Gary Watson smiled as plans for an £18 million mental health hospital in the heart of Kent, with the potential to create 150 jobs, were revealed.

The director at real estate investment manager Jones Lang LaSalle has been hard at work behind the scenes laying the foundations for the latest addition to Kent Medical Campus.

The site near Maidstone aims to become a hub for healthcare businesses and the study of living organisms, known as life sciences.

It is already home to the £95 million private KIMS Hospital, with many more companies soon to be announced as potential tenants.

The new mental health hospital, set to be run by Cygnet Health Care, has to await planning approval, but should not face too many hurdles given the fact that councillors gave outline planning permission for the 30-acre campus in 2013.

Mr Watson hopes the project will be completed within three to five years, having gained the added benefit of Enterprise Zone status, giving business rate relief, from the Chancellor in last year’s autumn statement.

“Health is a flourishing industry,” he said. “Life sciences are at the cutting edge of all that, and there is a lot of opportunity out there with the reform in the NHS, private care and tertiary care.

“The difficulty is health is not a market-led commodity; it’s demand-led. Investors and developers are very much reliant on where the public sector is at, in terms of procurement.

“It’s a challenge but demand is only going one way. We have a compelling investment case if you look at what we have to offer.”

The campus shares its Enterprise Zone status with Ebbsfleet garden city and Rochester Airport Technology Park, both of which are also yet to come to fruition.

The latter is a £4 million revamp that will replace the airfield’s grass runway with asphalt and create a new centre for hi-tech firms, which could create 1,000 jobs.

A decision on whether the park will go ahead is due at a planning meeting in March, even though Medway Council gave permission for the site in February last year.

The decision was called in for judicial review and the council backed out of the process late.

Medway Council leader Cllr Alan Jarrett said: “We have taken the view that we didn’t want the judicial review to rumble on for months on end and decided it was better to hold our hands up and ask the planning committee to look at it afresh. We took a pragmatic view of it.

“Others clearly agree how important it is, otherwise we would not have been given Enterprise Zone status by the Chancellor.”

The technology hub is intended to link with major employers in the area such as BAE Systems.

It is hoped that it will follow the success of similar hubs, such as the Nucleus at Dartford and Canterbury Innovation Centre at the University of Kent, and also become a home for hi-tech companies that are outgrowing the nearby Medway Innovation Centre in Chatham, where many start-ups have flourished since it opened in 2010.

“We took the view we didn’t want any old business park with crinkly sheds employing three people,” said Cllr Jarrett.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if some of BAE’s supply chain could be located nearby and use the airport. That is the sort of thinking we have with this.

“It is all around the skills agenda. This is how we can capitalise on the work done by the universities and the University Technical College. We want people to leave education and use those skills in Medway, rather than moving away.”

Much of this thinking has been inspired by the work of Kent’s other Enterprise Zone, Discovery Park, the business estate based at the former Pfizer site in Sandwich. More than 2,400 people are employed at 125 companies on the location.

It is a significant number, given the fact that 2,400 people worked there before US drugs giant Pfizer announced it was scaling back its operations in Kent in 2011, costing hundreds of jobs.

According to Discovery Park managing director Paul Barber, a simple philosophy is behind the success.

“Word has got out around the scientific community that science works better in times of collaboration,” he said.

“Back in the day, it was so secretive but now people realise that was prohibitive.

“If you show more of what you’re doing with your so-called competitors and they share their information with you, then you achieve more progress together.

“That doesn’t happen everywhere but does at Discovery Park. We are finding a lot of science companies are arranging their meetings themselves without us, which is great.”

One such group is BioGateway, which was launched last summer with the aim of connecting Kent’s life-science community with similar groups internationally, such as FlandersBio in Belgium.

BioGateway chief executive Imran Khan said: “We have been set up to help firms irrespective of whether they are a small business or a big corporate, whether they are at the idea stage, need help getting capital or getting a lab or finding talent.

“There is a really strong network of science companies in Kent. Big companies are coming here and taking note of what’s happening.”

One group feeling the uptick is Locate in Kent, an agency that offers free advice to businesses looking to move to the county, or to expand their premises here.

The organisation has placed 20 life-science companies in the county over the past five years, and has another 26 such projects in the pipeline.

Chief executive Paul Wookey said: “The life sciences industry is a key part of the science and technology sector in Kent.

“Historically, it has clustered around Oxford and Cambridge but in recent years the county has developed thriving science-centric locations such as Kent Science Park, Discovery Park and innovation centres supporting small technology companies.

“We now have the critical mass necessary to create a golden triangle stretching from Kent to Oxford and Cambridge for life sciences, thanks to infrastructure developments such as high-speed rail and road links to London and the Continent, and the spread of high-speed broadband.

“This will benefit the county as a whole, as the companies in this sector tend to grow quickly, the jobs they create are usually highly skilled, and the companies attract a high-quality workforce who make a positive contribution to the local economy, both at work and outside it.”