East Renfrewshire Council leader Jim Fletcher is focusing on boosting the economy as he takes the helm of the Clyde Valley Community Planning Partnership (CVCPP)

CVCPP represents eight councils and is a major engine of economic development in west central Scotland. The group met at the start of December, the first time with Fletcher in the role of chairman, to discuss how they can work together to respond to the global economic downturn. Fletcher hopes to expand the focus of the partnership to look at issues other than just the sharing of services, which has been a major topic in recent years. In 2010, the eight Clyde Valley councils announced that they were planning to share back-office services such as waste management, transport, health and social care, and support services. However, only four councils are still involved in this particular project.

Fletcher said: “In previous years we had lots of discussions, quite properly, about how to share services. It came out of an initiative set up by Steven Purcell, the then leader of Glasgow City Council and we all embraced it. We all recognised that sharing services is one key area of usefully making savings in the back office and trying to protect frontline services. All the councils which attended the Clyde Valley Community Planning Partnership effectively signed up for that. There has been a lot of work put into that initiative and we still have four councils left in the main area of work we are leading on.

“It has not been without its challenges and controversies but the problem is we have focused so much on shared services in recent years that the wider work of the partnership has been lost. The first thing I’d like to do as chair is to reconstitute some of the things we did before.

I’d like to try and get all the councils in the west of Scotland engaged in a co-ordinated approach of how we deal with a whole raft of issues but principally economic development in the area of job creation.” The eight councils have been working together in the CVCPP since it was set-up in 2003 to deliver the city vision strategy. City vision has contributed to a number of projects, including the M74 extension, the waterfront regeneration at the Clyde, Inverclyde and the Millennium Canal, improvements to Glasgow City Centre and regional town centres, the Loch Lomond and Strathleven Corridor and Barrhead Regeneration as well as a number of employability programmes such as the construction skills action plan.

Fletcher, a former career civil servant, was head of the tri-service Pensions Agency based in Glasgow, first with the Ministry of Defence and latterly with Electronic Data Systems Ltd, when the work of the Pensions Agency was transferred to the private sector as part of a public-private partnership arrangement. He first became a councillor for the Thornliebank Ward on the former Eastwood District Council in 1988 and was the first Labour councillor ever to be elected to that council. He was elected to the newly created East Renfrewshire Council in 1995 and as the council’s first education convener, he was responsible for the vision and planning which has established East Renfrewshire as Scotland’s top education authority. He has been leader for over six years and is noted for his inclusive way of working, with party politics firmly parked outwith the council chamber. He leads a multiparty coalition in East Renfrewshire Council.

When speaking about East Renfrewshire, Fletcher is both passionate and proud, particularly when it comes to education. East Renfrewshire remains Scotland’s best performing education authority. He said: “We are quite bullish about what we do, particularly in education. As an authority we took the decision from 1995 to invest heavily in education and it has paid off. It is not just the schools in the leafy suburbs which perform really well, all our schools, even those in deprived areas, perform excellently. We think we are delivering on education and the way we have approached it is quite different from other councils in Scotland.

A recent report which found that parents from more deprived areas are looking for exactly the same things for their children as parents in the wealthier areas is absolutely right. We would have a huge concern if there was ever any sort of shared service that would dilute our ability in East Renfrewshire to make the strategic decisions which deliver for our kids. It is one of the reasons why people want to move to the area and why we have so many young families.

We are happy to embrace shared services but we are not happy to lose the ability to take strategic decisions locally to the benefit of our local residents.

“We have a good track record of following kids when they leave school, to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks. We take great care to ensure they go on to higher or further education or go into some sort of job or training opportunity rather than see them go off the radar into the black economy. This is getting harder to manage, it is harder for young people to pick up a university or college place and to get employment.” He acknowledges the council faces considerable economic issues, in line with every local authority in the country. He added: “Irrespective of the political composition after May, there will be huge financial challenges for our council, as well as every other council in the UK. Preparing to meet those budget challenges is probably the first major issues that we, and most other councils, will have to deal with. We anticipated this happening, it is fair to say that after the banking bail-out, we anticipated there would be less money available for the public sector generally. We have been working to get our costs down from an early stage through our public service excellence programme. Our aim has been to try and strip as much as we can from the back office, any inefficiencies or duplication we have, and to try and focus our money on the front line.

“The other issue we face is clearly the economic circumstance we find ourselves in with growing unemployment. We are looking at all sorts of opportunities to help people who live in East Renfrewshire through what is going to be a very difficult economic time.” One of the initiatives currently under way in the area is a new campaign to stimulate the local economy, attract new businesses and market the area as a great place to live, work and visit. The three-year campaign called, A Place to Grow, is backed by East Renfrewshire Council and East Renfrewshire Chamber of Commerce. To help promote the area, a new brand identity has been unveiled and will be used to market all of the areas’ economic development, tourism and community-based activities. Fletcher said: “Part of the place campaign focuses on East Renfrewshire as being an attractive place to live and work but also to create some employment opportunities through various initiatives. There is a lot going on in the area, we have a number of major food stores in East Renfrewshire and we almost see ourselves as being the food capital of Scotland. American firm Whole Foods Market opened its first store outside London in Giffnock a few months ago. Our Crossmill business park in Barrhead has a number of new units for light industry, and we are trying to encourage people to move in there to create employment and also to develop our old Shanks Park, which has been lying derelict for some time. Rather than just sitting moaning about the economy, we are thinking about what we can do to make it better.

“We sat down with the local chamber of commerce and local entrepreneurs who have businesses in the area and we looked at what we can do to make things better. Rather than us coming up with all the ideas, we asked the business community what they thought we should do and that could impact on perhaps the way we develop our new local plan. We are really trying to find a way forward which is sensible for local residents and also for developers to ensure that any development is planned and we have infrastructure to deal with any new housing or other developments which may arrive.”