Council will be key to recovery for businesses - Liz McAreavey

A perfect storm of adverse conditions continues to challenge many businesses in Edinburgh keen to regain the ground they lost during the pandemic.

Liz McAreavey is Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce

They equally face the important but mystifying quest for net zero, as Edinburgh seeks to move to the city’s shared vision for a greener, fairer future.

While Edinburgh’s business community has shown enormous resilience and innovation throughout the past two difficult years, the speed and quality of our economic recovery is going to depend to a considerable extent on the national and local policy environment.

That is why when the people of Edinburgh take to the polls on May 5 th to elect councillors responsible for our city’s administration, the business community will be watching with keener interest than ever.

And it is also why Edinburgh Chamber and Essential Edinburgh, our Business Improvement District partner are co-hosting a business hustings event which is being chaired by Euan McGrory, editor of the Edinburgh Evening News, this week at the George Hotel.

The event will give representatives of the five major parties the opportunity to speak directly to the city’s businesses and answer questions posed from them.

Following from the Prospectus for Growth we published last year as a result of engagement with the Edinburgh Business Resilience Group, many themes are likely to be of continued importance:

 Edinburgh Chamber has led calls to reset the relationship between local and national Government and the business community, making the economy a major priority through, for example creating an economy committee, appointing a Business Champion and through increased collaborative working

 Create a more encouraging and positive policy environment – for example through improving pre-planning processes and simply making it easier and more affordable to do business in Edinburgh.

 Take an innovative approach to business taxation models, moving to fairer and more transactional models

 Greater collaboration on skills building to tackle shortages – in particular as we move to higher skilled, higher paid models we need to build on our already well-educated local workforce to ensure we are meeting the demands for skills that are needed today and in our green and digital future.

Considerable policy support also needs to be established to help businesses in moving to greater sustainability through a just economic transition. This will need to include engaging with the SMEs who make up 99% of our business population and employ around 50% of our private sector workforce, supporting knowledge sharing, training and empowering the workforce to drive growth and productivity.

The recently published Scottish Government’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation, setting out its priorities for the decade ahead, contains more than 70 actions across five key priority programmes that have been identified as having the greatest potential to create a fairer and more sustainable economy.

And it was encouraging to note that the governance structure to be created to ensure delivery will be co-led by business and will have immediate Ministerial access. A clear sign that Government has been listening to the view of the private sector, that the relationship between business and Government – local and national – needs to be reset.

The Capital’s economic recovery will depend on how we can navigate the challenges we face, and it is all going to happen over the course of the next council administration’s watch.

It is critical that we not only ensure the voice of our membership and the wider business community is heard and acknowledged, but also that candidates make commitments and are held to account.

With trust in politicians at an all-time low, now is the time for our locally elected members to step up and truly listen and collaborate. Without the success of Edinburgh, Scotland will make little progress towards its National Strategy. We need to hear the ideas, the passion and the ‘how’ we will secure a prosperous, but also fair and green economy.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Liz McAreavey, Chief Executive, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce