Lesley Riddoch: The road and miles to Dundee rebirth

Scotland’s fourth city keeps on trying in face of government and big business indifference, writes Lesley Riddoch

WHAT would Scottish independence, Devo Plus or voting No mean for the people of Dundee?

Compared with EU membership, retaining sterling or writing a constitution, the impact of constitutional change on the fortunes of Scotland’s fourth city may seem like small beer.

But given the persistent size of the “don’t know” camp, it may be time to turn the constitutional debate around and ask what abstract, lofty-sounding options for constitutional change actually mean for a city making Herculean efforts to resurrect its fortunes – but currently held back by local realities and investment decisions far beyond its immediate control.

This week Dundee will make a slight dent in the Central Belt monopoly of Scottish civic life with BBC Scotland’s Bob Servant Independent. The comedy series – about a local cheeseburger tycoon entering a by-election – is set and filmed in Dundee’s relatively wealthy neighbourhood of Broughty Ferry.

But the star, Brian Cox, writer Neil Forsyth and dead-pan, absurdist humour are all pure Dundee.

It could be a big break for a city whose pioneering decision to build Britain’s first ring-road in the 1950s allowed the city to be physically by-passed ever after.

For the last decade Dundee has been trying to come in from the cold with a waterfront regeneration plan – currently Scotland’s second biggest construction project and the 17th largest in the UK.

Despite the recession, the ambitious plans are roughly on track, although delivery dates have lengthened and the aim is still to reverse the car priority created when the Tay Road Bridge opened in 1966, cutting the city off from the Tay.

The new plan extends the original street grid to the water’s edge and already ugly concrete bridge ramps have gone, giving homes and businesses on Dock Street their first direct view of the river for half a century.

The much-hated 22-storey council HQ, Tayside House, is now half its original height – dismantled because of safety fears about the much-preferred public option of death by dynamite. The council is in talks with Forth Ports to install a lock gate system, allowing City Quay to become the east coast’s newest marina – bringing life to the unnaturally quiet new housing blocks and directing more tourist traffic to the world’s oldest floating warship, the frigate Unicorn.

The beautiful, listed Tay Hotel – sitting derelict for a decade – is currently being refurbished by the Malmaison chain and due to open this summer. Planning permission for another five-star hotel is under way and a large housing development’s going ahead alongside District 10 – a new waterfront business park with cheap-to-rent recycled ships containers as premises.

The hope is that young, spin-off businesses from the city’s two universities and burgeoning arts and design sectors will make use of currently vacant land.

A Dundee manufacturer is in talks with a major European wind turbine manufacturer about a joint venture that could give Scotland a foothold in the offshore renewables industry and create 500 local jobs, thanks to the city’s deep-water port and proximity to the northernmost Alpha and Bravo projects in the Firth of Forth development.

And of course there’s the jewel in the crown – the new V&A design museum is now scheduled to open in 2015 with more than half the cash needed in place after the ambitious, water-borne Japanese-designed building was pulled back “onshore” to cut costs. The hope is that the V&A’s only outpost beyond London will do for Dundee what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao.

Of course, it’s easy to snipe. Dundee still has Scotland’s highest rate of teenage pregnancy – a despairing behaviour correlated the world over with low levels of education amongst girls and low self-esteem amongst boys.

Shops in the city centre are closing down faster than the 1960s over-bridge walkways. Land speculation means prices are higher and rentals longer than most recession-hit firms can afford. A bespoke media park lies almost empty and tiny Dundee airport has just lost connections to Birmingham and Belfast – and is now quieter than Hebridean Benbecula airport.

But in addition to these currently unavoidable recessionary effects – Dundee has problems with distant governance.

Last week, development director Mike Galloway announced Dundee Council will finance a revamp of the ageing, shabby station after a ten-year campaign with Network Rail failed to persuade the “not for shareholder dividend” private Milton Keynes-based company to put the Dundee upgrade on the priority list.

Likewise the key to success for the offshore wind industry is London-based regulator Ofgem, whose pricing regime leaves Scottish suppliers out of the market and the Warwickshire-based National Grid plc whose laggardly upgrades have left existing Scottish renewables suppliers unable to connect to the grid – let alone offshore newcomers.

Is Dundee on government radar? You’d have to wonder. Last month a Department of Energy report – also viewed by Scottish ministers – boasted of a £43 million investment by turbines manufacturers Gamesa creating 300 jobs in Dundee. In fact Gamesa abandoned those plans in 2011.

Back onshore, even if Dundee Council raises the cash to refurbish Network Rail’s unsightly and almost inaccessible station (partly by building a hotel to offset costs) it can’t cut perhaps the highest rail ticket prices in Scotland. A peak time daily return from Glasgow to Dundee is an outrageous £50.50 for a 150-mile round trip – while Glasgow to Edinburgh is £21.80 for 104 miles and Glasgow to Aberdeen £80.80 for a 290-mile journey. Do the maths. For four Dundonians it’s now cheaper to take a taxi. This “Tayside Tax” could be eliminated by the Scottish Government, which continues to exclude Tayside from a “regulated zone”, created by the last Labour administration, which protects Central Belt commuters from exorbitant price rises.

All of this matters. Can a city succeed when rail travel is exorbitantly expensive, when the council must do what the relevant couldn’t-care-less UK quango will not and when manufacturing jobs depend on grid improvement and pricing charges set by a remote UK regulator?

In the face of such uncertainty and competition from Aberdeen and Edinburgh, no-one would blame Dundee for lying down and giving up the ghost. Amazingly it doesn’t. Dundee is trying. And God loves a trier.

But where do obstacles to economic development and empowerment really lie? Holyrood, Westminster or beyond? Localising the constitutional debate might just focus and also reinvigorate it.