The promised land?

London Remade is a £20m programme set up by Ken Livingstone to promote recycling and cut the amount of rubbish used as landfill. Run under the auspices of the London Development Agency, it is focused on the River Thames and its targets include the creation of 3000 jobs in the east London area – within the Thames Gateway. Director Hugh Carr Harris wants many of them to be manufacturing jobs associated with the processing and recycling of waste.

If public policy were seamless, some of those workers would find homes among the 20,000-25,000 new units scheduled to be built in Barking and Dagenham. (If they were candidates for affordable housing, however, they should probably look elsewhere since Barking and Dagenham is not keen to build any more social housing in the borough.) In an ecologically sound way, London Remade's workers would live and work locally – provided planners have made land available for potentially messy rubbish tips and recycling plant.

It would be neat if homes and jobs were as joined together throughout the growth zones identified in the Communities Plan. In some of them indeed, the connection seems close. Take the M11 corridor. On behalf of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, planning consultant Colin Buchanan and Partners is working on employment in the Cambridge-Stansted area. It describes a virtuous circle. Jobs in biotech, pharmaceutical and other "future-oriented" firms have been growing.

Cambridge is regularly cited by chancellor Gordon Brown as an exemplary "cluster" of similar industries. To accommodate further growth, new housing is needed. The same common-sense model applies to Stansted airport. Thanks in part to Ryanair and Easyjet, employment has been expanding; but further jobs growth hinges on the availability of staff and so the jobs equation rests on housing in Uttlesford and contiguous districts.

The reasoning behind the Communities Plan was based on a mismatch between existing and potential job opportunities and housing – this was the thrust of the work by planning adviser Stephen Crowe for the (then) Department of Transport, Local Government and Regions. Elsewhere in government, the focus was labour costs in London and the South-east. Over recent years, the Treasury has become intellectually convinced that the cost of employing people in the South is excessive. The Confederation of British Industry lobbied hard on this – its interest is to keep down the cost of salaries. One of government's principal roles, in the CBI's view, is to help by ensuring land is made available for housing. The Blair government broadly agreed.

To this extent, John Prescott's grand plan is coherent. Employment has expanded and is likely to continue expanding, provided people can find somewhere to live. The recently completed strategic plan for the South-east to 2012 treats employment as a given: it is assumed jobs will grow, in manufacturing as well as services, in distribution and in knowledge production.

But that is the regional level. The point of the February document was to break down projections of employment growth into subregional space or, to put it crudely, to suggest where the residents of the various Prescottvilles would actually work.

Planners say part of the answer is intuitive. For example, the Ashford growth node already has the jobs. Its unemployment rate may already have gone beyond the "full employment" point and employment will inevitably expand with the completion of the fast rail link to the Channel Tunnel. Ashford's version of Prescottville is already, in that sense, fully booked. However many houses get built, they will be occupied at once.

But the strength of the connection between work and residence weakens the further north and the further east you go. The jobs economy in Corby, the former Northants new town, now slated for housing expansion, has an uncomfortably "Northern" feel to it – the companies located there are footloose and their prosperity is tightly linked to general economic conditions. Corby already has problems of low demand for social housing.

The task confronting Bob Lane, head of the town's regeneration company, Corby Catalyst, is how to create more "middle class" jobs so that there are people to buy the additional private housing the ODPM plan specifies.

There are parallel issues along the North Kent coast. But throughout the Thames Gateway, the big question is not so much the availability of jobs as how to get to them. Trains are not the only form of transport. On the long-term planning horizon are aircraft. The Department for Transport has nominated Kent Thamesside as a possible location for a new airport – protesters have already made the spire and birdlife of the village of Cliffe famous. In the Whitehall strategy for the South-east, job creation in and around an airport at Cliffe would be accommodated by housing expansion in the Medway and Isle of Grain areas; Prescottvilleans would be airport workers.

But elsewhere in the Gateway an unanswered question is whether new residents will commute to work in London: would existing rail links allow them to do so? In the vision of London's future published by planning guru Sir Peter Hall in the early 1960s, Kent dwellers would hop on the Channel Tunnel trains and zip into town. The hard reality is that even a relatively small project such as the eastwards extension of the Docklands Light Railway is fraught with planning, political and financial difficulties. On an administrative level, it's a question of whether Prescott speaks to Alistair Darling and, just as important, whether their respective quangos are in touch. How responsive, for example, will the Strategic Rail Authority (a national quango) be to the needs of the Thurrock urban development corporation when it says it hopes some of the residents of its 17,000 proposed new homes would find it easier to travel to work, say, in the Royal Docks or Canary Wharf? Getting to Thurrock is not easy now, yet the plan envisages the creation by the UDC of some 29,000 jobs, implying a large daily movement into the area to do jobs there.

If London and the South-east were a single "travel to work" area, there would be no gap: residence and employment would mesh. The same would be true if the Thames Gateway formed a single economic unit. It doesn't and not just because a river cuts it in two. The residents of the new housing across much of the zone will not be working locally, nor (assuming present trends in technology and office management) are they going to be working at home: the upshot is long commutes on already over-stretched railways that, mysteriously, don't seem to be part of the Communities Plan.