Current status: Answered by Richard Lochhead on 3 July 2025
To ask the Scottish Government how many manufacturing jobs have been created through inward investment in (a) Scotland and (b) each local authority area, in each of the last five years.
Scotland has a strong record in attracting foreign direct investment and our Inward Investment Plan (IIP) plays a central role in supporting this by targeting key sectors such as high-value manufacturing and energy transition.
Responsibility for measuring Scotland’s inward investment performance, which includes planned jobs and supply chain impacts for involved projects, rests with Scottish Enterprise. The independent EY Attractiveness Survey and the DBT annual inward investment results provide an additional performance indicator for inward investment. Collectively the results, though based on different methodologies and published at different intervals during the year, help the Scottish Government build a broader understanding of Scotland’s inward investment performance.
Whilst the Scottish Government nor Scottish Enterprise holds specific data on manufacturing jobs created through inward investment at local authority level, information on how Scotland has performed in terms of attracting investment in key sectors is available via the EY attractiveness survey (the latest results can be found here: ey-uk-attractiveness-survey-scotland-06-2025.pdf and the Department for Business and Trade Inward Investment Results (the latest results can be found here: DBT inward investment results 2024 to 2025 - GOV.UK). Scottish Enterprise results will be published in the Autumn.