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Building Better Cities: Delivering Growth and Opportunities
ABERDEEN
Recent experience
Aberdeen has cemented its presence as the oil capital of Europe. The recent history of the city-region is one of success, with high employment, high earnings and excellent "quality of life". Aberdeen's experience is well documented by the Aberdeen futures project.
Pockets of deprivation are isolated, but deep. Aberdeen's success has also been Scotland's gain through multiplier effects for both incomes and employment, with GDP over 30% above the Scottish average and above full employment. Meanwhile, pressures on the fish-processing and food sectors will pose significant challenges for the wider city-region.
Today's success may constrain success in the future. High house prices and constraints on the availability of business locations and land, traffic congestion, and skill shortages in a near full employment economy each act as a disincentive to locate and grow businesses in Aberdeen. These concerns look likely to persist with a high level of projected traffic growth and declining population.
Key challenges
While Aberdeen starts from a high base, its growth in recent years has lagged the rest of Scotland. Its success is narrowly based on oil and gas, which in itself is a cyclical industry. Aberdeen has long recognised this and is well placed to achieve the necessary diversification response - with a strong research base, a strong service sector in terms of software and business advice, and a higher business startrate than the average for Scotland.
Short-term priorities
Key requirements are:
- Rectifying skill shortages. Aberdeen is unlikely to be able to generate all the required skills locally. Its population is projected to fall, so it needs to do better at attracting and retaining the skilled and entrepreneurial, in what is a competitive international market for talent. This in turn requires Aberdeen to be a place that mobile skilled professionals and industries want to move to. The challenges here are building a sense of place (a City "buzz") through strategic cultural investment;
- Improved transport infrastructure, and increasing the availability of high quality business locations for business expansion/development;
- Building on measures to maintain and extend the prosperity of the UK oil and gas industry especially through the application of new technology to the industry; and further development of research and development and the use of new technology in the industry holds the key to extending the prosperity of the sector.
Longer-term directions
In the longer term, Aberdeen will need to adapt to the gradual maturing of the UK oil and gas sector. Looking beyond the UK oil and gas industry will be based on:
- internationalisation of existing oil and gas firms into global oil and gas industry, thereby building on the knowledge and expertise gained here;
- diversification into new industries.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS
- City Growth Fund will provide city with 11.5m over 3 years;
- Addressing Aberdeen's transport problems is one of the Executive's 10 national transport priorities. A transport strategy for the North-East is being developed, including the appraisal of the case for an Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route;
- New Intermediary Technology Institute on Energy to help strengthen the energy sectors technology base;
- "Quality of Life" initiative worth 3.6m in 2002/03 to help improve the quality of people's everyday lives. Further 6.7m allocated in the Scottish Budget over 3 years.
DETAILED ACHIEVEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS
- Increased investment in Aberdeen and Robert Gordon Universities up 24% since 1999 to 83m;
- Nearly 1,300 trainees on Skillseekers, Modern Apprenticeships and Training for Work courses;
- Scottish Enterprise Grampian and Aberdeen City Council assessing case for a Development Company;
- 9.3m for Park and Ride and bus priority measures in and around Aberdeen;
- Nearly 1m to improve transport in the Dyce area; examining future options for rail links to Aberdeen in the Scottish Strategic Rail Study;
- 0.8m for investment in walking, cycling and safer streets projects over the 4 years to 2003-04;
- Food Standards Agency Scotland set up in Aberdeen, bringing in 40 civil service jobs;
- CCTV systems to fight crime in known "hot spots";
- Providing community safety partnership grants of nearly 207,000 to help Aberdeen develop local solutions to local crime problems;
- State-of-the-art facilities at the Aberdeen Children's Hospital; worth 25m, part of the largest hospital building programme in NHS history;
- Since 1999, Communities Scotland has supported 512 units of affordable housing in Aberdeen to help regenerate disadvantaged communities and provide housing for those with particular needs; worth 17m;
- Since 1999, over 6,000 houses in the city have benefited from Warm Deal and Central Heating Programmes;
- Over 4.7m of Social Inclusion Partnership funding committed to deprived areas of Aberdeen from 1999 to 2004;
- A total of 18m Lottery funding has gone to Aberdeen City since 1993 including an award of almost 2m by the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Funding towards the 4.5m extension to Her Majesty's Theatre;
- Sporting facilities for young people and for the community in general, through the 3m New Opportunities Fund PE & Sport programme.
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