Paying for jobs
Does Scotland really need to pay for its financial services jobs?
A war of words has broken out in Scotland after the SNP-led administration awarded 6m to US investment bank Morgan Stanley, as long as it creates 600 jobs in Glasgow. The handout from the Regional Selective Assistance scheme, which amounts to 10k per job, was blasted by both opposition politicians and groups who look into how taxpayers' money is spent, after it emerged that Morgan Stanley had plans to expand in Glasgow already.
Summing up the spluttering outrage, Derek Brownlee MSP, Scottish Conservative finance spokesman, says: "You can only justify the use of taxpayers' money to create jobs if they would not have come without the money."
However recruiters are predictably less damning of RSA job initiatives. Neil Campbell, a recruiter at the Edinburgh office of Change Jobs, says he personally has no problem with his tax money being spent supporting financial services in Scotland.
He tells us: "We have come across this before with HSBC Securities. It was given a couple of million, a few years ago, and it has gone on to expand even further since then. And really 6m is not a lot of money in terms of demonstrating [the Executive's] commitment to financial services which is a huge boost to the Scottish economy."
Campbell also does not place much stock in the argument that simply because Morgan Stanley is a multi-billion dollar business it should not be entitled to the level of support that smaller companies bringing jobs to Scotland would receive. He adds: "After all it is the big investment companies which have brought a lot of jobs to the economy in the first place."
