The wasteland

But regeneration experts are warning that this massive site – big enough to contain a whole new city – is being wasted. For decades, they say, successive governments have failed to provide the infrastructure required to unlock sites in the Thames Gateway. As a result, the chance to solve the housing shortage without building on the green belt is slipping away.

"The Thames Gateway is at this very moment being frittered away for lack of a vision and the tools to deliver it," said Lord Rogers, speaking at a CABE regeneration conference the week before Prescott's announcement. "We are talking about the opportunity to create a town for an additional 300,000 people, but unless we treat this area holistically we will be lucky if we can achieve a third of that."

Prescott's announcement will have done little to ease Rogers' concerns. The deputy prime minister's barnstorming speech set out how he would spend the £1.5bn of extra money for housing and planning allocated in last week's comprehensive spending review.

"My strategy of providing sustainable, high-quality, well planned communities in growth areas will benefit everyone," Prescott crowed, announcing a raft of measures to ease the housing crisis (see list overleaf). "All 200,000 homes could be done in the Thames Gateway," he stated, before adding the crucial qualifier, "provided you could find the money for infrastructure."

However, Prescott failed to promise a single penny for new transport links.

Regeneration experts were left wondering where they'd heard it all before. "I've been here three times looking at exactly the same thing: in the '70s, the '80s and again, now," says Chris Glaister, a planner who is advising the Thames Gateway London Partnership, the body attempting to co-ordinate regeneration in the area. "These ideas have been on the table for years. But this time, the economic conditions are right. The problem is, unless we get the investment in transport infrastructure, we'll miss the chance. It's now or never – but most people have got a very high level of cynicism about funding becoming available for infrastructure."

Part of the problem is the lack of a single body to drive through integrated regeneration. Prescott's new department, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, is in charge of housing, planning and regeneration, but has no transport remit. There are numerous competing bodies involved on the ground: London mayor Ken Livingstone's Greater London Authority; the London Development Agency; government regeneration quango English Partnerships; and the Housing Corporation, which is promised funding for affordable homes in the area under the spending review.

In addition, observers say the long-standing animosity between Prescott and Livingstone – whose recently unveiled draft London Plan also targets the Thames Gateway for major regeneration – could lead to a damaging power struggle.

Developers are taking on sites piecemeal and developing them at suburban densities. We need a strategic plan

Jon Rouse, chief executive, CABE

In the meantime, London's booming economy means developers are already moving into the Thames Gateway. But sites are being developed at low densities in an ad-hoc way, meaning that an integrated plan – if it comes – will be increasingly difficult to implement. In the absence of a strategic masterplan, the 13 local authorities in the area are getting on with isolated bits of regeneration on their own patches. As Glaister E E says: "There are so many different interests involved, you tend to get conflicting agendas."

"Developers are taking on sites piecemeal and developing them at suburban densities," agrees CABE chief executive Jon Rouse, who believes the Thames Gateway is indicative of the cheese-paring way regeneration is tackled in this country. "The Dutch would have bought the land, cleaned it up, put in the infrastructure, sold it on at a profit and moved on to the next site. It's very simple."

Rouse cites two schemes that illustrate how the area is being squandered. At Barking Reach, on the north bank of the river, Bellway Homes is building 4000 homes on a site CABE believes could accommodate 12,000. And a little further east at Dagenham, plans to regenerate the former Ford car plant look likely to go the same way. "We need a strategic plan," says Rouse.

Drive east from central London on the A13 – the only significant transport artery serving the northern Thames Gateway – and the problems soon become apparent. After passing the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, the traffic-snarled highway ploughs through a twilight zone of abandoned land, giant factories and run-down housing estates. A nervewracking right turn from the fast lane of the A13 takes you past a row of tatty industrial units to the first phase of Bellway's Barking Reach scheme.

Low-rise executive houses, laid out in Brookside-style culs-de-sac with names like Galleon's Drive and Schooner Close, are hemmed in between high-fenced wasteland and a huge Exel distribution warehouse. Nearby, enormous electricity pylons, which nobody is willing to pay to bury underground, march across land earmarked for more housing. A single bus stop advertises its destination: Dagenham. It feels like the end of the world, but it is only six miles from Canary Wharf.

"There's no use kidding anybody," says Tony McBrearty, deputy chief executive at Thames Gateway London Partnership. "Unless proper transport infrastructure is put in, places like Barking Reach cannot fulfil their potential. Bellway is saying, 'Of course we'll build more densely at Barking Reach, but we need the infrastructure'. If builders have confidence [that infrastructure will be provided] then these things will happen."

McBrearty points out that the two success stories in Thames Gateway – Canary Wharf and the booming development zone around Stratford – were achieved on the back of firm transport proposals: the Jubilee Line at Canary Wharf and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link at Stratford. The same has to be done in the rest of the area: "We're talking about a new city being built in east London. It's crucial to the national economy. The government has to do that," he says.

There is no shortage of proposals for transport links. There are plans to extend the Docklands Light Railway – the elevated rail system approved by Margaret Thatcher – deeper into the area, linking City Airport and Woolwich to the south. Three new river crossings, linking the north and south banks, are on the drawing board. Most important of all is CrossRail, a £10bn commuter rail system that will start at Heathrow airport in the west, burrow beneath central London and continue towards the eastern hinterland.

We’re talking about a new city being built in east London. It’s crucial to the national economy

Tony McBrearty, deputy chief executive, Thames Gateway London Partnership

However, the government has yet to commit funds to CrossRail and, if it is approved, there is still a question mark over the route it will take. The cheaper option involves linking existing population centres to the east of the capital.

The more expensive route would serve the undeveloped areas of the Thames Gateway, giving developers the incentive to build high-density schemes throughout the area.

"It's a much, much more expensive scheme, but the reason for doing it is to open up parcels of land that would not otherwise be served," Stephen Glaister, professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London, said at a recent Property Week conference on development in London. "It will only happen if government is willing to commit funding to it."

The government has promised a decision this year but Glaister warned ominously: "If discussion goes wrong during this calendar year the whole thing will be dead."

Even if CrossRail gets the green light, it will be at least 10 years before trains are running. By that time, the whole of the Thames Gateway could have been covered in land-hungry, car-dependent housing schemes. "Something has to happen in the interim to encourage developers to build at higher densities," says Ricky Burdett, director of the cities programme at the London School of Economics and a planning adviser to Livingstone. "At the moment that's not being done, but it's early days."

Burdett points to the Millennium Village on the Greenwich Peninsula further to the west – a showpiece development championed by Prescott as a template for the area. A subsidised bus system running on dedicated roads will ferry residents to the Jubilee Line station until the area develops an infrastructure of its own.

The initiative needs to be extended to the entire Thames Gateway, Burdett believes. "Whether Prescott is able to do that, I don't know," he adds.

There are other problems besides transport. Fledgling communities need amenities such as schools and health centres, says Frank Vickery, assistant chief executive at the East Thames Housing Association, which is building affordable homes at Barking Reach and other areas. However, bureaucracy and lack of funding mean there is no link between land release, transport improvements and the provision of new facilities. "It's a few houses here, a school there, a bit of light rail there," he complains.

"The school at one of our schemes in Beckton was four years too late. The units were all sold and there was no school."

Vickery believes the multiple funding agencies should be replaced by a single body for the area. "It would be better to treat it like a new town," he says. "Put all the money – for housing, infrastructure, remediation and so on – into one big pot."

Others agree with Vickery that a new approach is required. Writing in Building last year, eminent planner Sir Peter Hall called for a body akin to Heseltine's urban development corporations – well-resourced bodies with land assembly and planning powers – to step in to save Thames Gateway.