The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Buckle up, Orcadians... you might be in for a bumpy ride
The Courier Business Awards in 2017 were, as I believe the kids are saying these days, lit.
It wasn’t just that the corks kept popping; that the good folk of Tayside and Fife demonstrated an eagerness, quite in contrast to my former neighbours in Aberdeenshire, to hit the dance floor as the first chord struck, and to not quit until the last band member had packed his instrument case into the back of the van; nor even that our host Gyles Brandreth was every bit as genial and entertaining in a dinner suit on an October night in Dundee as he is in a novelty jumper rearranging the consonants in Dictionary Corner.
The V&A was just months away from completion and the suddenly confident city was popping up on every magazine and website’s “must visit” lists for the year ahead. Minecraft developer Chris Van der Kuyl was presented with the outstanding contribution award and gave a moving and inspiring speech about his hometown and the path it had clambered, often uphill and rocky, to earn its newfound place in the sun.
If you could have bottled and sold the atmosphere in the Apex Hotel marquee that night you’d have been a shoo-in for every entrepreneurship gong going.
It was another of the speeches that has stuck in my mind though. I’m paraphrasing here – blame the prosecco – but the gist of it was “if you think this feels good, buckle up folks because you ain’t seen nothing yet”.
The Tay Cities Deal, we were assured, was shaping up to be something truly transformational: a once-in-many-generations opportunity, led by a partnership of local and national governments and local business and education institutions, to pump millions into the economies on either side of the river and change the face of the region.
I remember the day a year later when they announced the heads of terms agreement had been signed by civic leaders in Perth. The newsroom was abuzz as we started to flesh out the details of what was being promised and soak up reaction from the great and the good. It was one of those long but genuinely exciting days that don’t come along very often, when you sense you’re playing a tiny part in something with the potential to be momentous, because for once it looked like the reality might actually live up to the hype.
Setting aside the numbers – a £700 million programme designed to create in excess of 6,000 jobs – it was remarkable in its scope and ambition.
A £37m investment in tourism and culture, an aviation academy, £25m towards drug discovery and surgical research, an international barley hub at Invergowrie, a cyber security centre of excellence and the country’s first forensic science research centre in Dundee, a £10m Perth City Transformation project, an entrepreneurial hub on Dundee’s waterfront, a clean energy storage and enterprise hub on the site of the Eden Campus of St Andrews University at Guardbridge, a Perth bus and rail interchange project, a £9.5m investment in Dundee Airport... you get the picture.
And now here we are. Almost two years on and not only are our grand plans still on the drawing board, the cheque is still in the post. The deal has yet to be signed off, despite repeated calls, and the most recent plea to the chancellor signed by the leaders of all four councils last month has been met with, in the words of Dundee’s John Alexander, “radio silence”.
Now I’m a tolerant soul. It’s a curse in a column writer. There’s been a pandemic, great minds have probably been occupied elsewhere. But I’m also
pathologically disorganised and an arch procrastinator and I know when I move on to the next job before I’ve finished the current one, the best I can hope for is that I might finally get round to completing both of them, and a few others besides, in a less satisfactory fashion than if I’d just applied a bit of focus and given each one my full attention.
So you’ll forgive me if I don’t raise a glass just yet to the £100m growth deal for the islands announced ahead of Boris Johnson’s visit to Orkney this week, just days after a similar £90m package was confirmed for Falkirk.
It had been hoped the prime minister might also use his whistle-stop trip north of the border to reignite the Tay
Cities deal process. Instead we had a Westminster source accusing the SNP of using the issue as a “political football” while the PM juggled with crabs and toasted the strength of the union.
The same day, we announced almost 100 more redundancies at two Dundee companies. It’s becoming a regular occurrence as the impact of Covid-19 sinks in and it underlines why it’s more important than ever that the Tay Cities Deal funding is unlocked.
So congratulations on the growth deal, Orkney. I dare say you’ll be needing it in the years ahead every bit as much as we will here. But I wouldn’t strike up the band just yet, you might be in for a long wait.