Stoate discusses visit of Thames Gateway Minister 

When I first came to Dartford some thirty odd years ago to work as a junior doctor at Joyce Green Hospital, the borough barely featured on the national media radar. Its name cropped up occasionally in references to the Dartford tunnel but that was pretty much about it. The advent of the Thames Gateway and Ebbsfleet and Bluewater in particular changed all that. Now barely a month goes by without some feature or another about Ebbsfleet, The Bridge or one of the other major developments appearing in the nationals.

This new investment has transformed the economic fortunes of Dartford. Businesses that would never have given Dartford a second thought twenty years ago are now choosing to locate to the borough whilst more and more families are deciding to set up home here every year. There is in short good reason to be optimistic about Dartford’s future.

This is not to say however that there aren’t any potential pitfalls ahead. We have to ensure for instance that Dartford’s existing communities get a fair share of the resources flowing into the area on the back of the new development taking place. We don’t want to arrive at a situation in ten or twenty years time whereby the residents of existing communities look at the level of facilities and infrastructure provided in Eastern Quarry and elsewhere and feel that they’ve got the raw end of the deal.

It is a point I made very forcefully to the new Thames Gateway Minister, Caroline Flint MP, a few weeks ago when we visited St Mary’s Church in Greenhithe together to look at their community development plans. Greenhithe has few community facilities of its own and the church has come up with an ambitious plan to create a new community centre to address this deficit. The church hopes that the new centre will act as a bridge between the new and existing communities in the area.

The value of this kind of project cannot be understated. If you want to create truly integrated communities in the Thames Gateway you need projects like these to succeed. In my view we have to make sure therefore that more funding for projects of this nature is made available in future funding packages for the Thames Gateway. If it isn’t then we could be counting the cost for years to come.