It’s what Scottish creative industries have been demanding for years: a major film studio to put Scotland on the global movie-making map that acts as a magnet for international talent and investment.
Several attempts have been made in the past, usually with Sir Sean Connery’s name attached, most notably the partnership with Sony in 1998 on land owned by Sir David Murray at the Edinburgh end of the M8.
Connery subsequently blamed the-then Labour government for killing the project because of his support for the SNP, but more likely was Edinburgh City Council’s suspicion that the whole thing was a Trojan Horse to allow his pal Sir David to turn green-belt land into a housing estate.
Eighteen years later and Scotland is still without a sound stage capable of handling big budget productions, although three schemes are at different stages of development: Cumbernauld, Dundee and Straiton, an area once proposed as a new home for Hibernian FC just off the Edinburgh city by-pass.
Cumbernauld, where the Jacobean time-travel TV hit Outlander was filmed, has until now been the choice of Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, with the promise of Scottish Government cash to get the action rolling.
Dundee seems far behind, but Pentland Studios (PSL) has been discussing its plan for a £140 million complex on 86 acres between Loanhead and Lothianburn with Midlothian Council for more than two years and submitted a formal planning application in May.
Led by movie production heavyweights, PSL finally ran out of patience last month at the lack of progress and asked the Scottish Government to intervene, which it refused to do only last week.
But the Government has just performed a James Bond-style hand-brake turn and taken it out of the local authority’s hands because “the potential economic and cultural benefits” are “an issue of national importance”.
If a minister belatedly saw what was happening and pulled rank, in a week when it was claimed that Scottish public sector debt could hit £50 billion, no wonder.
Cumbernauld will need an unspecified Government subsidy that will almost certainly run into seven figures while funding for PSL is entirely private.
The Scottish Government says the Cumbernauld plan is at a “critical stage” but, with debt of that scale, the stage should be the final one to kill it off in favour of a project thath does not require one penny of taxpayers’ money.
But wait a minute. Like the Murray land at Gogar where the Sony studio was to have been, the Straiton site is green belt. Surely nothing can be built on this rural bulkwark against the sprawl of greater Edinburgh?
Not if the Damhead Community Council has anything to do with it, except the location is between the Bilston industrial estate and the by-pass, next to Ikea, Costco and the Straiton retail park. Despite the nearby Pentland Hills, the Trossachs this is not.
What makes Midlothian Council’s dithering all the more mystifying is the high probability that it was about to be taken out of the green belt in the revised local plan anyway. Like Edinburgh Council’s non-decision about the Leith Walk tram line completion, it smacks of an attempt to kick the scheme way beyond the election.
Government intervention under such circumstances usually, but not always, means it is minded to give the go-ahead and to block something as potentially important as an international film studio would be some statement of ambition or lack of it.
In Dunblane it should also give Judy Murray some encouragement as she considers whether to appeal against Stirling Council’s decision to throw out her sports centre at Park of Keir, another facility many regard as of potential national importance.
Meanwhile, her namesake Sir David’s plan for the old film lot plot is the £1bn Garden District project which sits alongside the £700m International Business Gateway plan revealed this week for land he also owns at Edinburgh Airport. It could arguably be the capital’s most significant expansion since the New Town.
Now shorn of film studios or a new sports stadium, the Garden District is primarily a housing scheme but it’s still green belt and environmental campaigners have vowed to defeat it.
They will almost certainly have their day tomorrow when Edinburgh councillors throw out the Royal High School hotel, but for the sake of the economic health of the East of Scotland plans such as the Garden Village, International Business Gateway and Pentland Studios are schemes whose days are arriving.
As Finance Secretary John Swinney struggles with an economy in which oil revenues are vanishing, renewable energy isn’t delivering and debt is soaring, he needs all the growth he can get.
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