On Wednesday he told members of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce that moving some 3,000 jobs out of the capital was good for them. Then he cited the relocation of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) to Inverness (which cost £27m, the loss of many experts and a public outcry) as the one relocation of which he is “extremely proud”.
He “spun himself into a real gaffe”, said Eddie Reilly, Scottish secretary of the Public and Commercial Service Union, and everyone, from businessmen to the council and to his Holyrood colleagues, agreed. It would have been better if he had said nothing, but for him that was not an option. His reputation was at stake again.
Audit Scotland is due to publish its review of the Scottish executive’s relocation initiative this month and it is expected to be highly critical about the costs involved in the exercise, the pace and the value for money that it provides the taxpayer. The first minister has good reason to feel anxious.
When the policy was introduced in the early days of devolution its aims — to deliver the benefits of government jobs across the country — were laudable. If people from all parts of Scotland had voted for home rule then all parts of Scotland should reap the rewards, in the shape of the masses of public money that were about to be thrown around.
Supporting fragile and declining communities, helping areas of economic hardship and deprivation, sharing the spoils of public sector employment — relocation was going to do all of that.
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However, the reality has been somewhat different. Although the executive lists a number of areas targeted by relocation programmes — the Borders, the southwest and the Highlands — most of the movement has been from one city to another, and largely within the central belt.
Some of Scotland’s most vulnerable rural communities, in Angus and Perth for instance, have yet to attract any government offshoots to their environs. Even in those places that have been reached by devolution’s largesse, such as Inverness (SNH) or Galashiels (Scottish Public Pensions) or Falkirk (the executive’s Inquiry Reporters Unit), the numbers of personnel involved have been relatively small and the impact on the local economy unnoticeable.
In Inverness, SNH has had problems recruiting staff to replace the 230 who refused to move, and the Inquiry Reporters Unit in Falkirk has experienced similar difficulties.
There is no evidence of regional regeneration, or even of efficiencies being achieved. In fact, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason in relocation the way the executive has enforced it. The very word “relocation” has got a bad name.
It is an opportunity lost. The public sector should be prepared to up sticks if there are compelling incentives to do so, just as the private sector does.
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It does not have to be a calamity for the employee. The financial cost of upheaval is met by the employer and the social cost can often be compensated for by the change of scene.
The trouble is that the executive lacks any compelling incentives for its relocations. They appear to have been arranged on a haphazard basis, with the bulk of the human traffic going from Edinburgh to Glasgow in what is seen as a political rather than an economic or social process. This has resulted in an ill-tempered jockeying for position between Scotland’s two biggest cities over which jobs belong where.
The first minister obviously believes they belong in Glasgow. The housing agency, Communities Scotland, has gone west and so have 450 National Health Service jobs and 210 in lifelong learning. Transport jobs are heading that way, too, as is the land and property register and, most controversially, sportscotland.
McConnell said that the latter move located the sports body “in the right place and corrected a historical wrong that should never have happened in the first place”. Describing the site of a government quango as a “historical wrong” suggests that McConnell has not only blown things wildly out of proportion but also that he has his own political agenda.
If the intention was to move jobs from an area of high public sector employment to an area of lower public sector employment, how does the east end of Glasgow (already home to Scotland’s national theatre) score more points than Edinburgh’s South Gyle? Surely it is not just down to the lobbying talents of the MSPs concerned or their personal relationship with the first minister? When George Lyon, the deputy finance minister, was tackled in June on the criteria for relocating jobs he seemed unable to come up with a coherent answer.
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In one recent relocation, the convenor of water customer consultation panels shifted jobs to Alloa from Stirling. However, the water industry commissioner, the regulator of the water industry, remained in Stirling.
Two bodies working in the same industry, in the same building, now operate nine miles apart with all the expense and wastage that separate offices and facilities incur. Why? Perhaps if there were a clearer strategy, MSPs would be more supportive of the policy in principle and less prone to attacks of nimbyism (or should that be imbyism?).
As it is, every politician with a vested interest in relocation is up in arms and McConnell’s line of defence has been laughed out of Edinburgh.
What he actually said was the removal of public sector jobs to Glasgow would ease the pressure on the private sector — a way of conceding that the public sector is too big.
The solution, then, is to stop creating more quangos and agencies, introduce savings into the public sector, cut the number of people it employs and give the wealth generating private sector room to breathe.
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With diminishing public sector dependency, Scotland’s economy might perk up and new businesses might voluntarily set up in low-rent areas, thus rendering the relocation drive redundant.
“We are doing a good thing for the Edinburgh economy,” McConnell insisted. So why not do it for the rest of Scotland?