“Dartford suffers from having the crossing there”

Steven met Dartford MP Jim Dickson in his constituency office, a converted former police station, to discuss the Dartford Crossing, Swanscombe Hole, the jumping spider and Morgan McSweeny.

What is your official occupation?
Member of Parliament for Dartford.

Why, of all the constituencies, is Dartford yours? 
I've been involved in Labour politics for a long time. Along the way, I've been strongly involved in local government in southeast London. I stood in Old Bexley and Sidcup in 2001, attempting to be Ted Heath's successor in what was an interesting election because obviously it was one term of a Labour government and the Tories trying to peg us back or even chuck us out. Obviously, Labour did well, and there was a moment where I thought I might become the MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup. While I was down there, it was my first experience with Dartford because I came over and helped Dr Howard Stoate, who's still fondly remembered in these parts and was the last Labour MP for Dartford and a GP. Actually, he came out and helped me in my election. That was my first experience of Dartford. I've kept in touch with Dartford ever since. I've done bits of work here in the communications business. I worked with an organisational Kent-Thameside regeneration partnership, which is all about getting Ingress Park built and some of the other housing east of Dartford, in Gravesend and other places. I've come back and campaigned here on and off ever since. I have known the Dartford Labour Party members for some time.
When it became clear in late ‘23, early ‘24 that there's a potential vacancy for the candidate, I was very keen to put myself forward because it's a town and a community I like and since being elected, I've developed a really strong affection for, and absolutely love being here. I now live here, and that's been a very positive thing for me too.
Dartford is an incredibly dynamic place.

Dartford is somewhere that has jobs and opportunities

Every MP will insist that their constituency is the best, if not in the UK, at least in Kent. What is the pitch for Dartford? Why is it a great constituency? 
I think the reason why it's so special is because it has a really strong cultural history and sense of cultural identity. Going back to Anne of Cleves lived here, and Richard Trevithick, the father of the steam engine, did quite a lot of his early research here. All the way through to more recent cultural stuff. You've got the Orchard Theatre, the largest regional. Birthplace of the Rolling Stones with Mick and Keith. Incidentally, just as a little side element to this, it's just fantastic the way Mick, who's probably one of the ten most famous people in the world, still comes back to Dartford and keeps in touch with his roots here because he has a real affection for the place. That tells you something. Peter Blake, amazing pop art icon of the 60s, still keeps closely in touch with Dartford. A rich cultural tradition we've got here, but it's changing very quickly as well. One of the other things I like is it harnesses that deep sense of cultural identity in place with an openness to change. Over the last 15 years, lots of new homes have been built, and people have moved from places like southeast London, east London or Essex or other parts of Kent and come to Dartford. It's changed its complexion, and we've got a much more diverse community, everything from having an emerging Indian heritage population, lots more West African heritage residents moving from southeast London, residents from other parts of Kent making it really quite an interesting place that I think is good. An example of how a vibrant multicultural Britain can actually be a successful multicultural Britain. Dartford is somewhere that has jobs and opportunities. It's somewhere that has some new housing. If we can make all that work together, that's a hopeful thing. 
Having said all that, there are lots of things that need fixing, and those are the things I'm focused on, as well as trying to make sure that everyone does get along together and that we bring those new traditions that the incoming population bring with them and harness them well with the traditions of a historic market town. 

Looking at the future, there are a number of towns and villages that over time used to be in Kent and now part of Greater London. Would you welcome any reorganisation that moved towards Dartford becoming part of London?
Not at all. I think Dartford is distinctively Kent. The northern bits of Dartford have a stronger Thames estuary identity as well, and I think those things aren't the same as a London identity. I think anyone who suggests that Dartford is any way likely to be submerged into some notion of greater London is completely wrong. I would never suggest such a thing. I think it has a lot of the advantages of being close to London, people can commute into London to work and take advantage of the job opportunities there, but it's also got opportunities facing east and being able to take advantage of infrastructure investment. We're getting, along the estuary and new homes, the Lower Thames Crossing, which we may come on to talk about. Lots of the infrastructure that needs to be developed as a result of the fact that we do have new housing alongside being a traditional place. It's also the second fastest growing local authority in the UK. Tower Hamlets is growing more quickly, but we don't count that as a town. So, it’s the fastest growing town in the UK. The big issue is the infrastructure that people need. The schools, the hospitals, the road space hasn’t really kept pace. Part of my job is to make a strong argument to government that we get to make a community that works.

The Lower Thames Crossing can't come soon enough

From an infrastructure point of view, how much of your time is spent dealing with complaints about the tunnel or the bridge?
I have five key priorities for Dartford, which I won't bore you with by going through, but the biggest one of all is to get Dartford moving, because we have the fantastic Dartford Crossing, which is an extremely mixed blessing. I use the word fantastic in an ironic sense, because Dartford suffers from having the Crossing there and having so much traffic both passing near Dartford, but also backing up into Dartford when something goes wrong with the Crossing. Something goes wrong with the Crossing a lot, because it's massively over capacity. It was built for 50,000 vehicles a day, and it's now taking 100,000 vehicles a day.
When anything goes wrong, all of the Dartford circulatory system, the Dartford road system, just completely seizes up. The Lower Thames Crossing can't come soon enough. One thing I'm really pleased about with my first 20 months as the MP is that I've been able to, I think, raise and get noticed the voices of Dartford residents around the need for the Lower Thames Crossing. Absolute credit to the government, it's responded well. I was elected in July 2024, and by March 2025, the Development Consent Order was being approved by the Department for Transport, and Rachel Reeves was making a point of it.
We now need a private sector package to add to that. That will happen. Spades are already in the ground, and we're expecting the boring machine to actually build the tunnel. That's the point at which people will say, yes, the Lower Thames Crossing is definitely happening when they see the boring machine actually creating the tunnel. That's going to probably start 2028 with lots of the road being built around the river prior to that. I'm really pleased about that. International rail links for Kent has been a big campaign, and that's part of getting Dartford moving and making sure Ebbsfleet is properly an international station again. I think we've made good progress on that with Virgin winning the capacity at Temple Mills to run services down the St Pancras high-speed line. Another win which will definitely happen. We need to make sure it happens as quickly as possible. 

What is happening about the Swanscombe Hole?
A third strand to my activities around getting Dartford moving has been to try and make sure we get the money to rebuild Galley Hill Road. Swanscombe has hugely suffered from having a main artery running alongside it, taking everybody from Greenhithe and Dartford to Gravesend. That's been obviously sitting there broken since April 2023. I've been working incredibly hard to get government interested in this and...
Is government interested? 
Government is interested. What's brilliant is I managed to get our wonderful previous roads minister, Lillian Greenwood, down in September 2024. One of her earliest engagements as Roads Minister. She came down, saw Galley Hill Road, the state it was in, saw the effect it was having on Swanscombe residents with obviously large vehicles thundering through small streets and other cars diverted into Swanscombe. She said something needs to be done about this. At the point at which I invited her down, central government had washed its hands of the problem. Kent didn't have any money and was never likely to get any. Thames Water, who could have been partly responsible and that probably will play out as part of a litigation process going forward, haven't got any money, famously. Essentially, it needed to be a central government problem to fix. But central government didn't have any money for a distressed transport asset that should have been the responsibility of its local authority. She went back, and to her absolute credit, she went back to the treasury and said, we need money for distressed transport assets around the country, but with Galley Hill Road as a massive example. In the comprehensive spending review that followed, Rachel Reeves allocated a billion pounds for a Transport Structures Fund, as it's called. Colleagues in the Department for Transport now are busy working out how it's going to be allocated, but I'm pretty confident that we're going to have an announcement that this fund is now open, here's how local authorities can bid, and here's how previously distressed assets with no obvious solution in sight can now be fixed using central government money. I'm working closely with Kent. We put politics completely aside on these things. This is all about Swanscombe residents and our local infrastructure. I'm saying I've got the government to produce this money. It's now up to Kent to get the best business case into government so that we can get the 50 or 60 million pounds. That is a staggering amount of money to get a short stretch of road fixed. But such is the nature of the place the road is located. 
I'm saying Kent now has to step up and make sure that we get an allocation that can get Galley Hill Road up and running. Meanwhile, I need to be continuing to explain this to local residents. What I can say to people is we've had we've made real progress, and I'm confident that by the time I face the election electorate again in 2029, we will see the road open again or be pretty close to having the road open again.