60 Cannon Street,
London, EC4N 6NP
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7710 0020
John is a senior consultant at Media House International (MHI) and the views of the column are John McLellan’s and not that of MHI.
Center Parcs is gamechanger for Borders that highlights folly of Galloway National Park
I’ve been at a quite a few launches and press conferences over the years, but few with such an enthusiastic reception as Tuesday’s unveiling of the plan by Center Parcs to build their first village in Scotland in the Borders just north of Hawick.
It wasn’t just the usual warm welcome for a big initiative; the excitement at the event at Hawick rugby club was palpable and at times verged on the emotional, as councillors of different parties and none expressed heartfelt gratitude that a high-profile UK company had chosen their community to be home for a £400 million development which could create 1,200 permanent year-round jobs.
A gamechanger, said Borders Council leader Euan Jardine, and going through Hawick it’s not difficult to see why. The symbols of the now long-gone dominance of textile mills are all around and, as well as a major employer offering career progression in a national operation, Center Parcs should also be a badly needed economic anchor for local suppliers, and set standards for hospitality from which others in the tourism sector can benefit.
Representatives from the South of Scotland Destination Alliance and VisitScotland were present and they can already see the benefits such a major player can bring to the whole sector by introducing more visitors to what the Borders has to offer, and encouraging other operators to raise their game.
Private development with achievable aims
So maybe I would say all this, given I was there in a professional capacity as part of the communications team, but having watched the likes of the Edinburgh City Region Deal promise much but so far struggle to deliver, the differences here are marked. Similarly, the Alba Project, unveiled with vast hype and public money in 1997 to build “the electronic equivalent of North Sea oil” on a Livingston campus with US computing giant Cadence at its heart, failed to deliver. It would be, its vice-president claimed, “a paradigm shift which moves the electronics industry in Scotland out of the screwdriver manufacturing and assembly era into high intellectual capacity employment”. Within ten years, it had collapsed.
The difference is that while Center Parcs is obviously keen to work closely with all the government agencies with an interest in its success, it’s not reliant on them, with the obvious exception of the planning process. It is a private development on private land with clear aims, and achievable because they have done it before, most recently in County Longford in Ireland. None of it is hype because the promise is to replicate an already successful blueprint in a Scottish context.
Galloway national park row
It also stands in contrast to the increasingly polarised debate in Galloway about the Scottish Government’s intention to turn a vast chunk of the region into a national park, a bureaucratic intervention which its supporters believe will bring great benefits to the local tourism economy. It creates an interesting comparison with an entirely private project in one part of the south which, if Longford is anything to go by, will pump around £50 million a year into the Scottish economy, £36m of it into the Borders alone. Longford also generates €23m (about £19m) in taxes for the Irish exchequer while, judging by the two existing Scottish national parks, Galloway could cost the public £15m a year and still require private investment to generate the economic benefits claimed by its supporters.
If all goes according to both plans, Center Parcs will be welcoming its first guests in about five years’ time, while in Galloway a few rangers will be looking for places to introduce beavers as farmers face going through the same planning process as Center Parcs to put up anything much bigger than a garden shed. Although nothing can be taken for granted, it’s not difficult to work out which of the two represents the best opportunity for their respective communities.
From conversations with the various government agencies represented on Tuesday, none were opposed to the idea of a Galloway National Park but, given the talk in the room was about super-charging the local economy, their views were much more guarded. No chat about a game-changer for Galloway or anything like that, and in a region dominated by dairy farming, the last thing local agriculture wants after the UK Government’s inheritance tax assault is bureaucratic intervention of any sort, especially with the provisions of this year’s Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act still to kick in.
Enhanced ‘forest park’
But there was also a view that there was an opportunity to do something with the Unesco Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere, which covers a similar area to the proposed national park. What that “something” may be is not at all clear, but the Biosphere declares it is “a participatory, not a regulatory, organisation” so as a main national park sponsor it suggests something with regulatory teeth would be welcome. It’s more obvious that with the various publicly funded organisations all under budgetary pressure, a national park is seen as an alternative way to bankroll new promotional activity which might otherwise be unaffordable.
As the Galloway consultation begins under the Scottish Government’s NatureScot agency ─ in which opponents have little faith to run an unbiased process as it’s tasked with implementing a clear policy to create a third national park ─ the idea floated in this week’s Scotsman of opting instead for enhancing the existing Galloway Forest Park might provide the SNP with an “off-ramp” in the run-up to the 2026 election. And at a time when NatureScot is itself is at a crossroads, with chief executive Francesca Osowska leaving to head the Scottish Funding Council in January, finding a diplomatic way through an increasingly bitter argument would be pragmatic.
Back in the Borders, SNP council group leader, Elaine Thornton-Nicol, is every bit as enthusiastic about Center Parcs as her Conservative counterpart, Councillor Jardine, and as First Minister John Swinney ditches needlessly divisive legacies of the Green coalition, some togetherness in Galloway wouldn’t go amiss either.
