The head of the Government’s Thames Gateway regeneration scheme has left after just a year in the post.

Judith Armitt’s departure as the project’s chief executive comes less than two weeks after the Prime Minister announced a £9 billion “delivery plan” which he said would make the area a global leader in environmentally-friendly economic development.

The Thames Gatetway scheme, intended to provide 160,000 homes and 225,000 jobs by 2016 along a 40-mile corridor of East London, north Kent and south Essex, is central to Mr Brown’s plans for a huge expansion in England’s housing stock.

But there have been frustrations at its slow progress. Last month the Commons Public Accounts Committee said that the Department for Communities and Local Government was “manifestly not up to the job” of leading the regeneration project, which is Europe’s largest. The project, said Edward Leigh, chairman of the committee, could become a “public spending calamity” if the department did not vastly improve its management.

Yesterday the department’s Permanent Secretary, Peter Housden, announced that Joe Montgomery, 46, a senior official there, was taking over responsibility for the Thames Gateway executive. Mr Housden said in a letter to the project’s “stakeholders”: “Following the successful launch of the Thames Gateway delivery plan a fortnight ago, we are now discussing Judith Armitt’s next move. Judith has made a tremendous contribution to the progress we have seen in the Gateway.”

Spokesmen for the department said that it never commented on individual members of staff. But a report on the development trade website building.co. uk suggested that Ms Armitt, 54, who took up the post late last year, had clashed with Yvette Cooper, the Housing Minister, over the delivery plan.

An unnamed senior Thames Gateway source was quoted as saying: “It has been a fiasco. Yvette is unhappy. The plans from a week ago had to be torn up.”

Eric Pickles, the Shadow Local Government Secretary, said: “This is yet more evidence that the Government’s handling of the important Thames Gateway has been a shambles.”

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