Scaling the Oxford-Cambridge corridor
Turbocharging the growth of the Oxford-Cambridge corridor (OxCam) was one of the headline industrial commitments of the Starmer administration – it was to become the UK’s Silicon Valley, the public was repeatedly told.
Under Andy Burnham, the way the government talks about regions and growth has changed, and the demands on public finances are even greater, given ambitions elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether this changes the calculus around OxCam, but the appointment of Patrick Vallance as the growth corridor’s chair during the new Prime Minister’s first week in office was at the very least a statement of intent.
The Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board earlier this year set out the aspiration to make OxCam a “top 10 global innovation cluster.” A new report from Public First, launched this week as Labour Party conference, outlines exactly what an undertaking would involved. Public First’s Rachel Wolf, speaking at a fringe event, argued that achieving such an ambition is really a bigger question about how the government chooses to spend, build, and support the UK’s leading assets.
Global competition
In the report’s foreword, Patrick Vallance calls Oxcam a “golden opportunity, one that we cannot afford to miss.” The publication seeks to inject urgency into the business case, as well as appealing to the government’s desire for a strong national innovation system, which has been clearly articulated under BIST. “We are competing with every cluster named in this report,” Vallance concludes – these range from established world-leading clusters like the Bay Area to geopolitical rivals such as Shenzhen.
Between 2019 and 2023 OxCam produced more scientific publications per resident than any other global cluster, the report observes. It has the kinds of talent that most countries would pay an awful lot of money to attract and is one of the most innovation-intensive places in the world – but without scale, these hard-fought advantages are squandered.
Public First has benchmarked OxCam on measures including talent, infrastructure, transport, and capital, finding it greatly out-performed across essentially all metrics, leading to the headline takeaway that it “ranks second last” among the dozen or so clusters it is compared against. Some of these comparisons are fundamentally about size – OxCam is a much less populous region than existing superclusters (Paris, Seoul, the Randstad region in the Netherlands) and less geographically concentrated. The point being made is quite how deep a transformation would be needed to get OxCam into a global top ten.
But there are some areas where like-for-like comparison throws up interesting divergences, such as the contrast between OxCam’s stellar performance on spinouts versus its performance in commercialisation:
Elsewhere, we see that OxCam attracts 80 times less venture capital than the Bay Area, two thirds of the unicorns founded by Oxford and Cambridge are now situated elsewhere, industrial power costs five times more than Austin Texas, and there are more than eight and half times fewer people living within 60 minutes of Oxford, Cambridge or Milton Keynes than Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
The underlying problem is that governments of all stripes (local and regional as well as national) have refused to invest in the kinds of infrastructure necessary to build a more innovative economy. This leaves the ambition to be top ten in the world verging on impossible to realise without a major change of direction.
The argument which OxCam’s supporters are trying to make land is that the challenge is not only domestic, but international. The longer the government takes to coordinate action, the more other countries will pull away from OxCam. The report contains lessons from all over the world for the UK to adopt: the use of institutional capital in Paris to attract further investment, or the focus on housing and energy in Austin which means people can actually live near to where they work (house prices actually went down in Austin even as the economy grew). There are learnings from Singapore on how to get talent to stay and come back. Amsterdam and Rotterdam demonstrate how a multi-modal transport network can exponentially increase the available pool of talent.
National imperative
For those pushing the Burnham administration to go further and deeper with scaling OxCam, the takeaway is simple:
“Resolving these bottlenecks is a national imperative and one of the clearest routes to long-term national renewal and economic security.”
This would require a government which says it believes in innovation to embark on a generational scheme of road laying, house building, and infrastructure investment – and crucially, to do quickly.
The question is how a commitment to growth gets squared with the political need for said growth to be in “every postcode.” There are plenty of other clusters and zones competing for national attention and investment – another event at the Labour party conference saw the case made for a souped-up life sciences cluster in London, referencing a different Public First report which estimated that this would add £3.5bn to the UK economy.
The framing in this case was not around intra-region connectivity – that is, getting infrastructure right in Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and the counties in between – but rather choosing areas based on their ability to create national spillovers. And other models are available: Research England’s new collaboration fund, announced by science minister Chris McDonald earlier this month, highlights the partnership between Cambridge and Manchester rather than Cambridge and Oxford.
Political sensitivities around innovation investment being concentrated within the Golden Triangle will inevitably persist. These need to be weighed up against the government’s desire to genuinely have world-leading innovation clusters within the UK, which by definition must involve agglomeration – they cannot serve every postcode, as much as one might wish it.