THE bold North-east bid for City Deal status has taken an important step forward and now deserves to succeed.
The £2.9billion headline figure dwarves anything else that has been put forward from Scotland.
As the bid documents notes in pointed terms, the area has made a massive contribution to the Scottish and UK economy over the past 40 years, as host to the North Sea industry, without always getting a great deal out of it.
This is pay-back time.
The Aberdeen City Region team has to work with two governments and this creates the potential for tension.
Whereas City Deals were devised in Whitehall as a means of devolving decision-making, initially within England, Edinburgh has developed a tendency to pull in the other direction, towards the centre.
City Deals represent a challenge to that trend.
Just as the UK needs powerful regional centres with enough muscle to challenge the economic might of London, so the Scottish Government must recognise the need for distinctive regions to exercise more powers and take key strategic decisions that will shape their future.
The breadth of support for the City Deal bid – including, of course, Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce – is impressive.
Even without substantial additional funds that approval of the bid will trigger, the mere fact of having so many strategic partners working together is a huge bonus.
Too often, organisations operate within their own areas of responsibility without seeing the need to buy into a bigger picture.
The City Deal bid has already acted as a catalyst for countering that approach with all the big public sector players in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire joining forces with key sectors of the local economy.
To take one example of how this works, the proposed Energetica University Enterprise Zone makes complete sense.
Aberdeen and Robert Gordon Universities are committed to strengthen their partnership with business to create “a world-class corridor between Aberdeen and Peterhead which offers unique investment and growth opportunities to energy, engineering and technology organisations of all sizes”.
Collaborations already exist and elevating them into “a world-class corridor” is easier said than done.
Yet precedent elsewhere suggests that adopting such a concept encourages people to buy into it and make their location decisions accordingly – particularly when, as the bid document suggests, there are to be tax breaks, capital grants and international promotion to underpin the idea.
There are many such examples of creative thinking within the bid which has the potential to be truly transformational.
Once the go-ahead is given, the two council leaders, Jenny Laing and Jim Gifford, have proposed the establishment of a City Region Deal Executive “to ensure robust and timeous decision making”.
To many who have had to fight their way through existing channels of decision-making, whether national or local, these words alone will usher in a mood of optimism.