Business Comment: Vaccination among few bright spots in gloomy start to the year
Jane Cumming, regional chairwoman of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, on the start of the year for businesses.
It’s only a month into the new year and we already seem to be swimming in paperwork.
Whether it is grant applications for the various new funds for business, or the paperwork required to get your goods to market post-Brexit, I think we would all be delighted if we had a few less bits of paper in our lives.
However, the one exception is the paperwork involved in getting a Covid vaccination.
Never have so many people across the land looked forward quite so much to having an
injection.
The prospect of widespread vaccination has been one of the few bright spots in a fairly gloomy start to the year with tighter restrictions, particularly painful for us having been in tier one for so long.
As somebody said to me recently, that good old Scottish word “scunnered” seems to have been designed especially to describe this particular period in our lives.
But it is always darkest just before the dawn, so hopefully better times will come.
We may be some way off welcoming visitors back to this area which is so dependent on the tourist industry for jobs.
And not just those jobs which are directly tourism related, but also supporting the variety of businesses we enjoy which could never be sustained if they could only rely on the local population. These include the local restaurants, galleries, shops – many of whom rely on visitors to make their businesses viable.
It may not happen immediately but there are strong signs of pent up demand, particularly from the domestic market.
One other bright spot on the horizon is the prospect of a new political administration in the USA.
Trade tariffs have been hugely damaging to some of our most important exports, particularly Scotch whisky, but there are high hopes President Joe Biden may end the tariffs which have cost the industry dear.
Losses are running at £30 million a month in a disagreement over subsidies for aircraft manufacturers. Surely President Biden will demonstrate more common sense than his predecessor?
