Sale ends the Silicon Glen dream

The 96-acre Alba Campus in Livingston is now to be converted into a general use business park after garnering just a fraction of the 6,000 jobs it was expected to attract.

News of the sale by Scottish Enterprise to Miller Developments, believed to have been in the region of 8 million, took West Lothian Council by surprise yesterday. Willie Dunn, the deputy leader, warned Miller against turning the 100,000sqft campus into a "run-of-the-mill" industrial estate.

"We will need to meet with Miller to discuss their plans and see if they meet the terms of the planning permission," said Mr Dunn. "If the Alba Campus was turned into just another piece of office space, we would not be happy; we have plenty of those in the area already. "

Conceived in 1996, the Alba Campus plan was for a 200 million world-beating centre of electronics design centred around the Californian technology giant Cadence, whose decision to establish a manufacturing base in "Silicon Glen" was seen as heralding an electronic golden age of inward investment for the Scottish economy.

Launched by Crawford Beveredge, then head of Scottish Enterprise, in a flurry of media hyperbole in 1997, Alba was expected to create up to 6,000 jobs and provide Scotland with what one commentator called "the electronic equivalent of North Sea oil".

At a turf-cutting ceremony performed by Donald Dewar, the then first minister, in April 1998, Michael Bealmear, Cadence's vice-president, called the development "a paradigm shift which moves the electronics industry in Scotland out of the screwdriver manufacturing and assembly era into high intellectual capacity employment."

But the hopes of strategists and investors were dashed by the global electronics downturn of 2000, which made tenants hard to attract. Cadence drastically scaled back its plans and was forced to pay back investment cash to Scottish Enterprise.

Despite the presence of the successful Scottish universities' collaboration, the Institute for Systems Level Integration (ISLI) and the development of a new "innovation centre" for electronics start-ups, Alba has continued to struggle to find tenants for its three high-spec offices, let alone pursue expansion plans.

A spokesman for Scottish Enteprise Edinburgh and Lothian yesterday denied that the forthcoming sale was an admission of strategic failure on the part of the network. "It is not true to say that Project Alba has not been successful or that the investment been lost," he said.

"The ISLI has been a great success and would not have happened without Alba.

"Cadence is still there and the innovation centre is thriving in a new purpose-built development. Many of the buildings are still occupied and it has contributed a great deal to the local economy."

Dave McDougall, the director of the West Lothian Chamber of Commerce, said yesterday that the impact of the demise of the Alba vision would be limited. "I think the business community has already discounted this, it is not too great a shock.

"Business realises that the economy is constantly evolving and this is just another step along the road. Business always has to be flexible and it is good that the public sector is learning to be as well," he said.

"Scottish Enterprise are probably glad to get it off their hands and if it gives them some extra cash, that is welcome. We would like to see good use made of the facility."

Malcolm Deans, director of Miller Developments said: "We have got a good mainstream office product, with a focus on technology, it will continue to provide jobs the future.

"We and our partners HBOS got into this in the hope that electronics had a significant future and in the last couple of years we have had to re-evaluate that when it became clear that the demand wasn't there."