Glasgow-Edinburgh Collaboration

What do we want to achieve through collaboration?

Glasgow and Edinburgh have a three-fold purpose for city collaboration:

• to close the gap with cities that currently boast superior economic performance
• to make a disproportionate contribution to improving Scotland’s economic performance
• to keep pace with other cities already collaborating to compete.

Why is collaboration the way to win?

In the current competition for the best international talent, investment and businesses, there is evidence that ‘size matters’. On the world stage, Glasgow and Edinburgh are small, but geographically close: by collaborating we can ‘punch above our weight’ without compromising our distinctive identities. This is a lesson already learnt in other parts of the world, be it the Oresund, the Dutch Randstadt, or with our own city regions. Ambitious businesses around the world have also realised the potential of collaborating to compete.

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Appropriate and effective collaboration must be market focused and opportunity-driven. The success of Scotland’s world-class financial services sector is a case in point – it has long viewed Glasgow and Edinburgh as the primary poles in a single region where it can do business. 5 Collaboration provides an opportunity to project a larger, more compelling proposition.

Won’t collaboration be difficult?

Collaboration is a process that requires time and investment: it will take time to reap its full rewards. The Prospectus is not simply a list of tasks to be ‘ticked off’ but should be seen as part of a process to help change attitudes and develop innovative ways that Glasgow and Edinburgh can use their combined assets more effectively.

Collaboration and competition

In entering into collaboration, we recognise Glasgow and Edinburgh have unique and complementary identities, each powerful in the international market. Diversity is part of our strength, however, and collaboration should enhance, not dilute, each city’s identity. We are also clear that collaboration will not replace competition: the aim is to use the best mechanism for delivering prosperity to both cities, their regions, and Scotland.

Collaborative actions should meet four criteria:

• additionality (where collaboration helps achieve objectives that either city alone could not achieve alone)
• appropriateness (where actions are most appropriate to a city/ urban focus);
• importance (capable of making a real difference to the competitiveness of the cities as a whole);
• balance (between short term deliverables as well as long term propositions).

5 the two cities account for over two-thirds of Scotland’s financial services jobs - Annual Business Inquiry 2003, Office for National Statistics