We are the Stop the Arc Group campaigning to raise awareness of the
Government’s plans to increase the total population of the five
counties of the Ox-Cam Arc (Beds, Bucks, Cambs + Peterborough,
Northants and Oxon) by at least 50 to 60% by 2050, a period when the
Office of National Statistics expects the average population growth of
the country to be only about 16%.
Putting so much growth in the five Arc counties will increase the
strain on all our resources and infrastructure. It will increase road
congestion and pollution, contribute massively to climate change and
will do untold damage to our natural environment, already among the
most impoverished of Europe.
Stop the Arc’s website, with more details of the Government’s plans, is here:
https://www.noexpressway.org/
As you are probably aware, the Government is currently running until
the 12th October a public consultation on the Oxford-Cambridge Arc
Spatial Framework.
This consultation, the first of three, has been widely criticised.
The Consultation document contains absolutely no information about the
scale of development proposed for the Arc; nothing at all on the
number of extra houses, or jobs or economic output expected from all
this development. Yet we know from earlier documents that the
Government plans to add up to one million more houses to the Arc,
almost one quarter of which are earmarked for London commuters.
Embarrassed by the public outcry, the Government has simply stopped
talking about the additional houses planned but keeps talking about
its ambitions for both jobs and the economy which, its own ‘careful
research’ has shown, require one million more houses!
The Stop the Arc campaign has created an alternative Ox-Cam Arc
consultation that you can find on our website homepage here:
https://www.noexpressway.org/
A more direct link straight to the survey is here:
https://tinyurl.com/5MinArcSurvey
Our alternative survey makes clearer some of the hard choices that lie
ahead for the Ox-Cm Arc and gives the public the opportunity to say
just how much development, and of what sort, it wants for the five
counties; including an opportunity (denied in the official
consultation) to say ‘No’ to the Arc altogether.