IN this week's Monday interview, a Glasgow restaurant family has unveiled its first venture in the Scottish capital in a “spectacular” £1 billion location that has been set in place since the start of the year.
Danielle Fleming and sibling Ryan Dexter are taking on 50 staff for the new Salerno Pizza restaurant in the St James Quarter, a prominent site in the huge shopping, hospitality and leisure development next spring, after father Alan helped steer their ambitious project. They had just concluded the deal when the pandemic struck.
Lisa Thomson, of Purpose HR, says in Mark Williamson's SME Focus on Monday: "We have a niche focus on innovative and high-growth start-up and scale-up businesses in the technology, life sciences and engineering sectors. The technology sector in Scotland has seen a boom during lockdown, bucking economic trends. We are exceptionally proud of our client base which includes some of the most innovative, investor backed businesses in Scotland and beyond."
In Paul Sheerin's Business Voices column this week, he says: "Of the uncertainties that this year has thrown up, the one I expected to be clear on by now was Brexit ..."
Business Week: Sir Tom Hunter says Indyref2 inevitable as he criticises Brexit politicians
Official figures are expected to show a jump in borrowing by the UK Government this week.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will disclose the scale of borrowing in November and current state of the UK deficit in an update on Tuesday December 22.
In its previous update in October, the organisation revealed a decrease in monthly borrowing to £22.3 billion.
However, economists have predicted that greater economic support to deal with tightened coronavirus restrictions and lockdown measures will have piled more pressure on to public sector finances.
Analysts at Investec have forecast that public sector net borrowing will surge to £31.4 billion for November, about £26 billion higher than the same month last year.
"While the figures for this year look scary, the lion's share of the increase in borrowing relative to last year represents the direct cost of the various economic support measures," Investec analysts said.
They said that November's figures are set to be lifted by "a rise in the take-up of the furlough scheme", which was extended beyond October and will now continue until April 2021.
On Thursday, HMRC said another £3.4 billion worth of claims were made between November 15 and December 13, taking total claims to £46.4 billion and 9.9 million furloughed jobs.
Investec said that although the winding down of programmes is likely to reduce borrowing, they still expect the Chancellor to address concerns over fiscal sustainability with "a selected rise in taxes at some stage".
So far this financial year, borrowing has increased by an average of £24.2 billion compared with the same month in the previous financial year.
If borrowing continues at this pace, the UK's deficit would reach £346 billion over 2020-21 as a whole, although the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast £394 billion in its spending review, highlighting that borrowing could still accelerate.
Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "This all begs the question of how the deficit is to be funded.
"The Bank of England is doing its bit by holding interest rates at historic lows and manipulating Government bond yields via its quantitative easing scheme to try and cap them.
"As a result, the OBR actually expects interest costs on the national debt to drop as a percentage of GDP going forward."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here