01 Jun 2022
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
Being a positive and relentless champion for the growth of the city’s economy is written into the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce mission statement so I cannot deny the occasional urge to compete with our colleagues in other Scottish cities. If it’s a business inward investment, a government budget allocation, or the attraction of a major event then competition is often unavoidable but there are just as many times when co-operation is more rewarding.
Just such an occasion has been joint work with Edinburgh and Aberdeen Chambers of Commerce on the publication last week of Scotland’s Urban Age 2022, sponsored by Brodies and Anderson Anderson Brown (AAB). Researched and written by an independent team led by Brian Evans, Professor of Urbanism and Landscape at the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh School of Architecture, the review asks what the pandemic has done to the role of Scotland’s largest three cities. It builds on work published in 2018 which explored how important the three cities are to Scotland’s economy and the very different journeys that each city has been on. Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh (the ‘AGE’ cities) together with their city regions count for over 70% of Scotland’s jobs and residents.
The report takes the two basic propositions that the world’s population will increasingly live in cities and those cities are evolving from industrial centres to hubs for knowledge intensive business and applies them to the AGE cities. The pandemic has not changed these propositions although hybrid working may be challenging the relative importance of proximity where knowledge businesses group together in a city to boost productivity and innovation.
It is certainly true in Glasgow’s case that workers have not quickly returned to our city centre but by the very definition of ’hybrid’, employers are expecting at least some time to be spent in the city centre office and our local evidence shows demand for high quality new offices remaining strong.
The report sets out some scenarios that make it clear that we don’t yet know how sustained home working will be but sides with the view that returning to pre-pandemic normality looks unlikely. That has serious implications for urban systems not least in transport where the financial viability of existing public networks in rail, bus and, in Glasgow, the underground needs much better debate than we are currently getting.
Cities across the world are usually more economically productive than their national averages. In the UK, especially for our larger cities, this is not the case and in Scotland only Edinburgh bucks the trend. The report points to two main issues; too many unskilled workers and the dominance of London and the South East. Glasgow’s own record on producing a strong pipeline of very highly qualified citizens has long been accompanied by an unusually high percentage with no qualifications whatsoever.
I don’t remember anyone predicting two years ago that we would now have such a tight labour market with employers crying out for staff in such diverse industries as engineering and hospitality. For at least three decades Glasgow has had a very high economic inactivity rate with whole neighbourhoods blighted by worklessness. If ever there was a time for tackling that issue it is now and we may go some way to achieving our productivity goals at the same time.
As regards to London’s dominance, that is one of the reasons why the UK government has chosen to make Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham Innovation Accelerators as part of a Levelling Up drive to spread research and development spending more evenly across the country. This must only be the beginning of a process aiming for greater business investment in research and development and hundreds of ambitious new companies clustering, perhaps, around our three innovation districts.
But perhaps the most heartfelt plea in the report is for a greater devolution of powers and resources to our cities and city regions. This is one common cause that constantly brings our three city Chambers of Commerce together.
This article was first published in The Herald on Wednesday 1 June 2022
