06 Jul 2022
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of 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. Over two columns I will share these outcomes now that Ms Forbes has announced a delivery board to hold all partners to account for the implementation of her National Strategy.
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 coordinated 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 coordinated 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.
This article was first published in The Herald on Wednesday 6 July 2022
