It is clear Robin Cooper has his work cut out as he rushes through a PowerPoint presentation on what a future garden city in Kent will look like.

The chief executive of the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, the body tasked with building 15,000 homes over 20 years, has been in the job for barely two months.

Yet he has already been served his first platefuls of cynicism by locals who have heard it all before.

George Osborne revealed proposals to build the first garden city in the UK for more than 100 years at Ebbsfleet during his Budget speech last year.

While it drew cheers from MPs, it prompted eye rolls from residents across Gravesend and Dartford.

Outline planning permission to develop in Ebbsfleet Valley, the brownfield former quarry land between the two towns, was first awarded in 1996, three years before Bluewater opened.

Outline planning permission was then renewed in 2002 and 2007 but has so far resulted only in the development of homes at Springhead in Northfleet and the construction of Ebbsfleet Interational Station, which opened in 2007.

This time, Mr Cooper has to persuade people it is really going to happen.

He said: “There is a bit of healthy cynicism and there is nothing wrong with that because this has been talked about for 20 years and largely not delivered.

“We have a long way to go, but the idea of this development corporation is to bring pace and investment to the area.

“We need to show we can deliver and have realistic timescales, but there is a good feeling and we need to capitalise on that.”

The plans are certainly ambitious. To serve all the new houses, Mr Cooper wants to build three secondary and seven primary schools, two swimming pools, two sports halls and two indoor bowls courts, establish 70 hectares of playing fields and parks and seven hectares of allotments, leave 33 hectares as natural green space, employ 18 GPs and create 56 NHS beds.

In many ways the creation of Ebbsfleet garden city appears to be written in the stars.

In 2012, proposals to build a Paramount-themed entertainment resort on the nearby Swanscombe peninsula were put forward.

If all goes to plan, the £3.2 billion attraction should open in Easter 2020, bringing with it 27,000 jobs.

Politically, the lack of housing supply has rarely been so high on the agenda, with the Chancellor revealing plans to relax planning laws further during his summer budget last month.

The development corporation has full control of planning in its area, rather than the local councils.

It has also been given £200 million to spend and should glide over hurdles that have held up previous development, namely that building infrastructure has been too expensive for developers to make a profit.

After all, the houses are due to be built in old quarries, where there is no gas, electricity, sewage or water works.

“Until we’ve got that in we can’t start building the homes,” said Mr Cooper, who was director of regeneration at Medway Council before taking up his current post.

“If we put in the gas and the roads a developer can say they will commit to 1,000 houses.”

“If we put in the gas and the roads a developer can say they will commit to 1,000 houses...” - Robin Cooper, Ebbsfleet Development Corporation

Serious questions hang over the ability of infrastructure to handle the huge amounts of people due to come to Ebbsfleet garden city and the nearby Paramount resort.

Mr Cooper seems confident that a two-lane road in and out of the theme park from the A2 will deal with congestion from its 15 million visitors a year.

“To put that into context, Bluewater has 28 million visitors a year,” he said.

His three main infrastructure considerations are improving the Bean and Ebbsfleet junctions – and where the Thames Crossing will be built.

Mr Cooper caused controversy last month when he revealed he favoured building a new Thames Crossing to the east of Gravesend.

He the option was better than the alternative second bridge at Dartford because it gave transport infrastructure “more resilience”.

Mr Cooper also believes the development corporation has all the tools to make Ebbsfleet an exciting place to live.

How realistic is it to consider Ebbsfleet a place for people to work and live, considering so many people in the area commute to London?

Robin Cooper: “Of course people will commute and there is nothing wrong with that at all. It brings big incomes into the area, which are invested into local jobs and shops. We do want to provide opportunities down here, though. We could have a skills centre that could create the skills they will need at the Paramount park. The opportunity for 27,000 jobs will be immense.”

How will you stop the houses being bought by people in London?

RC: “If you look at the guys on the council waiting list, then we can influence that because you have to have a local connection. Between 20% and 30% of the housing will be affordable homes for local people. If you look at schemes like St Mary’s Island in Chatham, something like 90% of the people who moved in moved less than three miles.”

How do you stop landlords just buying all the homes and selling them as buy to let?

RC: “It has to be a mix. We wouldn’t want massive investors coming in and buying blocks of 100 houses because you end up with very odd communities not commited to the area. I wouldn’t be against someone buying a second house and renting that out, but I wouldn’t want institutional investment coming in and buying whole blocks. How we stop it is a good question.”

When do you think Ebbsfleet will become a place, rather than an idea?

RC: “We are not going to acheive that until we provide community infrastructure. Up at Springhead (the only part of the garden city fully built so far) we have the Eastgate community centre, which is the sort of thing you need because it is a place to meet for people who live there. You need that early in the process. Then you are starting to build a genuine community and it is not seen as just a bit of new housing.”