Views
Recession having an impact locally - for the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald
OVER THE last few weeks, I have spent a lot of my time meeting local businesses in the strath and employers' organisations to discuss the impact that the economic problems across the country are having locally.
Some sectors are doing better than others, and many firms feel that the unremitting diet of bad news in the media is disguising a much more mixed picture.
But the problems in the banking system are a worry for almost all businesses – and causing serious problems for some. I have had many reports of firms facing real trouble because their bank has reduced their overdraft without notice, increased the interest rate, or imposed an additional one-off fee.
I have raised this with Government Ministers, who are failing so far to use the majority taxpayer stake in banks to get them to do the right thing for local businesses.
Likewise, house-builders, who have borne the brunt of the slowdown so far, are rightly frustrated that the Government has been doing too little to stimulate the building of more affordable homes.
Tavish Scott's success in the recent Scottish budget negotiations, persuading the Government to restart funding for school building, will help. It needs to be followed with much more job-creating investment in house-building and infrastructure programmes. That would be a far better use of public money than a wasteful and ineffective cut in VAT.
But there are local factors at play too. For example, unfair excess charges imposed by delivery companies have a direct impact on businesses. Overall these charges are unnecessarily draining tens of thousands of pounds from the local economy every year. I have asked Consumer Focus to investigate these rip-off charges.
Tourism is the mainstay of the Badenoch and Strathspey economy, and there are good reasons to think the industry might be one of those that bucks the trend this year.
With household budgets under pressure, many British people are choosing to holiday at home this year. The prominence of the Cairngorms National Park and local marketing initiatives will, I hope, mean that Badenoch and Strathspey is high on people's lists when choosing where to go in this country. VisitScotland and VisitBritain need to play their part in making sure that it is.
Likewise, the weakness of the Pound against the Euro means the people from the Euro-zone have 25% more spending power when they come here.
That should be a big attraction to increase foreign visitors, which should be aided by the introduction of weekly flights from Inverness to Germany in the summer.
But research also suggests that visitors will be ever more conscious of the quality and the price of the service they get when they are here.
Many of our local B&Bs and hotels stand to gain on that front too. So while the gloomy national picture will certainly hit us here in the Strath, hopefully we can weather the storm a little better than other parts of the country.
Infrastructure first, please THE PLANNING system has been much in the news recently.
The decision by the Cairngorms National Park to give approval to the next phase of proposals for Aviemore Highland Resort is welcome, and the conditions they insisted upon will no doubt improve the eventual outcome.
Hopefully this will give the resort the assurances of future growth that its financiers need. Many local jobs depend on that.
There has also been a spate of proposals for substantial new housing developments in villages up and down the strath. This may be developers trying to get their applications in before the new local plan is approved, or simply making preparations for better economic times.
Whatever the reason, I hope that planners will bear in mind the scale and quality of existing settlements in making decisions about new proposals. And most importantly, there needs to be a simple principle where large-scale developments are concerned: infrastructure first.
Hundreds of new homes in any town or village inevitably place huge strain on local schools, medical services, roads, water services and so on.
Improvements in infrastructure need to go alongside growth in population, not lag behind as they so often do. And large developers need to be prevented from blocking off access to the water and sewerage system for small-scale local developments.
Posted on: 25/02/2009
