve made a commitment to work together. I’m sure that there’ll be investment coming down the track in terms of pipeline, whether that’s East West Rail or other activity. We’re looking forward to a CSR timetable as well. So it’s not just about this Budget, it’s about how we move over the next six to 12 months and continue the momentum that’s there. We need to continue to work together.” Alistair Lomax, chief executive of the ARC Universities Group, says the arc has developed without central support. Now, he suggests, the arc can be a torchbearer for delivering sustainable growth: “With the R&D capability and the messages that are coming and the challenges from government and from the United Nations, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to bring those two things together and make sure that any development that we do is actually improving the environment.” Jackie Sadek, chief executive of UK Regeneration, also wants to see language around the arc change. “If the Oxford-Cambridge Arc is not framed in the language and doesn’t have the approach of a knowledge economy that fires the rest of the UK, then we will have lost the opportunity.” Do that and government will have to back the project whatever else the levelling-up agenda is seeking to deliver. “When they do start to move forward, they can’t afford to bin off the likes of Oxford and Cambridge,” he says. So could government side-step the arc in favour of more politically expedient projects further north? It would be a mistake for government to do so, says Mike Derbyshire, head of planning at Bidwells. “They get it. They must get it. Because if they don’t, then it’s pretty serious, isn’t it?” Sadek agrees. “They are going to have to pick winners. The market is there and absolutely gagging to do this. The universities are also there underpinning all of this. Sooner or later, the government’s going to have to strike a balance between the levelling-up agenda, which I get completely and actually support completely, and actually backing a winner and showing that we are really meaningful about growing our economy. And getting behind all of this is the best way that we could possibly demonstrate that.” Temple goes further and says that investing in the arc will actively help level up other parts of the country, not just UK plc as a whole. “You could see very, very clearly a pattern where we would bring new products and services to market and we would collaborate with other parts of the UK,” he says. “We could bring that investment in to test and to pilot in the geography that is the arc. We’ve been very successful in many places, particularly in Oxfordshire, around things like artificial intelligence, connected autonomous vehicles, space and satellite technology. “They are globally significant investment opportunities. What we’ve got to do is really connect with the communities so they can realise the benefit of them. We will turn that £1 into three, four or five pounds that allows government through the Exchequer to be able to invest in other places that desperately need that investment.” You wouldn’t launch a satellite developed in Oxford from Oxford, he argues, you would launch it from Cornwall. Do all that and inward investment could follow. “AstraZeneca may have moved from the north to the south, but the alternative was that potentially they would move out of the UK,” says Derbyshire. “For some of these tech companies their choices – and we need to be frank here – are pretty limited. “In the UK, it’s probably London, Oxford, Cambridge. With the best will in the world I’d love to say that Manchester and Birmingham will be competitive, but at this moment in time, if Pfizer wanted to come to the UK, it would probably be one of three locations. “And would we have a strategy that said ‘no, we don’t want one of the largest companies in the world settling in the UK’? No, clearly not. There are some clear and obvious wins for the UK.” Click here to listen to the other sessions that EG recreated in the studio during the postponed MIPIM week. In partnership with