Local residents, a technology journalist and researcher, and an eminent urban planner respond to new Government plans for the Gateway as set out by Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and Judith Armitt, new Chief Executive of the Thames Gateway.
I’m delighted to be launching the Thames Gateway Interim Plan. This is the most exciting and maybe largest regeneration project in the UK, maybe even in Europe. And the fantastic opportunity presented by the 2012 Olympics means that the eyes of the world will be upon us.
The true test of our success will be the difference that we make to the lives of people in the towns and communities that make up the Thames Gateway, both now and in the future. The Thames Gateway is the common thread which connects various, diverse places; places where people from all backgrounds, of all ages, should feel that they belong, places where they should be able to find a home, a job and a life, places that should promote social justice, economic prosperity and cultural diversity.
We all know that the Thames Gateway has huge potential and we have huge ambitions for it. I know that some have questioned whether the Government has the courage and commitment to see this through. Let me assure you that we have and we will. The launch of this plan brings a renewed focus across Government to deliver our vision over the months and years ahead.
But first let us take pride in what we have already achieved in the Gateway. We’ve already invested heavily in transport infrastructure, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the Jubilee Line extension, Docklands Light Railway and River Rail connections, bypasses and road improvements.
And we’ve plans for much more. New homes and new jobs are being created every day. From the 3000 homes in Greenwich Millennium Village to the 5000 jobs at Bluewater through to the 900,000 square metres of office space at Chatham Maritime, not forgetting the new universities at Medway Campus, Southend and the Royal Docks.
And we’re ensuring a high quality environment throughout, like the cluster of green spaces from Jeskyns to Ranscombe Farm in Kent, with the new eco-friendly business centre at Shorne Wood, at their heart. Or the RSPB Centre at Rainham Marshes, which will be enjoyed by thousands of local people and school children: an example of a beautifully designed low carbon building.
But we have to be honest. Some of the homes built in the Gateway could have been better designed. The importance of high quality green space could have been given greater emphasis, and on the ground we have not always had strong and clear leadership, which is why I am so delighted to welcome Judith Armitt as the new chief executive of the Thames Gateway.
And we’re also listening to what people in the Gateway tell us is most important to them. They want schools, health centres, gardens and green spaces for children; jobs, training and a foot on the housing ladder for young people; and a safe, caring environment for older people. And it’s by meeting these needs that we can promote cohesive communities which are diverse and in which everyone can take pride.
I’m announcing a package of measures that will make the Gateway a more attractive place to live, to work and to invest in. Let me start with climate change. Our ambition is to make the Thames Gateway a low and then zero carbon development, with no net emissions from new development. Arup and Turner and Townsend are currently working on a feasibility study to achieve this goal. And we’ll create the Thames Gateway Parklands, not only to offset carbon emissions and manage floodwater, they’ll also help create a new identity for the area. The Parklands will link historic sites and buildings with a high quality, sustainable, rural environment running throughout the Gateway. Residents, visitors and wildlife will all enjoy and benefit from this ambitious concept.
Let me move onto housing. If we do not build more homes across the country, fewer than a third of today’s 10-year-olds will be able to afford a place of their own in 20n years’ time. In the South East there are the twin problems of housing shortages and overcrowding: that’s why we are creating 160,000 new homes in the next 10 years, with over a third of these designated as affordable housing. One of our key partners, the Mayor of London, has already set out proposals for 40,000 extra homes in the London part of the Gateway, and I commend the Mayor for the approach he has taken in the London plan.
We’ll be taking steps through CABE to root out poorly designed housing schemes in the Gateway. CABE will work alongside locally appointed design champions and local authorities. Councils can and should have the confidence to say no when plans are below the standard that people are entitled to expect, and we hope to help them in that task with the new Thames Gateway School of Urban Renaissance. And more of the homes that we build should be designed for families – too often many of the homes being built are one or two-bedroom flats. A community needs a mix of people and they need a mix of housing. The housing and communities we create today will be our legacy for years to come.
But it’s no use building just homes if there are no jobs to go alongside them. Our aim is to create the conditions for an additional 180,000 jobs in the Gateway. These will be mainly generated by four, key, transformational locations: Canary Wharf, Ebbsfleet Valley, Stratford City and the Gateway Ports. Most of these jobs will need at least Level Three qualifications, the equivalent of A-Levels, and many will need higher qualifications still. Yet only a sixth of adults in the Gateway have a degree, compared with a quarter of all Londoners. To give local people greater opportunities, we’re aiming to provide a new Gateway learning entitlement. The Gateway universities and further education colleges have agreed to develop a guarantee of assured progression within the Gateway area. This means that every local citizen who achieves a Level Three qualification will be given the chance to study for an appropriate Level Four qualification. We know that there is appetite for learning locally. The new Medway and Southend campuses are already proving hugely popular. Our plans will help make the Gateway a new centre of learning.
Finally, a word about the Olympics. The Thames Gateway is of course the focus of the Olympic legacy. We’re already providing the early infrastructure funding and we’re supporting the London/Thames Gateway Development Corporation to release the wider development potential of the Lower Lea Valley over the longer term. We’ll be working with the boroughs, the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Greater London Authority to achieve lasting change. And we’ll also support a cross-Gateway Task Force to ensure that the Olympic legacy is expanded along the 40 miles of the Gateway. This could, for example, include a new half-marathon or maybe even a network of sports villages.
We must harness all opportunities, both in developing Olympic legacy and in regenerating other parts of the Gateway, and we must pioneer new approaches to eco-development, high quality design, green spaces and community facilities. However, we also have to be realistic. This is a long-term challenge and ours is a long-term commitment. And we’ll publish our final Thames Gateway plan following the outcome of the comprehensive spending review.
Our aim is to build homes, not houses, to create communities, not conurbations. There’s a huge amount more to do, but this month I think we’re taking a significant step forward with two key pillars in place: the publication of our new plans for the Gateway, and Judith Armitt starting work as its chief executive.
Rt Hon Ruth Kelly MP is Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. This is an edited extract from her speech to the Thames Gateway Forum at London Excel on 22nd November 2006 www.thamesgatewayforum.com
The new plan for the Thames Gateway comprises two key documents and some supporting material: firstly, a document that sets out the policy framework for the Thames Gateway, outlining in more detail those new commitments that the Secretary of State has just made; and, secondly, we have brought together for the very first time a development prospectus for the Thames Gateway.
In these documents you will see a new emphasis on the economy, and, in particular, on skills. You’ll see an emphasis on the environment and on moving towards low carbon, and, above all, you’ll see an emphasis on providing quality of life, not only for newcomers but also for the existing population.
My role as Thames Gateway Chief Executive in support of ministers, is to provide continued strategic leadership to the Thames Gateway. And I have two other functions, I think. The first is to go across government and make those joins where they haven’t been made before. Do I hear you say, hooray? To go to other government departments, to go to other agencies, to assemble the resources and act as one government in terms of setting about central government’s part of this partnership, only part of this partnership, because it is the product of the work of the Thames Gateway strategic partnership as a whole, that has brought us to this moment, to this point of departure.
The other part of my role is to knock down hurdles. When as Chief Executive of Medway Council I spoke at the Thames Gateway Forum last year, I said that my experience was that there were always more people putting up hurdles than there were hurdlers, and I was determined to change that and to knock down those hurdles for other people. And that is exactly what I am hoping to do in the next five years of my role.
Judith Armitt is Thames Gateway Chief Executive. These are edited extracts from her speech to the Thames Gateway Forum at London Excel on 22nd November 2006 www.thamesgatewayforum.com
Among the mountains which the planners and developers have to climb to make the Thames Gateway a success are two peaks still shrouded in cloud. They are the peaks of Carbon Emissions and the local Knowledge Economy.
Failure to master either peak will be a disaster for the investors and politicians, residents and workers in this grand project.
The sherpas have already hauled up supplies for the project. The latest addition to these supplies are two publications from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). They are The State of the Gateway and The Thames Gateway Interim Plan: Development Prospectus.
To read these documents is to be reminded of how much is at stake: ‘London Thames Gateway holds the key to the future expansion of London as a world city, and to the continued economic growth of the Greater South East,’ says the Development Prospectus.
The week before the DCLG launched its new plans, the British Government received another vital document, the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change. Stern is clear that all developments have to plan now for climate change.
“Investments such as power stations, buildings, industrial plants and aircraft last for many decades. If there is a lack of confidence that climate change policies will persist, then businesses may not factor a carbon price into their decision-making. The result may be over investment in long-lived, high-carbon infrastructure – which will make emissions cuts later on much more expensive and difficult.”
Stern goes on: “Land-use planning and performance standards should encourage both private and public investment in buildings and other long-lived infrastructure to take account of climate change.”
This is a huge peak for the whole economy to climb, and even more important for all new developments such as the Thames Gateway.
But there are only two references to climate change in the combined 307 pages of the DCLG's plans for the Thames Gateway. One is a project at Gallions Park area of the Royals to build 230 high-quality, new homes with zero carbon emissions. This is a small demonstration project among the total of 100,000 homes planned for the Gateway.
This is just the anticipated residential build. We have to add to that the shopping centres, the factories, the offices, the recreational buildings. In all, Stern says, buildings account for 8% of carbon emissions.
Yet more, there's the transport which will be generated. Transport accounts for 14% of all carbon emissions, according to Stern.
Surely with Stern's warnings in their ears the planners and developers have to put this issue front and centre.
They have a clear warning in their own plan in the shape of the second reference to carbon emissions: the effects of global warming on sea levels. There is, after all, a clue in the title of the project: The Thames Gateway.
A stark map on page 18 of the DCLG's The State of the Gateway shows the areas of the Gateway at risk from flooding – about 20% of the total. A small note says that in these threatened areas local authorities should consult the Environment Agency and each proposal should have a flood risk assessment.
This peak of carbon emissions is closely linked to the other peak shrouded in cloud in the plans: the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is mostly a low carbon emitting sector, and so to be encouraged.
Wherever growth of the knowledge economy has put its roots into the Gateway the DCLG's reports laud this growth. For example, direct reference is made to the University of East London; the Visteon R&D facilities in Basildon; and the cluster of film and other media activity at Three Mills on the River Lea. All are given extra prominence by full colour pictures.
But the picture told by the raw data tables show how far the Gateway has to go to sustain its hopes of exploiting the opportunities of the knowledge economy.
The knowledge economy needs high levels of education. Yet the Gateway's proportion of the working population with degrees is below that of England, at under 15% compared with 20%. And it is way below the whole of London at over 30% in 2001, as The State of the Gateway shows on page 43.
It has, at least, increased from about 8% in 1991. Surprisingly, and worryingly, the planners do not know why. “We do not know whether the increases in the number of residents with a degree in the
London sub-region is due to upskilling the existing population or migration of well qualified people.”
They should know why. And they should soon.
They already have a notion: “Given the changes in Canary Wharf over this period it is likely that a good proportion of the increase is due to inward migration.” It is likely, then, that so far there has been more gentrification than bottom-up development.
In defence, the DCLG could say that the issues of carbon emissions and the knowledge economy are implicit in the plan. They will be tackled as other policies are developed. More plans are under way: the final Thames Gateway Interim plan will be published after the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review.
The planners and developers in both the public sector and the private sector had better have a far clearer picture of how high these two peaks are by then. More important, they had better know how they are going to climb them.
Former editor of Computing, Richard Sharpe is a Visiting Fellow at the University of East London and co-convenor of MagLab: the magazines network, www.maglab.org
I am a 20-year-old student living in Dartford, an area of proposed improvement within the Thames Gateway. I also go to university in East London, yet another area covered by the Thames Gateway promises for improvement. I wasn’t aware until recently that I was living in a district that is set to be part of the Thames Gateway build-up. In my experience, the Thames is not so much a gateway but more of a dividing line, and I have grown up with the division that separates the two sides, North and South. However, after reading the Thames Gateway interim plan I now know that enormous promises and prophesies have been made about what will happen to my area. It would be great if the South receives the promised amount of attention. Old school divisions will potentially disappear as more people see it as a good place to live and in which to start a business.
The section on ‘Building homes in mixed communities’ states that approximately 160,000 homes will have been built in the Thames Gateway between 2001 and 2016. Some have already been built in my home town of Dartford. Those at Waterstone Park are very modern and of an extremely high standard. They are definitely an asset.
At the moment local housing standards are not very high and the promise of the government pouring money in for improvements, can only be a good thing. Dartford has a mixed community to say the least, so I think the proposed broad range of housing at different densities, for rent and for sale, and to meet the needs of different households, is necessary to make these plans a success. Without this wide variety of houses, families may be forced out of their own town by not being able to afford increases house prices, or because the option of renting has been taken away.
It’s all well and good creating thousands of new homes in the Gateway but what about the employment rates? The section ‘Providing opportunities for all: skills and worklessness’ states that there will be jobs for thousands of citizens living within the Gateway. Yet the gap between the current skills of existing Gateways residents and the skills that the Gateway requires, is very big. Once all the new lovely new houses are built, it won’t be long before the Gateway fills up with skilled workers from all over London and beyond. Tension may be created, with the original Gateway citizens slowly but surely forced out, since without skilled, highly paid jobs they would not be able to afford the new, highly priced houses.
At present 19 percent of the working age population in the Thames Gateway have no qualifications. How are these people meant to survive in a new, improved environment? The Thames Gateway Partnership is hoping to overcome these problems by creating modern apprenticeships to meet the needs of some 2,000 employers. Many of the universities in the area have been improved in a bid to increase higher education in the Gateway, my university being one of them. For example, the new Knowledge Dock gives students more of a chance to access technological facilities and entrepeneurship.
Another proposal is to create an ‘East London city strategy pilot’ – an initiative designed to find new ways to increase the employment rate and reduce child poverty. With this kind of promise, I feel as if I’ve heard it all before. There have been so many kinds of centres created over the years to try and decrease the unemployment rate in many of the Gateway areas, and none of them seem to work. I would obviously like to be wrong but I can’t see how this strategy will be any different.
The Thames Gateway plan offers an enormous amount of promises for the communities within the Gateway. I do think many of them can be fulfilled but at the same time I believe some will fall at the first hurdle. The increase in housing will be an asset but it has to be well thought out by the authorities so that the houses cater for all. The promises for increased employment I find hard to believe. I think there will be some increase in people achieving qualifications to suit the needs of Gateway employers, but I can’t see it working for the majority.
I have already experienced some of the changes set out in the Gateway plan in the sense that my university is currently improving and new homes around my home town are being created. I am looking forward to seeing the further outcome of the Thames Gateway plan, and really do hope it is a success.
Carly Trayler is studying Journalism at the University of East London.
As the Thames Gateway Policy Framework moves to the second wave of urban regeneration, the emphasis on ‘mixed community’ planning, as a solution to the severe shortage of housing for those on low incomes, should be cautiously welcomed. However, it is an assumption of the policy that ‘housing mobility’, and therefore social and geographic mobility, ‘organically’ flows down river. In reality, it is the recent escalation of house prices and divisive planning strategies, in areas like the East End, which influence the directional flow. In this light, my response is to question the culture of urban policy, which arguably leads to those on low incomes either moving out of an area or remaining isolated from the evolving identity of a locale.
This article goes on to consider urban transformation in terms of flows (literally the flow of individual bodies) rather than waves; this in order to eschew the macro reductionism afforded to waves of regeneration in the current policy, and instead grasp social mobility in terms of the micro level interactions individuals experience in a community. Imagined in this way, it argues that the repositioning of material and expressive components, such as houses, streets and schools, becomes a key factor in connecting the flows within the Thames Gateway. These are components, which in their current configuration, appear to resist the free action of social mobility. The article begins with a personal perspective on my parent’s journey down river in the early 1960s and my own commuter journey back into the East End as an employee of UEL.
My father grew up on the Becontree Estate at the end of WW2. Designed to provide affordable housing for the ‘better-off working class Londoner’ after WW1, the Estate took many out of the decaying East End.1 He met my mother in the area. She came from Bethnal Green, which like much of the East End was considered one of the epicentres of decay. In the 1950s social mobility for many living on the Estate started with an apprenticeship at Ford’s assembly plant. Eventually, a new job at the tractor factory in Basildon enabled the couple to flee to Southend-on-Sea.2 They considered themselves part of a generation fortunate enough to have escaped from the decay. The gradual flow down river, from the East End to Southend, was an emancipation of sorts. They were of course one of many couples who became disconnected from East London during this period.
Well, nostalgia ain’t wot it used to be, and neither is the East End. Property prices have risen sharply3 and you can pay as much as £8.75 for pie and mash! Clearly, the social composition has changed. It is undoubtedly a complex picture. Indeed, this is highlighted by my commute to UEL. One might expect transport technologies to blur social division as they enable bodies to flow across boundaries. But on the contrary, the C2C and DLR journey from Southend to Cyprus, via Limehouse, draws into sharp focus a culture that preserves the division between, on the south side, the new gated architectures and water features of penthouse apartments, and on the north side, the familiar scenes of inner-city decay.
One prominent theory put forward to explain this divide is the gentrification of the East End, in other words, the tactical use of luxury, not only as a means of domination, but also as a protection against the social and geographic mobility of the working classes. However, what we are also experiencing is a variation on the flows of social mobility. This is a new kind of flow which begins with inner-city decay, extends to the suburbs, but now appears to clear the way for the eventual reterritorialisation of the up river environment. Like this, recent government policy assumes that housing mobility naturally flows from Inner to Outer London, and from London to Essex and Kent.4 But underlying this assumption is a culture mostly determined by the power of private sector investment in housing, particularly evident in the Docklands project.5
There is of course the argument that those who sell up and move down river will reap the rewards of rising property prices. But as Giddens has argued, the sale of council property to tenants in the 1980s was a welcome idea that rebounded on many of those it was supposed to benefit.6 More recently, the remaining decay on the north side of the DLR is perhaps testament to the fact that the sell-off only really benefited the better off already living in houses and able to maintain the high cost of living in London. Certainly, it dramatically reduced the amount of affordable rented accommodation.
It seems that the potential of the Thames Gateway project to transform the environment orbits around this issue of mobility flow. To this end, Manuel DeLanda7 recently argued that in order to make a difference urban design should in part concern itself with material connectivity. Thinking of locales as ‘stations’ in which ‘the daily paths of individual persons converge’, DeLanda points to the design of material and expressive components as intermediate determinants of social connectivity. Seen like this, the positioning of a door, a house, a street, a railway line, an estate, a school, a shop, a factory, as well as the visual ‘design’ of a component, can decide the flows within the wider community. Indeed, unlike my DLR experience, DeLanda recognises how ‘regions that subdivide… must be connected to each other to allow for the circulation of human bodies’.8 The location of a school, for example, acts as an attractor, directing the flow of bodies from place to place.
The recent policy framework talks of ‘organic growth’ within communities that strive to conserve or develop a ‘sense of place’. Yet, Canary Wharf is identified with office work and will attract housing for workers in finance and business services. Urban identity, in this sense, is neither guaranteed or for that matter organic. On the contrary, it is the strategic positioning of material components that makes a difference. Truly mixing a community would mean building affordable housing which shares the river views of the Limehouse penthouses, and the positioning of an estate with access to the same schools and restaurants, as well as local employment. Nevertheless, significantly, Delanda9 recognises the almost deliberate sluggishness of urban change. The acceleration of change requires a deliberate design intended to break with tradition. In this light, a ‘mixed community’ would need to counter what Braudel10 once described as a culture ‘bent on preserving, maintaining [and] repeating’ itself; a tactic of conserving the expressions of luxury as a mode of resistance to inclusive social mobility.
Perhaps unfettered social mobility will destabilise an area like Canary Wharf, but its deterritorialisation could lead to novel stability and new social assemblages. This would require the positioning of material and expressive components as points of convergence that could dissolve divisive identities and promote the actualisation of mobility flows in all regions of the Gateway, up river, as well as down river.
Tony Sampson commutes through the Gateway from Southend to the Docklands Campus of UEL, where he is senior lecturer and programme leader in Interactive Media and Multimedia.
I’d like to argue that the Gateway’s taken a big jump forward but it is only a half-jump; we do not yet have a plan to replace RPG9a of 1995. We have a policy framework for a plan which is very different, and as the plan admits, it has a long way to go because the Gateway is still underperforming the greater region.
The plan, or rather the half-plan, is hugely ambitious: 180,000 jobs to be created particularly through raising the skill offer of the local population, which is presently far below the kinds of skills that would be needed for entry into the new jobs created in these places in the next 10 to 15 years. Because unless this happens, the real risk is a repetition of Canary Wharf, where the jobs got created but were filled by draw-in from outside, benefiting the local population relatively little.
That, I would say, is one of the big potential problems, or challenges, facing the Thames Gateway planners today. Also relevant is the fact that although this isn’t yet a plan in the sense of having a map attached, it states that there will be four key locations in the Gateway which will be absolutely crucial in delivering the jobs. Outstanding among these of course is Canary Wharf which is a legacy of Michael Heseltine and Erik Sorensen in the old London Docklands Development Corporation. That is their legacy definitively, and perhaps the Gateway is trading rather too much on that legacy, but if it’s there, let’s use it.
Of the other three locations, both Ebbsfleet and Stratford City will be essentially indigenous locations, office locations, and also retail in the case of Stratford, so that again they will demand the kinds of skills which currently many residents of the Gateway cannot offer, which is why the education and training element is so crucial.
The other element, the Gateway Ports, will offer a greater variety of jobs, including manual labour jobs. But if you consider what’s happened in a container port nowadays when literally thousands of jobs in the old economy are replaced by one guy high up in a crane moving the containers around, you will realise that here too the demand is not for the old kind of manual labour which was the traditional stock-in-trade of the Gateway.
The other great promise in the new plan is the huge number of sustainable homes that will be delivered in mixed communities, to a total of 160,000 – a big jump on the previous target of 120,000. Plus, and this is a big plus, an emphasis on quality which so far has been so woefully lacking in much of what has been built in the Gateway. The challenge here will be through CABE and through the various delivery agencies, massively to increase the quality. Can it be done in sufficient volume and in sufficient time? It remains to be seen.
Added to this, the new plan or half-plan, emphasises that these new homes will have to be set in a very special kind of environment, and this environment, the Thames Gateway Parklands, represents a new element in the thinking – a very bold and important element, partly owing to Terry Farrell’s work. But it is coupled also in a way that is not 100 per cent clear with the other key element on the environmental side which is flood protection. Here, notice that the draft from the Environment Agency on that particular question is due only in 2008, when it won’t even be settled. So the strange fact is that the plan will have to be sealed before it’s clear what the flood protection implications are, or rather better the other way round, what the flood prevention implications of the Environment Agency will be for development in the Gateway.
I would regard that as crucial, because the report just says, Government and stakeholders will need to consider how to take forward these recommendations. But this in the middle of trying to deliver the huge volume of new housing to the highest standards when essentially no one knows exactly where that housing can go, because there is a real prospect that large areas of the Gateway will have to be sealed off as parklands subject perhaps to flooding if the worst happens out in the North Sea, as it did 53 years ago.
So a major question there which we should be looking at. A further question is the administrative maze. The report recognises that the agencies could work together more effectively. Some say, and I think this somewhat of an understatement given the vehemence with which many of us have expressed ourselves on this, that the network of delivery mechanisms is overly complex. And all the report says here is that effectively further work will take place, led by DCLG to ensure that the key agencies, UDC, LDA and English Partnerships in the London area will somehow be aligned with the role of the UDC, whatever that means. The DCLG and the strategic partnership will jointly review delivery arrangements to ensure they’re strong and effective. This says to me that there is a strong suggestion on the part of the team that drew up the plan that they are not strong and effective as yet, and this is an agenda still to be sorted. So watch that space.
The other element is of course the money. The report emphasises the amount of money that has been allocated, most of it back in 2003. But most of this is already committed to projects, and on this key question the new report simply says that the final strategic framework plan will include a detailed, timetabled programme for each project. Well amen to that, but the real question is where the money is going to come from. We do know from the Roger Tym report a couple of years ago which dealt with the whole Greater South East, but by extension or intensification it applies very much to the Gateway, that over the wider region there is estimated to be an £8 billion spending gap between what Government has promised and what the different regional development agencies and assemblies consider necessary to do the job. A substantial part of that £8 billion gap you can be absolutely sure is right here in the Gateway, and the question therefore is how and how far government will fill it.
Not a small element of this, and I think one of the less satisfactory elements because less clear in the new report, is transport, with not only CrossRail at issue, in competition with Thameslink, but also other schemes of a more modest nature including light rail extension to Barking and the completion of the busway networks North and South of the river and their possible integration with the Kent Fast Track. At present only a relatively small amount of even these modest schemes is committed in financial terms. That has to be a major issue on which it must be said the new report is really quite Delphic, saying that a strategic partnership subgroup will report on the investment priorities, assessing them consistently and relating them to the plan.
Well that’s fine, but then the crucial sentence which many of you will have been double-reading or treble-reading, states: subject to a suitable business case the Government will accept those schemes identified by the subgroup and endorsesd by the strategic partnership and will allocate spending accordingly, wait for it, as and when funding becomes available. So it looks to me as if we are in a somewhat circular process, unless there is speedy resolution before the publication of the final plan.
So what conclusion do we draw? I think we draw this: the plan is well-meaning. It has lots of good intentions. It’s on the right side. The question is still how to deliver these good intentions.
The timetable is out of step because the flood protection question is absolutely critical to the future of the Gateway. Until we know where we cannot build, we cannot know where we can build, and so we cannot in any sense produce a spatial strategy for the Gateway.
Secondly, on the delivery question, the powers of the different agencies still represent a concern, addressed in the report but not yet by any means sorted. The other delivery side, the money, is still extremely uncertain. There is no guarantee that the money will be available for completion of key projects like CrossRail. There is no guarantee even of the funding of more modest light rail and bus schemes, and finally no guarantee of critical elements like the upgrading of the C2C line into Fenchurch Street, on which the development of the Essex part of the Gateway crucially depends.
Therefore we remain in a state of suspended animation. The question remains, will it all happen, or better, when will it all happen? Because maybe it all happens eventually, but maybe far too slowly to meet the ambitions of the plan.
And finally, as usual, we’re all waiting for Gordon……
Sir Peter Hall is Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning. These are edited extracts from his speech to the Thames Gateway Forum on 22nd November 2006 www.thamesgatewayforum.com
© 2004·06
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