It's a tough job, but some clever thinking can boost employment

Without jobs and the opportunity for all to contribute as part of the workforce, we will end up repeating the mistakes of the past in the future. But the big question is, how can we create more jobs?

Those with long careers behind them, like me, may well remember what we used to call the "wealth-creating sector". I used to work in manufacturing in the days when the making of, say, cars or bicycles was seen as vastly superior to trades such as journalism or housing management.

Times change, of course, and with them not just attitudes but, more importantly, economic realities. The old manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared and even many of the newer so-called knowledge-based industries are undergoing massive change as work is outsourced to other countries.

We have to wonder what all this means for ambitious regeneration projects such as the Thames Gateway or the Northern Way with its vision of a chain of vibrant communities across a revived North.

I have an idea that could offer at least a partial solution, and I think represents the sort of thinking we need if we are to transform prospects in some of these areas.

We can't bring back the economic drivers of the last century, but we can draw lessons from the early years of it – specifically, I'm thinking of the creation of the Ford motor factory on what was then derelict marshland beside the Thames.

This was a serious piece of social and economic engineering involving the creation of an entire industry – from foundry to finished car – and for some 75 years it dominated the lives of tens of thousands of people. Not just those who worked in the plant but all the suppliers and subcontractors, the shops and schools, the sports teams – all of them were dependent in one way or another on this great enterprise.

I knew it in its later days in the 1980s when I used to visit it as a supplier and it was enormously impressive.

We should relocate one of the great London teaching hospitals, Barts and the London NHS Trust, to the old Ford factory site in Essex

Now, of course, it is a shadow of its old self – reduced from a full-scale motor plant to a centre for engineering excellence.

These days, the health and education sectors are far more powerful forces for the economy – London's biggest employer is the NHS. Something like a large teaching school is more likely to achieve the high spin-off of jobs that a Ford plant once did.

Now it just so happens that there are plans to rebuild one of London's great teaching hospitals, Bart's and the London NHS Trust, at a cost of about £1bn.

The problem with this project is that it would centre around rebuilding on existing sites that are cramped and situated in places that won't see the largest population growth (I should, here, declare an interest: I chair another London teaching hospital, University College London Hospital, which is currently building its own scheme in central London.).

But my solution would be to relocate a new Bart's and the London to Dagenham, on the old Ford site. Just think what this could do for the long-term regeneration and sustainability of a whole swathe of the Thames Gateway.

We'd be talking about thousands of secure jobs, about one of the top medical schools in the country, about clinical research of world importance and a superb acute hospital serving not just the existing communities in the area, but also the huge increase in population that is expected over the course of the next 20 years.

The proposed Thames Gateway Bridge in east London would make it accessible to both sides of the Gateway and create a serious economic and social base away from the central London area, which is already, arguably, over-resourced.