Releasing rural prosperity - 2

Paper presented at 4th annual SCA conference

"Who should run the countryside" Rural Scotland 2006"

Royal Highland Centre, Ingliston, Edinburgh 25th April 2006

Colin Williamson

Chief Executive Dumfries & Galloway Region, Scottish Enterprise

Filed 29 May 06
©www.land-care.org.uk

The topic for this session of the conference is ‘releasing rural prosperity’. That is very much a priority for Scottish Enterprise. Indeed, in an area like Dumfries and Galloway, it is at the heart of everything that we do.

I would like to try and give you an overview of some of the projects and programmes that we run in Dumfries and Galloway, and to give you some examples of how we release rural prosperity. I would like to focus in on one or two specific examples of interventions through our ‘planning to succeed in rural leadership’ programme. I would also like to give you an explanation of Scottish Enterprise and our Scottish Enterprise Rural Group, including some of the challenges we face going forward.

Colin Williamson
Chief Executive, Dumfries & Galloway, Scottish Enterprise
(To enlarge photo Click Here)

Photo©Kimpton Graphics

Scottish Enterprise is the economic development agency for lowland Scotland; there is obviously an equivalent in the Highlands and Islands. We are headquartered in Glasgow, we have an annual budget of about £500 million. We deliver most of our operational activity through twelve local enterprise companies based throughout lowland Scotland. We try to balance the strategic priorities set in a smart successful Scotland, which is the Scottish Executive’s national strategy for economic and business development, with our local needs.

The way that we intervene can take a number of forms. We offer financial support to individuals and businesses, and we provide knowledge and information to businesses in order for them to make informed decisions. We also make connections for them within Scotland, the UK and internationally. And of course the whole objective at the end of the day is to grow the Scottish economy in a sustainable way.

Within Scottish Enterprise, I am the Deputy Chairman of the Scottish Enterprise Rural Group, which is a combination of not only people like me and representatives from the rural local enterprise companies but also the Scottish Executive and various industry teams that are based in our headquarters. We are effectively champions of the rural areas; trying to make sure we embed the rural aspects of ‘smart successful Scotland’ within our forward strategies. We make sure that the Scottish Executive are fully informed about what we are doing, how that can then influence the rural development plan, and indeed the forward strategy for agriculture. We are also making sure that from Peterhead to Portpatrick, we are actually sharing what best practice we have developed within rural areas and make sure that we work closely with partners. That includes attending conferences like this to raise the awareness of individuals’ understandings of what Scottish Enterprise does in rural areas.

Coming to the specific rural approach that we take in Dumfries and Galloway, we help individuals to set up a business for the first time; we help local businesses to expand; we also work to attract new businesses into the area. But we also work towards improving skills and raising the employment rate. We support individuals within communities not only to build rural businesses but also to help build rural communities as well.

In Scottish Enterprise Dumfries and Galloway we do this in a number of ways. We actually have broken down our region into five key sectors. I’m going to touch this afternoon particularly on agriculture and food, which we think are heavily interlinked and very important to us. But we are also very active in areas like forestry, renewable energy and tourism. Obviously most of our work is around those five key areas, but also in the linkages between them.

We work with existing businesses through a dedicated account and client management service. We also help new growing and growth businesses through our Business Gateway with business advisors and business information.

Turning then to just a few examples of how we actually intervene to release that rural prosperity that this particular session of the conference is about. I’ll come onto ‘planning to succeed’ and ‘rural leadership’ in a moment. We are, for example, involved in helping agricultural managers, employees and those self-employed in agriculture to make sure that they upgrade their skills. We have been helping those individuals with up to 50% grant aid to actually get the skills to take their business forward. We’ve also helped with running workshops on ‘profit without subsidy’ and we have, at Dumfries and Galloway a food forum which is about getting local food businesses to come together to act as a steering group for others in order to develop the food sector in the region.

We have, for example, been linking with E.ON who have just announced a major £90 million investment in a biomass plant in Locherbie, to advise and inform farmers and landowners in Dumfries and Galloway of the potential benefits of short rotation coppicing of willow for coal firing in this particular power station. And that’s about giving people information and advice on what they need to know in terms of that particular crop, but also how they then work with E.ON to actually supply that for the future.

We also have projects like the ‘food chain exchange’ which is very much about trying to ensure that the farmer, the grower, the processor, the retailer, and the buyer are all talking to one another. Collaborating, communicating and discussing issues of mutual interest so that we can actually make sure that that chain is talking to one another at all individual levels, and make sure that we understand what the issues are for each part of that chain as well.

We also have things like ‘meet the buyer’ that I guess is pretty common within Scottish Enterprise, but it’s certainly about trying to make sure that local food businesses – small, medium and large – have a chance to sell into the supermarket sector, and indeed savour the flavour of the local brand that we have developed in Dumfries and Galloway - again to try and release more of that prosperity.

We also work with the Shellfish Association in Dumfries and Galloway, particularly around the possibility of future applications of shellfish waste.

We are working with, for example, Glasgow University and the SAC on trying to look at the properties of CLA and how, and if, possible there is a USP to sell milk form Dumfries and Galloway, with the properties that this CLA can actually give the milk that is produced locally.

If I could just turn to a couple of examples of how we actually intervene in working with individuals in rural areas to help release that prosperity. One of the key projects for us in the last couple of years has been ‘planning to succeed.’ This has been very much about trying to help young farmers improve their business management skills, on top of their agricultural skills. By a younger farmer I mean under 40. As I say, it’s very much about running a programme which starts to get businesses and individuals talking to one another, sharing information, sharing profit and loss accounts – which is a fairly rare thing in agriculture I understand, but they are doing that. The aim is to motivate, to set business plan goals, to organise cash flow and to improve business management generally. Basically we are trying to ensure that these young farmers actually have the business skills on top of the agricultural skills to compete in today’s world.

We have 124 farming businesses participating, in nine groups. We’ve got two new groups under development: one an all female farmer group which was requested, and a group based at the Barony College. We’ve got half a dozen dedicated facilitators who support these individual groups. We are very pleased that this has been recognised as best practice within the forward strategy for agriculture. We are hoping to roll this particular programme out throughout Scotland over the next year or two.

A recent valuation suggested that, based on those 124 farms we had actually got a cost ratio benefit of 13:1. In other words for the amount of public sector money we had put in we’d added about £1 million to the local economy. As I say, that is a very very good ratio in our view for that kind of programme. The programme has continued to run and be successful. I think most farmers have appreciated the opportunity to participate in it.

More recently we’ve started to look at the question of rural business leadership. One of the new programmes we’ve introduced is called the ‘rural leadership programme.’ It is again an attempt to try and give the tools to rural business leaders to articulate and contribute to the development of the local economy in rural Scotland. It is very much about giving those individuals the knowledge, the skills and the information with which they could then become spokespersons for the rural areas. At the moment we’ve got about twelve rural business people involved, drawn primarily from Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders. We have had quite a lot of interest from the north of England to participate. Perhaps in the next programme we may co-operate with the north of England in the future development of this programme. It is about developing leadership, it is about giving them a dedicated coach and facilitator.

It is not just about working with businesses, working with individuals, working with groups. It is also about working with the institutions in rural areas; for example, Barony College and the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC), to try and develop the infrastructure that we have in rural areas which can then assist rural businesses of all types, sizes and shapes and develop their prosperity for the future. Indeed we work with both of these organisations on a regular basis to try to achieve that.

I couldn’t finish off today without saying something about the fact that Scottish Enterprise is looking to revise its overall national strategy towards being more of a metropolitan region and takinf a priority approach to industry. Again, I won't take up time today to try and debate the benefits of that particular approach, suffice to say that it is recognised that it is important for Scotland’s future of sustainable prosperity to build on these particular platforms.

I think the challenges for people like me in rural areas is to make sure that we continue to have a strong, cross-cutting rural theme to all the activities that we undertake, but also to make sure that we make a rural contribution to some of our key sectors or key industries in Scotland; not least tourism, energy and food and drink, and within that agriculture. But also there are some new opportunities which are emerging in rural areas. In our case the unfortunate situation of the closure in 2004 of the Chapelcross power station, the first nuclear power station in Scotland. It will offer us opportunities to develop expertise in the area of nuclear decommissioning. So, here we have a small rural area in the south west of Scotland which might take some kind of national leadership on this type of technology for the future.

I hope I have it given you a flavour of how Scottish Enterprise is trying to work, not only with businesses but with individuals and institutions, to try and release prosperity in rural areas. We are very keen to continue that into the future.

Thank you.

Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

Land-Care is grateful to Tony Andrews, CEO Scottish Countryside Alliance, and to Dick Playfair of Playfair Walker for the invitation to attend the conference in a media capacity, the opportunity to participate in both formal and informal discussion, and for their help in providing Land-Care with transcripts of the papers presented.

No responsibility for errors or omissions in the transcription process can be taken by SCA, Playfair Walker or Land-Care.

Kimpton Graphics is a division of Land-Care.

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Releasing rural prosperity - 2

Paper presented at 4th annual SCA conference

"Who should run the countryside" Rural Scotland 2006"

Royal Highland Centre, Ingliston, Edinburgh 25th April 2006

Colin Williamson

Chief Executive Dumfries & Galloway Region, Scottish Enterprise

Filed 29 May 06
©www.land-care.org.uk

©www.land-care.org.uk

Further reading recommended by Land-Care

Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

MENU

Releasing rural prosperity - 2

Paper presented at 4th annual SCA conference

"Who should run the countryside" Rural Scotland 2006"

Royal Highland Centre, Ingliston, Edinburgh 25th April 2006

Colin Williamson

Chief Executive Dumfries & Galloway Region, Scottish Enterprise

Filed 29 May 06 ©www.land-care.org.uk

©www.land-care.org.uk

Further reading recommended by Land-Care

Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

Filed 29 May 06
©www.land-care.org.uk