THE Scottish Government’s strategy for economic growth needs to be reviewed “as a matter of urgency”, a Holyrood committee has claimed.
MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee said “substantial opportunities” were being missed by ministers.
The inquiry looked at economic growth in the decade following the crash, between 2007-2017, when the government introduced targets in the National Performance Framework.
They included raising the GDP growth rate in Scotland to the UK level, matching the GDP growth rate of small independent EU countries by 2017, narrowing the labour market participation gap across Scotland and reducing income inequality by 20%.
Growth in Scotland did not meet those targets and was below the performance of the rest of the UK economy as a whole.
The committee says reversing this trend requires the Scottish Government to “use all of the levers at its disposal to bring a sharper focus on growing the economy”.
Tory MSP Gordon Lindhurst, who chairs the committee, said there were some positives: “We have a resilient labour market and a strong business community, but we need to encourage more entrepreneurship as well as ambition within existing businesses in order to strengthen productivity.
“We found some companies had a ‘fear of heights’ – lacking confidence to scale-up and grow. We expect the Scottish Government to work together with the UK Government to recognise the substantial opportunities that exist and closely analyse what policies are working so that both can help bring a sharper focus to growing the economy.”
Economy spokesperson for the Scottish Labour party, Jackie Baillie, said that the report was proof that the SNP government was failing.
She said: “Under the Nationalists, growth has been significantly lower than the rest of the UK and other small European countries, wages are stagnant and productivity is flat lining.”
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