OxCam Arc evidence data

Why we are interested in the FutureGov OxCam Arc project

The Oxford-Cambridge Arc (OxCam Arc) is an area between Oxford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge with 18 local planning authorities within that boundary. The government has identified it as a ‘national economic priority’, and is in the process of developing a 'Spatial Framework', a strategic plan to support sustainable growth of the area up to 2050.

We will be working with the OxCam team in MHCLG and FutureGov, a design agency. FutureGov will initially pinpoint a dataset that impacts on future local planning in the Arc. The OxCam team and FutureGov will identify what users need from the data, and how it can be collected and maintained.

This data will be collected as part of the evidence base work for the Spatial Framework. Digital Land will clean this data and put it into our format to test our pipeline. ‘Local Plan Evidence’ traditionally is in the form of reports and local authorities often don’t have access to the raw data.

The project aims to separate administrative documents from the data collection to enable possible digital use and innovation. The OxCam team will use the cleaned and structured data we provide to explore creating a common, accessible data repository (platform) for the OxCam Arc, which local authorities would be able to access.

What are we focused on

From this project, we will learn how to collect evidence data, process it, and provide it to local authorities and our MHCLG colleagues.

• We will take the dataset collected by the OxCam team and put it through our pipeline to transform and harmonise the data.
• We will test our pipeline and the data it produces with feedback from the OxCam team.
• We will see how the data is used for a map and how it will be made available for local authorities, either through the Digital Land platform and/or through the data repository that the OxCam team intend to create for the Arc.