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Building Better Cities: Delivering Growth and Opportunities

GLASGOW

Recent experience

Employment growth in Glasgow has out-performed all the cities over the last 5 years. The significant service sector growth in the dynamic city centre, driven by commercial and retail sectors, and underpinned by extensive investment in the public realm, is more than offsetting decline in manufacturing. But the legacy of industrial change remains large. Glasgow remains a dual city: simultaneously witnessing strong growth and acting as the centre of gravity for the West of Scotland, while dealing with the legacy of decline. Prosperity co-exists with extensive and deeply rooted areas of social exclusion, characterised by low skills and low aspirations, which are largely disconnected from growth areas in the city.

Key challenges

Promoting further growth, while ensuring that prosperity is widened and shared is the key challenge. Strong growth in the knowledge economy and the service sector provide the engine of growth. For this to be sustained, further improvements will be required to the links with Glasgow's excellent research and learning institutions, its strong tourism presence and business facilities.

Under utilised people/assets co-exist with tight labour market/shortages of readily developable land. There is large backlog of physical dereliction - 9% of the land area of Glasgow is either derelict or vacant. Glasgow must regenerate vacant and derelict land throughout the city and deliver family housing, jobs and business infrastructure. Economic activity rates are amongst the lowest in the UK. For Glasgow to have the same rate of employment as Scotland as a whole would require over 50,000 new jobs; but over 40% of those not in work in Glasgow have no qualifications.

Short-term priorities

Key requirements are:

• Widening economic successes to address deep social deprivation. There are major opportunities for regeneration and reconstruction with the M74 Extension, the Housing Stock Transfer and the Schools PPP. The priority is to ensure labour and land markets can respond to this huge boost to the economy, to ensure the benefits are maximised well beyond the construction phases;
• Building capabilities and skills to respond to economic opportunities. Pressures of growth, side by side with deprivation, provide challenges - skill shortages co-exist beside pockets of unemployment and low economic activity, in a city with an extensive learning sector. This represents a huge policy opportunity for Glasgow;
• Improving governance and partnership working. Any response is complicated by the fragmented governance structures at city-region level, and a sense of partnership overload.

Longer-term directions

Glasgow has, since the early 1990s, reinvented itself on its own terms, with growth in employment and investment. This will need to continue - the deeply rooted social problems in Glasgow represent both the biggest challenge in building a better Scotland, and the biggest opportunity. Success would in itself bring new issues to be tackled - Glasgow's low level of car ownership is likely to converge with the Scottish average as Glasgow prospers, bringing with it increasing strain on the transport system.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS

• City Growth Fund will provide city with 40.1m over 3 years;
• Accelerating land renewal, through additional 6m in 2004-05 and 10m in 2005-06 for Glasgow and North Lanarkshire;
• Extending and completing the M74 Motorway at a cost of 214m - due to open in 2008;
• Through the Housing Stock Transfer 80,000 Glasgow council tenants will transfer to community ownership and benefit from 1.6bn over the next 10 years to make their homes warm and dry;
• All 29 secondary schools in Glasgow have been replaced or refurbished, and in some cases extended, in a 230m PPP benefiting all 30,000 of the city's secondary pupils;
• Major 25m initiative by Scottish Enterprise to address construction skills needs in Glasgow;
• New Intermediary Technology Institute for Communications and Digital Media will help strengthen the sectors' technology base;
• Major investment of 700m over 10 years in Glasgow's health infrastructure;
• Scottish Executive Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Department relocated to Glasgow, bringing 160 posts to the city;
• Working together to realise an ambitious vision for the Upper Clyde, from Glasgow Green to the Erskine Bridge, through the Clyde Waterfront Working Group;
• "Quality of Life" initiative, worth 12.5m this year to help improve the quality of people's everyday lives. Further 23.2m allocated in the Scottish Budget over 3 years;
• Replacing outdated homeless hostels in Glasgow;
• Intervening early to improve the diets of Glasgow's children, by working to provide healthy nutritious food in schools.

DETAILED ACHIEVEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS

• Support for creative media, biotechnology, optoelectronics and tourism clusters in Glasgow through Scottish Enterprise;
• Over 9m to support over 5,000 trainees on Skillseekers, Modern Apprenticeships and Training for Work courses; over 3m Training for Work this year to provide 1,300 work-related training opportunities;
• Action Teams for Jobs set up in Glasgow to increase employment rates amongst disadvantaged groups within high employment areas;
• 11,000 more vocational students at Glasgow colleges since 1999;
• Increased investment in Glasgow, Strathclyde, Glasgow Caledonian Universities, RSAMB and Glasgow School of Art - up by 21% to 234m since 1999;
• Executive is working with Glasgow to address transport challenges in Glasgow;
• Assessing, through Scottish Enterprise and local authorities, how the investment in the M74 can be used to turn the area into a sought after city location and which can secure accelerated economic and social development;
• 23m upgrade of the A8 between Baillieston and Newhouse under way;
• Offering support to the 118m PPP contract for the M77 and the Glasgow Southern Orbital Road;
• Putting in place a rail link to Glasgow Airport is one of Executive's 10 national transport priorities - the Executive is providing 1.5m to help secure Parliamentary Powers for the link;
• 24m has been made available for the Larkhall to Milngavie rail link;
• 21m for quality bus corridors on all the main city centre access routes;
• 12.5m to Strathclyde Passenger Transport for new rolling stock on the West-Central Scotland rail network to be delivered in 2003/04;
• Looking at future options for rail links to/from Glasgow in the Scottish Strategic Rail Study;
• Supporting a study into future transport options along the Clyde Corridor;
• Providing 2.6m for investment in walking, cycling and safer streets projects over the 4 years to 2003/04;
• Glasgow Public Realm Programme upgraded the city centre environment to international standards. A Phase II programme will be delivered over the next 3 years to extend this to include Broomielaw, Merchant City and Trongate;
• Over 1m for CCTV systems to fight crime in known "hot spots" since 1999;
• 1m to progress feasibility study into flood protection along the Clyde River corridor;
• 93% of schools now have access to the internet;
• Providing community safety partnership grants of some 333,000 to help Glasgow develop local solutions to local crime problems;
• Funding free local off-peak bus travel for elderly people and those with a disability - making it easier for them to travel, so improving their quality of life;
• Since 1999, nearly 32,000 households in the city have benefited from the Warm Deal and Central Heating Programmes;
• Communities Scotland has supported nearly 5,000 units of affordable housing in Glasgow to help regenerate disadvantaged communities and provide housing for those with particular needs;
• Over 113.5m of Social Inclusion Partnership funding committed to deprived areas and communities in Glasgow from 1999 to 2004, over 38% of the total funding made available in Scotland over the period;
• As part of the recently agreed 700m programme over the next ten years, 52m for the extension of existing facilities at Glasgow Royal Infirmary;
• 292m Lottery Funding has gone to Glasgow City;
• The Scottish Arts Council provide support for 7:84 Theatre Company, the Citizens Theatre and the Tron Theatre; the Centre for Contemporary Arts; Scottish Ballet, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Scottish Opera, both also National Companies;
• One-off Scottish Executive funding of 3m in 2001/02 to the Glasgow museums;
• Funding provision of sporting facilities for young people and for the community in general through the New Opportunities Fund PE & Sport programme worth 13m;
• Redevelopment of Hampden Stadium through 25m from the Millennium Commission;
• Featuring Glasgow prominently across the VisitScotland product portfolio (in the City Breaks/Cultural Tourism/Business Tourism marketing themes) and in VisitScotland's international campaigns.

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