Barry McCarthy
I couldn’t help feeling that Scotland was a little like a ship lost at sea during a recent conference in Dundee on the country’s future in the global marketplace.
Leading economist Alan McGregor, director of Glasgow University’s training and employment research unit, said there were too many organisations trying to steer the country’s development. These included Scottish Enterprise with its 12 local enterprise companies, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, 32 local authorities – each with its own economic development department – and Careers Scotland, which improves workers’ productivity.
In between sessions at the Economic Development Association Scotland event, Professor McGregor told me that this confusing array of bodies had developed over the past 25 years and now the time had come for some form of rationalisation.
But how important is it for Scotland to get its ship on course?
With the growing influence of eastern European countries, which have a far cheaper labour force, along with the rapid expansion of China and India you could argue that the country’s position at the edge of Europe is becoming more remote. To hammer home this point, one speaker showed delegates a graph outlining the dangers ahead for the nation unless it reinvents itself.
David Wilkinson, managing director of the Inspired Leaders Network, presented a chart predicting how European cities would develop over the next five years. Places like Warsaw and Budapest had made huge progress and London and Manchester were well represented. But worryingly for Scotland no city north of the border featured as a high growth area on the graph.
So where does the country go from here? According to the experts, transport infrastructure needs to be vastly improved, education must be more closely linked to the workplace to increase GDP and more Scots need to learn other languages to improve foreign trade.
As the keynote speaker Hugh Aitken, vice president of worldwide customer fulfilment for US computer firm Sun Microsystems, put it: ‘Gone are the days of whisky, tartan and the bagpipes.’ Change is vital and the new impetus brought to the country by the Scottish National Party might well be what the country needs.
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I worked in Scotland in economic development and regeneration for nine years and did some work comparing Scotland with other UK and European nations and OECD nations. It's nice to see Alan McGregor’s name mentioned – he really knows in some detail what goes on in Scotland and the challenges ahead.
The main issue that seemed to drag down Scottish performance was the lack of a dynamic enterprise base. Scotland was very good at producing skills and graduates, but not enough companies to really use them.
You mention making education more linked to employment. However, what we found at Futureskills Scotland was that in general employers were not demanding enough of skills – that things like low productivity were demand-side problems rather than supply side.
Restructuring the likes of Scottish Enterprise etc – I think that it's due a restructuring and hard thinking about the priorities for its half a billion pound annual budget. But can we please have a reasonable debate on what are the key priorities and functions for any agencies – too often, we restructure as a solution, rather than thinking – let's define what should be done, and design the best agency(ies) in the world to deliver them.
Of course the new incumbents in the parliament might want to use restructuring as a symbol of change – but I’d like to see it doing in a constructive way rather than for its own sake.