“Taking the brakes off”, says Sir Anton. Whoever is in St Andrew’s House after next May is told they need to prioritise growth, starting with a committee chaired by the First Minister, which is focussed on growth.<\/p>\n
He wants to see “deep devolution” to local leaders, as promised in England.<\/p>\n
In short, England is going through a form of devolution which could be seen as catch-up with Scotland’s powers over the past 26 years. English change may put it at an advantage if more local control produces better economic results.<\/p>\n
Hearing from business leaders, Sir Anton heard that city metropolitan areas such as Manchester have already “seemed more co-ordinated than their Scottish counterparts”, with more flexible deployment of funding.<\/p>\n
Comparing Manchester city region with Glasgow’s, he observes that growth and productivity per worker have risen at similar levels, but the economy in north-west England is growing faster because it is attracting more migrants, workers and investment.<\/p>\n
The report goes into detail on university policy, as you might expect a former university principal to do, because universities are drivers of business and employment growth. <\/p>\n
We’re told planners need to be more flexible, and housebuilding should be more ambitious across all types of home.<\/p>\n
New approaches are required to boost Scottish trade and investment (where Scotland already does better than most English regions) and to target business rates relief, creating incentives for growth.<\/p>\n
Having seen the impact of restricted immigration visas for student recruitment, Sir Anton is alert to the demographic problems afflicting Scotland’s economic growth. So he’s calling on the UK Government to work with the Scottish one on exemptions and incentives to move to Scotland.<\/p>\n
In addition to being told to ease its tough messages on immigration, and to reduce energy costs for business, Labour is told to avoid further divergence on income tax if it wins power at Holyrood next May.<\/p>\n
“An incoming government should consider and actively report to Parliament on the economic growth effects which arise from divergence or alignment of Scottish and UK tax bands”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Taking the brakes off”, says Sir Anton. Whoever is in St Andrew’s House after next May is told…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-256201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}