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Plenary, 10 Feb 2000

10 Feb 2000 · S1 · Plenary

Item of business

Scottish Enterprise

Johnston, Nick Con Mid Scotland and Fife Watch on SPTV

This morning, I want to talk about coincidences. A coincidence is a chance happening or, as Louis Pasteur put it:

"Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind."

Or, as Francis Bacon said:

"In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance."

Or, to paraphrase Paul Simon, coincidence is too good to leave to chance.

The Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning is, by coincidence, the weighty voice today. After nearly nine months of procrastination, it has taken a Conservative motion, lodged by a humble junior spokesman, to bring forth a response from our minister. Notwithstanding the fine work done by the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee in its inquiry into support at local level, and notwithstanding the welcome, if overdue, announcement of a consultation on the national economic strategy, we need to fundamentally revisit the provision of economic development in Scotland.

For many months, the Conservatives have been campaigning for a radical overhaul of the enterprise network. When Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise were first introduced 10 years ago, it was made clear that they served as a framework for an economic development system which had a finite lifespan of 10 years maximum. As we are only too aware, the pace of change over the past decade has accelerated way beyond our wildest imagination. Consequently, the sell-by date of the Scottish Enterprise and HIE structure fell well short of the original expected 10-year lifespan.

Apart from the growing criticism from and disenchantment felt by the business community about Scottish Enterprise's output and deliveries to them over the past two years, if further proof were needed that the current design was starting to fail Scotland, one only has to look at SE's consultative document, "A New Strategy for the Scottish Enterprise Network", to confirm the growing anxiety that many of us have felt about SE's ability to deliver for Scotland as we approached the first decade of the new millennium.

By its own hand, Scottish Enterprise recognised Scotland's relatively low level of entrepreneurial activity and identified the relatively low number of companies competing at a low level. Scottish Enterprise pointed out that Scotland created fewer large global companies than we should expect, given its population.

The list of failures and inadequacies grew ever more depressing, with low levels of investment in corporate research, a continued fall in school education performance, growth in many of the fast-growing tradeable services such as computing, consultancy and business services below the UK average, and a large stock of workers with out-of-date skills or with a low level of skills.

The picture portrayed was not just sad but seriously worrying if Scotland was to survive and grow in an increasingly competitive world economy. For months, we have urged the Executive to tackle the problem of Scotland's slippage in those vital areas of economic activity and to deal with them with a greater sense of

urgency and importance than it seems willing to do.

Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise were success stories for many years and were the ideas for their time. Scottish Enterprise replaced the Scottish Development Agency, which was seen as the economic machine of the 1980s, as Scottish Enterprise was for the 1990s. Due to the pace of change, we are in need of another radical overhaul.

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Plenary, 10 Feb 2000

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