The Budget last week was nothing short of a full-on barn stormer from our new chancellor, prompting many pundits to tip the 39-year-old as the next PM. Fortune favours the bold, I guess – and it did need to be a strong showing.
Our economy is taking a battering (understatement alert!) with truly vast forces at play: the impact of Brexit and the unknown costs of coronavirus are just for starters. Productivity is low. Skills shortages are high. The population is aging. Our problems come thick and fast. And that’s before we begin to think about the underlying, all-pervading global climate change emergency.
Market whispers
Against this bleak and complex scenario, those of us involved in the OxCam Arc should be forgiven for having felt a bit pessimistic before the Budget. Nothing much had emanated from government on OxCam, other than some exciting speeches and a few statements of intent since the concept first came into being in 2014. And this despite the fact OxCam has the proven power to make new markets (witness the extraordinary sell-out conference that EG held at the Crick Institute last year). But since the election, the market has been whispering: has the whole thing gone off the boil? Has the moment been lost? Is this project going to be quietly forgotten? The widespread word is that the Expressway has already been canned. The recent wobble on HS2 had given some of us the jitters, only a bit becalmed by the announcement of the EWR route. Worse still, some of us had recognised that we just weren’t “northerly enough” to be too much in a political sweet spot. The mood music wasn’t good.
So a massive gold star goes to Bidwells, for keeping the faith. Mike Derbyshire and his team just kept calm and carried on, staging a truly excellent breakfast roundtable (albeit at Bidwells’ London office in London, rather than in Cannes) the very day before Rishi Sunak’s stonking ‘new deal’ performance at the Dispatch Box. In the run-up to this year’s non-MIPIM, Bidwells had very cleverly secured the senior civil servants working on OxCam from MHCLG, DIT and Homes England, putting them in a room with the market – the likes of Grosvenor, L&G, Marshalls and First Base were represented, as well as gobby old me from UKR and a good sprinkling from the university sector. And we had a most upbeat discussion. Civil servants needed to be guarded in what they said, but they hinted at good things to come in the Budget, and seemed quietly assured of their ground. It instilled confidence.
And, sure enough, the next day we got the shot in the arm we needed. The Budget was more than fulsome in stating that the OxCam Arc is “a key economic priority”, announcing government’s intention to “develop, with local partners, a long-term spatial framework to support strategic planning in the OxCam Arc. 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. The government is also going to examine and develop the case for up to four new development corporations in the OxCam Arc at Bedford, St Neots/Sandy, Cambourne and Cambridge, which includes plans to explore the case for a new town at Cambridge, to accelerate new housing and infrastructure development”.
Great news, and a moment of sanity. The so-called “golden triangle” of Oxford-London-Cambridge is the gift that keeps on giving. As my old boss Greg Clark, the daddy of devolution, would say: “If London is a problem, it is a problem that other countries would kill to have.” The cost of ‘levelling up’ Britain – an agenda all EG readers should get behind – can only be met by building markets where market confidence exists now. It is not either/or – it has to be both.
Feeling lucky
The trick now will be to not let OxCam languish again, or get blown off course by the strong headwinds of our multiple crises. In a sparkly fleet of foot moment at the end of their roundtable, Bidwells offered to service a regular market-facing OxCam sounding board for the government. The opportunity should be grasped, quickly. Trust me, setting up development corporations is hard graft, taking a lot of time and energy, and potentially needing primary legislation. The potential for rows among the local authorities as to who-sits-on-what, and where the boundaries will be, is legion. And we, the market, mustn’t get blown about. We need to think the way the Americans did with Silicon Valley. Those of us working in the OxCam market need to be mutually supportive and self-helping. We need to join Bidwells, EG, and anyone else to move decisively to populate the brilliant OxCam Arc. Seize this. Fortune favours the bold.
Jackie Sadek is chief operating officer at UK Regeneration
