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Table scraps are not enough

Table scraps are not enough

Zero, zilch, zip, nowt, nada, nothing.

That, incredibly, is the number of jobs created through inward investment over the past two years in the whole of Perth and Kinross.

By those standards, Angus was in gravy but it still benefited from just 35 new roles between 2013 and 2015.

Dundee fared slightly better with 112 and Fife was top scoring in Courier Country with a respectable 405.

But compare and contrast that figure with the 3,363 jobs created in Glasgow in the same period and it certainly looks like the north east is getting a raw deal.

The man behind the statistics, employment expert and former Scottish Enterprise senior director Denis Taylor, certainly thinks that is the case.

But the national enterprise agency was quick to defend itself, saying it had by no means washed its hands of the area in favour of the central belt.

It pointed to the Government cash-backed V&A museum development and the wider Dundee waterfront development as two future drivers and said inward investment generated £134.9 million of activity in Tayside and Fife last year.

SE also said inward investment created or safeguarded 1,677 jobs in the process.

On the face of it that sounds good but taking into account safeguarded roles, or in other words jobs that already exist, is the equivalent of comparing apples and pears.

And from where I am standing, the performance locally isn’t good enough anyway.

That’s not an assessment simply based on raw statistics, that is a viewpoint arrived at after years of observing the local business scene.

Under SE’s old structure, its Tayside regional operation maintained a high profile and did everything it could to be seen to be banging the local business drum.

It was by no means a perfect organisation I don’t know of one that is but it was open and accessible and appeared to have the best interests of the region at its heart.

While SE still has an office at Greenmarket in Dundee and does some terrific behind-the-scenes work with local businesses, I have long felt that its real corporate focus now lies elsewhere.

And in economically stressed times such as we have seen that just makes sense.

From a bald perspective, the central belt with its better infrastructure, bigger companies and greater concentration of talent is certainly more likely to provide greater bang for the taxpayer buck than is Dundee, Dingwall or Drummore.

I understand that major inward investors often target their cash at major conurbations and I’ll happily concede that corralling and managing a multi-faceted beast like inward investment is no mean feat.

But if Scotland is to deliver a better future for its citizens then all parts of the country have to be taken along for the ride not just the central belt.

When I first looked at the Taylor analysis of inward investment impact, I was neither shocked nor surprised that the north east was lagging so far behind.

That tells its own story and for SE there is much to be done to convince people like me they really are fighting Tayside and Fife’s corner.

It is simply not acceptable for Scotland’s fourth city, and the wider region that feeds from it, to be left begging for scraps from the table.