In any other European country, the national business development agency would be fêted by politicians of every party. But at Scottish Enterprise, for five years, Jack Perry has found himself engaged in an almost endless fight to persuade successive Holyrood administrations that the organisation has a valuable role to play.
Now, as he prepares to stand down, at least Mr Perry, the chief executive, has the satisfaction of knowing that he has managed to convince his political masters that Scottish Enterprise — far from being a waste of money, or a bureaucratic irrelevancy — is in reality a force for economic good.
These days, he can take a long view of these matters. A year before the 2007 election, he reckons the SNP “would probably have shut us down”. By the time the party got into government, he found them to be neutral and by the time the recession had begun to bite, he believes that he had persuaded them that Scottish Enterprise “was pretty much the only tool in the box as far as economic development was concerned”.
This process of having to convert political opponents into supporters, he notes, is not new: “When Jack McConnell [Labour first minister 2002-07] came into office, I don’t think he liked us much. But over time that relationship became pretty strong.”
But he thinks this repetitive cycle is debilitating. “When you have national institutions that are important and should continue from administration to administration, if they are very publicly rubbished, you undermine confidence in the institution,” he says.
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However, Mr Perry dismisses suspicions that the changes that have been imposed by the SNP on Scottish Enterprise — the winding up of local enterprise companies, the taking back in-house of the Intermediate Technology Institutes — represent political battles he has lost. “They are all pretty much things we ourselves wanted to do,” he says. He maintains that these changes have resulted in an enterprise agency which is now tightly focused on just that, though he does accept that upheavals such as the merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen to form Creative Scotland have caused unhelpful confusion.
He said: “Creative Scotland is not a business support organisation and Scottish Enterprise is not an organisation for promoting culture. Support for business is still very much Scottish Enterprise. Creative industries does remain a priority sector for us. We have created a subset of our investment funds specifically for digital media and got new partners in Scottish Television and Channel Four. We do see it as a promising area.”
This does not mean that everything in the garden is rosy. Mr Perry is still feisty enough to point to the administration’s failings. Take the government grant to Scottish Enterprise for 2010-11, that was projected by the SNP administration in 2008 to be £295 million, but has now been reduced to £201 million. Only two thirds of this cut is accounted for by a transfer of its Business Gateway advice service to councils and by a shift forward into this year of capital spending as a recession-fighting measure.
“Would I have liked to see a greater allocation in the budget toward enterprise? Yes, I certainly would have,” he says, qualifying his comment only to note that public sector chiefs in education and health would probably say the same thing.
But he makes plain his view that economic development in Scotland is being damaged by budget cuts. He says: “We could have accelerated some of the capital projects that we have got.
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“We are in the process of revamping our commercialisation activities to try and get a lot of very good Scottish intellectual property into markets and products a lot quicker.”
He adds also that the cuts mean opportunities are being missed to strengthen Scottish Development International, the arm of the agency which deals with inward investment and the promotion of Scottish companies overseas.
“During a recession, if traditional markets are drying up, businesses need to look where growth opportunities are and often those are overseas in new markets. Stepping up efforts to internationalise Scottish businesses is certainly one that I would prioritise.”
Mr Perry, 54, has no intention of retiring and plans as busy a life as ever with a portfolio of non-executive directorships. But if there is one thing he could bequeath to his successor and present deputy, Lena Wilson, it would be a period of political peace and constant support.
In a pointed reference to Ireland, a country with which the SNP used to draw a lot of comparisons, he said: “You will never hear an opposition politician in Ireland rubbish Enterprise Ireland.
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“They might well do it in private, but publicly they have reached a level of maturity which I am not quite sure we have reached here yet. When you do that sort of thing in public, it just makes your job when you get into government a lot more difficult.”