Project Hawking: Tripling the size of Ox-Cam by 2050
Summary
The 100 mile corridor between Oxford and Cambridge is one of the most exciting stretches of land on the planet. Machines there are discovering new gene therapies and scientists are building engines for space travel.
If the region grows in the next 25 years as fast as Silicon Valley did in the last quarter of a century, it will be a major source of cash for public services and a gateway for technology and investment into the rest of the country. And it is rich enough to fund its own growth.
It can also be a hotbed for better ways of living. A fleet of new towns in the Corridor can be designed around autonomous vehicles and small modular reactors. Residents could spend evenings exploring a linear national park running along the new ‘Lovelace’ railway line that links the two university cities.
So this government is right that Ox-Cam can be one of the big bets for the frontier of the UK economy.
People living in the corridor are understandably nervous about lots of development. Many can be convinced it’s worth it if it means a railway station in their town, higher paying jobs and cheaper housing. Or more beautiful nature.
But some won’t be.
That is why every government promises, then fails, to turn the corridor into the UK’s Silicon Valley. The Labour government is already being more ambitious than its Conservative predecessor. But business and policy-makers in the Corridor say it can go much further.
So this paper is about how to go big. And quick. It is a plan to unlock the unholy trinity of local politics, dysfunctional regulation and lack of money that has held us back:
A single powerful development corporation that can bypass local politics. Parliament should draw a tight line around the corridor, set a target to triple GDP in it by 2050 and then hand over implementation to a single development corporation - the Hawking DevCo - that reports directly to the Chancellor. It should be the supreme planning authority for the corridor drawn by Parliament. It will ask local politicians for advice about how to do things, not permission for whether to do them. This is a nationally significant project; its level of ambition should be set by national politicians.
A parallel regulatory process to speed it up. The Hawking DevCo should also have powers to discharge environmental regulation in the corridor, taking them from Natural England and the Environment Agency. By having an overarching DevCo that absorbs the gaggle of smaller ones being created along the corridor, it will be easier to hire the talent and create the institutional clout to knock heads together in other regulators, across departments and negotiate with big investors. A single body that coordinates infrastructure across the corridor can also look residents in the eye to say development means better hospitals, more nature and a shorter commute.
Be self-funding to free up money for the rest of the country. DevCos are money-printing machines because they can buy land, grant planning permission then sell it for a much higher price. In South Cambridgeshire alone, it could capture £30bn of uplift that more than pays for the infrastructure in the area. But to do that, the DevCo needs the financial autonomy to operate at scale and with 25 year horizons. That means allowing it to borrow outside the fiscal rules because it is so low risk, and giving it the tools to negotiate hard on commercial deals. Aggressive land value capture is crucial to make the politics work. Ox-Cam must add to investment in the rest of the country, not subtract from it.
Of course, we need to do the hard grind of reforming existing institutions like Natural England and local planning authorities. But in the meantime, we need to go around - not through - broken processes to deliver on our priorities. This can be a template for projects elsewhere.
Going big on Ox-Cam will be hard. So we have called this Project Hawking. Not only does the project link up the two universities that span the physicist Stephen Hawking’s career, it will require his faith in science and technology to sustain years of hard work.
The Hawking DevCo can be this Government’s Tennessee Valley Authority, a body that defined Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy of using a strong state to get stuff built for the people.
The second half of this paper sets out the piece of primary legislation that would achieve this. It was written with extensive input from planning experts, policy-makers and lawyers.