ON Friday the City Council, together with the Chamber and the Glasgow Economic Leadership, published an action plan for growing Glasgow’s economy. This is not an easy time to be making plans for the future, but plan we surely must.
Twenty years ago Glasgow was a city in economic crisis. It was not alone. Cities built on heavy industry all across Europe and America faced similar crises. Donald Trump, in his controversial fashion, deployed the lingering impact of decline during his campaign, lamenting the condition of ‘those inner cities’.
But for many industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Turin or Glasgow there has been strong, positive change, drawing on research work in new technologies. Last week, for example, the University of Glasgow launched its fresh innovation space for quantum imaging - bringing companies like Thales, Horiba and MSquared Lasers together with its academic teams to develop, among other things, new cameras that use quantum technologies to take pictures of invisible gases or to see round corners.
Glasgow now has a portfolio of emerging industry specialisms as varied as precision medicine, satellite applications and opto-electronics - and business, academia and government are engaged in practical collaboration in assets like the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre to create new or improved products.
The city’s digital technology and creative industries sectors are the biggest in Scotland, our tourism industry is expanding as events like the Commonwealth Games and investments like the SSE Hydro result in thousands more leisure visitors adding to the city’s track record in attracting delegates to its conferencing business.
More traditional industries also remain robust, and we see exports from such as whisky and engineering processed every day through the Chamber’s international trade team.
The new plan sets ambitious targets - 50,000 net new jobs, a million additional tourists and the development of the UK’s first designated Innovation Districts are three examples.
But even more notable is the plan’s insistence that far too many Glaswegians are missing out on the benefits of the growth in our city’s industries. We know that is often through poor skills, physical disconnection and most especially through ill health.
The business community understand these problems fundamentally must be tackled. The damage done is not just to productivity statistics, but also to the trust in the economic model upon which our business success is based. Mr Trump’s election may have brought extra clout to that argument.
Stuart Patrick is chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
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