WITH the COP26 climate change summit just weeks away the outlook for Glasgow post-Covid is much more positive, the chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce told The Go Radio Business Show with Hunter & Haughey.

Stuart Patrick pointed to the many conference fringe activities beginning to take shape including the Chamber’s own Climate Chamber Mission, taking place in City of Glasgow College and bringing together over 100 international companies with local businesses to explore trading links with a green economy theme.

Other fringe events, he said, were scheduled to be held in venues including the Glasgow Science Centre, Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, universities and the ScottishPower headquarters.

Also encouraging, Mr Patrick noted, was the unveiling of Glasgow City Council’s Greenprint for Investment, a £30 billion plan to transform Glasgow into a net-zero city by 2030. However, he said that while some projects were complex and at the relatively early feasibility study stage – revived plans for a regional metro system, for example – others were more advanced.

These include the expansion of the Scottish Event Campus, the location for COP26, which is on track to become one of the most sustainable and competitive conference and exhibition centres in the world.

But despite the outlook for Glasgow being more positive, Mr Patrick warned that the situation for those businesses relying on office workers returning to the city centre remains “grim”, at least in the short term.

“There is no end date in sight for the First Minister’s call for homeworking as the default,” he said. “We are falling further behind other UK cities. We need the Scottish Government to give us some hope of when the homeworking policy will be dropped or even modified.”