By Rosie Niven | 11 August 2014
A consultation on creating a development corporation responsible for delivering a garden city of up to 15,000 homes in Ebbsfleet has been launched by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles today.
City lawyer Michael Cassidy will chair the development corporation, which will help to deliver what the government has described as the UK’s first garden city for almost 100 years.
The Department for Communities and Local Government is seeking views on the creation of the corporation, the geographical area that it will cover, the planning powers it will be granted and the composition of its board. This public consultation will run to 6 October.
Chancellor George Osborne announced the plan to create a garden city for the north Kent town as part of a £6.2bn housebuilding plan in his Budget in March, including a commitment to £200m of public investment to fund the garden city’s infrastructure.
Ebbsfleet has been earmarked as a site for housing development since 1995, but Kent Thameside, the regeneration agency established to deliver 25,000 homes, closed in 2011 without achieving this ambition.
Launching the consultation today, Pickles said that progress at Ebbsfleet stalled under the last government, and that the coalition was now unlocking that potential of development at the site.
‘With £200m government backing and the set up of a development corporation to drive forward Ebbsfleet there is nothing to hold back plans on paper becoming real homes and communities,’ he added.
The board’s designated chair Michael Cassidy currently chairs the City of London Property Investment Board and is on the board of Crossrail.
Cassidy, whose previous roles include leading the Corporation of London and chairing its planning committee, described the development as ‘an exciting prospect’.
He added that he was looking forward to working with local communities ‘to create a place where people choose to live and lay down their roots’.
Osborne said that creating` the UK’s first garden city for almost a 100 years would need drive, creativity and commercial savvy.
‘Michael Cassidy has all of those qualities and I am delighted he will be leading the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation,’ he added.
The Ebbsfleet corporation is expected to be established in early 2015 when it will start to develop and implement a business plan, working with local authorities and communities.
