I attended the Thames Gateway forum today to launch the procurement for the Sporting Village. For those that don’t know, the forum is a big exhibition and conference in the Docklands Excel Centre, and the Council had a stand to promote our various regeneration projects. The launch was via a reception held on the stand and the surrounds, and it went very well indeed, with a good attendance and speeches from the great and the good. It compared very favourably with several other similar events at much the same time and this speaks very well to the narrative that we have fashioned for Basildon as a place to invest. That message has certainly got through to government as well, and they announced £30m of funding for Basildon regeneration over the next 3 years, which compares vary favourably to our surrounding local authorities. So, all in all, a very good day for the long term future of Basildon District, and there is also a rumour that Gordon Brown might be coming tomorrow, politics permitting.
You might have thought that as a Conservative I would be gloating over the government’s current predicament, but I am not. It is this sort of thing that brings politics and public service into disrepute and I would much rather that any party advantage from this affair had instead come from the debate on the best future for our nation.
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