28 Jul 2022
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive, Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
When the Finance Cabinet Secretary Kate Forbes was launching the National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET) back at the beginning of March she wrote that there had been one clear message she had absorbed. ‘As a country we will be judged on the outcomes we deliver, not the strategy we write’, she stated.
That comment chimed with feedback I had been receiving from Glasgow Chamber members for some time. We had consulted our members not just on the Scottish Government’s NSET but also the second Scottish Transport Priorities Review, the draft National Planning Framework, a national aviation strategy and the UK government’s Levelling Up White Paper. At a more local level we had a regional economic strategy as well as net zero, transport and economic strategies for the city itself.
All of these are important plans shaping our response to both the pandemic and the climate crisis but the sense of members being caught in a blizzard of policy making was tangible. As a consequence, the Chamber’s governing council discussed and agreed a short list of ten outcomes they felt would signal progress in delivering economic change in the city.
Now that Ms Forbes has announced a delivery board to hold all partners to account for the implementation of her National Strategy, I would like to share these outcomes.
Amongst the most immediate outcomes is the recovery of Glasgow’s city centre. Without our city centre, Glasgow’s thirty-year economic transformation would have been all but impossible. It has played its role as a generator of increasingly high value employment notably through the success of the International Financial Services District but also as the stage for so much of Scotland’s creative and cultural life.
It is one national asset that has been badly damaged by the pandemic, with a profoundly battered Sauchiehall Street the clearest symbol of all that has been lost. The Chamber sought and jointly chairs with Councillor Angus Millar the City Centre Taskforce and there are recommendations from its work to be delivered that would help find new uses for all those empty shop units and for the many vacant upper story offices in the traditional central business district.
Securing substantial private sector investment is essential and two of the most important opportunities for shaping a new city centre are the proposals from Sovereign Centros for the St. Enoch Centre and from Landsec for Buchanan Galleries. Glasgow City Council’s fresh masterplan for Sauchiehall, Argyle and Buchanan Street is underway and the next phases of the Avenues project, radically improving the attractiveness of several major streets, are due relatively soon.
There is a positive future for our city centre with more housing, more leisure and family attractions and more investment in modern workplaces but it needs some co-ordinated intervention to speed up the process.
Second up is Glasgow Airport, the city’s primary link to overseas markets in tourism, trade and inward investment. The Airport pre-pandemic was shipping a quarter of Scotland’s exports and the city centre’s hotel sector depends on the airport to bring in the overseas visitors that the city was successfully attracting before the pandemic struck. Resurrecting at short notice an aviation industry that was almost completely shut down for two years has obviously been difficult but, for the Chamber, the recovery of both the direct links to European and American markets and the frequency of connections to the major hubs is vital. Targeted route development funding and co-ordinated national and local marketing campaigns would help the Airport team recover lost business.
The Scottish Events Campus is the third asset that was significantly affected by the pandemic not least in becoming a frontline facility for vaccination. The SEC is roaring back into life with a programme of events, many of which were postponed until after the crisis had passed. With COP26 showing the scale of events the SEC can handle and the manifest success of the Hydro investment, now is the time to confirm the funding for the SEC’s expansion plans.
Fourth is Glasgow’s re-emergence as a centre for scientific discovery and technological innovation which received a boost from the UK Government’s designation of the city as an Innovation Accelerator under the Levelling Up White Paper. Research strengths in advanced manufacturing, space, photonics, nanofabrication and quantum technologies, in precision medicine, fintech and renewables are all opportunities that can help shape the city’s economic future. Glasgow has three innovation districts at varying stages of development, and we can measure their success by the emergence of clusters of new technology companies and growth in investment by business in research and development. Effective delivery of those innovation districts will be as important to the city’s future jobs as the International Financial Services District was for the previous twenty years.
Fifth is the recovery of overseas tourism using the successful delivery of the very first UCI World Cycling Championships in 2023 as a milestone event. This is a new gathering of all cycling disciplines under one championship banner and Glasgow has the experience to make it work.
Sixth is the marine industry including shipbuilding, ship repair, Glasgow’s substantial shipping industry and its excellent record in marine education. With the support of the Scottish Government’s Clyde Mission, Clyde Maritime is an industry led initiative to help shipbuilding and ship repair grow. Overcoming industry skills shortages will be the initial task.
Clyde Maritime is a tangible project for bringing more life back to the River Clyde and so too is the Chamber’s seventh deliverable, the Clyde Green Freeport bid which was submitted in June offering tax advantages to commercial and industrial activity all along the river front.
The eighth outcome would be a fresh regional skills campaign responding to the skills shortages across other sectors as diverse as engineering, transport and hospitality and with a special emphasis on the flexible role of the college sector in helping bring more Glaswegians out of the poverty of economic inactivity and into the plentiful job opportunities in the city. This is a rare moment in Glasgow’s recent economic history.
The ninth deliverable outcome is one of the most stretching and most crucial. Glasgow has to build on its role in COP 26 by achieving net zero by 2030 and the Chamber sits right behind the City Council’s Green Investment Prospectus. The prospectus itself has an extensive set of projects including the retrofitting of domestic heating systems and radical improvements in the public transport network. Many of the projects need private capital to make them happen.
The final deliverable the Chamber is backing is the Clyde Metro, which is included in the Scottish Government’s priorities for transport investment and essential if we are to encourage a permanent shift from private vehicles and on to public transport. It will also finally deliver on a long-term goal for the Chamber by creating a rail connection between the Airport and the City Centre.
Delivering all of these in the context of tight public finances is no easy task and rather reinforces the importance of getting the private sector wholly involved. The Chamber is committed to supporting each of these outcomes and as quickly as possible.
