Falkirk teams up with BP for regeneration game; Oil giant hopes to

It's a depressingly familiar picture. A major company announces redundancies in an area already suffering from declining industry and a struggling economy and then washes its hands of the matter. But when BP announced 700 redundancies at its Grangemouth plant in May last year it was determined to give something back to the area.

The result is the unveiling of the Falkirk Action Plan in just over a week's time, signalling a joined-up approach to regeneration with BP joining with Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley (SEFV) and Falkirk Council to tackle the area's problems.

A series of 18 projects across the four themes of increasing the exploitation of 21st century technology, attracting added value service businesses, attracting more visitors to Falkirk and creating a distribution hub to be implemented as part of the ten year plan will be unveiled at the launch ceremony on December 17.

The partners have spent six months developing the multi-million pound plans and held a series of public forums with celebrities like Fred MacAulay and Muriel Gray to help stimulate people to contribute ideas.

Views on the action plan approach were also sought from the International Futures Forum, a group of leading thinkers in fields ranging from economics to sociology.

Mervyn Jones, a senior manager at BP Grangemouth who is on the action plan committee, says, "They looked at Falkirk, met the people and looked at the location and gave us the view that if you compare us globally we are not in as bad a position as we think we are but there is clearly more we can do. Individuals from outside the UK are very interested in what we are doing in Falkirk because there are a number of areas in the European economy which are underperforming.

"You have got to energise people and look outside the boundaries of how you operate in order to create economic activity."

Charlene O'Connor, who recently took up the chief executive's position at SEFV, is full of praise for BP and its commitment to helping the area develop its strengths.

"I think for an organisation like BP the relationship with the community was almost a traditional dependency relationship," she says. "The scale of that industry is huge and so is its impact on the community. I think BP realise that and it is part of the reason why they want to be involved. They have operated in an exceptionally proactive manner."

O'Connor has experienced the Grangemouth situation before, having led the taskforces working with the thousands made redundant following the Motorola and NEC closures in West Lothian in her previous role at SE Edinburgh and Lothian.

A similar, smaller scale approach to finding new employment opportunities for those who have lost their jobs has made an encouraging start in Grangemouth. In the first phase of 370 redundancies, who left by the end of September, 233 have registered for support and 142 have already found new jobs. The remainder of the redundancies are due to be completed in phases by the end of this year and the second half of 2003.

The FAP is designed to move the area off the backfoot in terms of creating new business and jobs and improving infrastructure rather than responding to redundancy situations.

While exact details of the projects remain under wraps, the process of firming up the plan has run into some pitfalls, such as a debate over who should pay for upgrading a rail bridge near the planned new community stadium for Falkirk Football Club.

But O'Connor is relaxed about overcoming hurdles in implementation, arguing that this is where the partnership approach becomes important.

"Over the plan's lifetime there will be hundreds of these issues", she says.

"It is a 10-year plan but we will see the first 18 projects completed in three years. This approach leaves you with a better infrastructure that can take forward the future development of the area."

Charlene O'Connor: readyfor the challenge

Copyright 2002 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.