Hansard

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate. I want to focus on the challenges for the Fife region of being between two of Scotland’s largest cities—Dundee and Edinburgh—and the opportunities that come with that as well. First, though, I associate myself with Joe FitzPatrick’s comments about Perth’s attempt to achieve city status, which I hope happens over the coming months or years. That would be good not just for the people of Perth but for those in the surrounding area.

The west Fife town of Dunfermline’s closeness to Edinburgh brings both opportunities and challenges. The history of the area shows that, over the years, it has moved from mining work to defence work to electronics. The people of Fife have had to deal with that and with demographic changes over that time. It has been difficult, because people have had to acquire new skills, unemployment has fluctuated and people have had to move into new areas. However, the area’s closeness to the city region of Edinburgh has brought benefits. For example, following the closure of the naval base at Rosyth dockyard in 1995 and the departure from the area of all the naval families, we saw growth in the Dunfermline and west Fife area from people who came there to live and work.

The downside to that—this relates to sustainability, which we have touched on—is that although people come to live in an area, they often work elsewhere. For example, many people live in south Fife but work in Edinburgh and the Lothians. They put a lot of stress on the Forth road crossing and on public transport links. Even with the best intentions of growing a population and making a place more effective for people to live in, with communities being built around the city regions, major planning challenges are sometimes thrown up.

Another specific issue about Dunfermline that worries me greatly is that the naval families who left used the town centre and shopped there frequently but, as a result of the expansion of the town, many people have moved into the eastern part of the town and the town centre is now on the western periphery. That brings huge challenges because the area is not getting the benefit of people living there and using local shops and businesses. That kind of situation is a challenge for us as parliamentarians, because we must ensure that planning frameworks are about serving communities rather than about deciding the best place to put houses on any land that might be available.

The cities document sets out a number of interesting points, particularly on capital investment. The public sector also has a wider role—for example, it can set employment standards.

Scotland has had quite a lot of inward investment over the years. Some forms of that have been better than others. Companies such as Chunghwa Picture Tubes and Motorola came for a period and then moved to low-wage economies. Recently, Amazon has come to Fife. I hope that it will stay there for a period and grow its company and that the quality of the employment will grow, too. In any public sector investment in areas to bring in such companies, we must encourage high-quality employment practice as much as we can and we must attract companies that take a longer-term view and which will stay as long as they can for the benefit of a community.

A wider issue relates to the public sector. Many people who live in and around Fife get the benefit of working in the public sector in Dundee or Edinburgh, because Fife is quite close to those places. The Scottish Trades Union Congress reported this week that there is stress and pressure on public sector jobs, and a prediction of 70,000 job losses has been made. I hope that the Scottish Government is in a position to look at how we ensure that people are mobile across the public sector and not just within sections of the public sector. The issue is not just mobility within the national health service but how we move people from the NHS to local government, between local authorities and into other parts of the public sector.

When we face job losses, there will be people who want to leave—people who are of a certain age or who want to take their career in a different direction—but there will also be people who want to stay and work in the public sector, because they have the public service ethos. We in the Scottish Parliament should find a mechanism, or the Scottish Government should develop a mechanism, to ensure mobility across the public sector, which would ensure that people stayed in work and could perhaps work in their own locality.

Finally, I will talk about the sustainability of city regions. Fife and many other parts of the country could have a jobs bonanza as a result of renewable energy. Offshore wind is the big issue in Fife just now—many companies are looking closely at investing in Fife because of that. When people are employed for such work, we must have the infrastructure in Fife. I would hate to see us having to import labour or bring people from other parts of the UK or Scotland to work in Fife. Conversely, people from Fife might have to move to other parts of the country to work in renewable energy. That is a huge challenge.

The issue is how we plan the next five to 10 years. We have a difficult economic situation to deal with, but I believe that there is huge potential, particularly if we get the reindustrialisation of Scotland right in the future. I welcome the document and the collaborative approach that has been taken across the chamber to ensure that the document succeeds and delivers for our cities and regions.

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