Morrison focuses on tradeable services in Invest role

The former banker sees a way forward for the North without big projects, writes Carissa Casey

Twenty-six years as an investment banker in London, Tokyo and Wall Street may not be the best training ground for the first chief executive of Invest NI, Northern Ireland's revamped job-creation agency.

For Leslie Morrison it must have been a rude awakening when he arrived back in Belfast in 2002 to take up the position. To go from cutting billion dollar deals in the cloistered seclusion of Wall Street boardrooms to taking public flak from every newly-elected councillor in Northern Ireland cannot have been easy.

"I have found it difficult," he says. "Public accountability can make you very frustrated if you're not prepared to stand back and say that's the way it is. I have a fairly short fuse. I think I'm an impatient person and I want to get things done."

Four years on and it is only in the past few months that Morrison has managed to gather his 400-strong headquarters staff under one roof. Invest NI is an amalgamation of Northern Ireland's old Industrial Development Board with several smaller agencies focused on supporting indigenous enterprise, overseas trade and industrial research.

"It's extremely difficult to bring organisations together. It would have been nice to have done it faster," he says. "All organisations have different cultures. They don't really have as different a way of doing things as they think. It takes a process of acculturation to do simple things, get people to know each other, realise that they're not that different."

Morrison's arrival also followed a dramatic slowdown in the level of foreign direct investment from the heady days of the late 1990s.

A combination of a buoyant international market and the feel-good factor of the peace process saw FDI peak in Northern Ireland at £530 million sterling (€764 million) in the late 1990s. The 14 new projects announced in the past fiscal year to March 2006 represented an investment of just £155 million sterling, although follow-on commitments from existing companies added another £205 million to the overall investment figure.

Ten years after the ceasefires, a more jaundiced view of the peace dividend has also set in. The British exchequer is champing at the bit to rein in the £6 billion annual subvention which keeps the region's bloated public sector economy afloat. One in three workers is employed by the state and never has there been greater focus on the need for more private-sector jobs.

Morrison deftly side-steps responsibility. "We're not going to change fundamentally the £6 billion subsidy without growing the private sector. Is the private sector growing as fast as people would like? No. Can it grow at two or three times the rate without rather radical macro-economic measures? I don't think so. Radical macro-economic measures are not within our remit."

One very obvious radical measure would be to reduce Northern Ireland's level of corporation tax from its current 30 per cent to the Republic's rather more attractive 12.5 per cent.

Like many in Northern Ireland, Morrison believes that it is the cut-rate corporation tax which has created the Celtic Tiger, and he admits that it would be a "great help" in boosting Northern Ireland's private sector.

There are ongoing efforts from business and political leaders to persuade the British government to consider such a measure.

Morrison, like many others, remains sceptical about the chances of a reduced tax rate, but he is hopeful that additional fiscal incentives, such as tax credits, might be introduced.

For the moment, though, he works with what he has. If manufacturing is deserting in droves to the Far East, there are always tradeable services.

In the past few years, Northern Ireland has netted a series of high-profile software development projects from the likes of Citibank, Liberty Mutual, Northbrook Technology and Polaris.

"We produce great software graduates and we're not as expensive as London. The University of Ulster has the largest IT department of any university in the UK, so we have a big flow of people coming through," he says.

Side by side with high-end software development jobs, Northern Ireland has managed to attract large call centre projects. Just last month, ICICI One Source, one of India's largest business process outsourcing companies, announced that it would create 1,000 new jobs in Northern Ireland.

The agency has also managed to nab a few projects from the Republic.

Dublin telecommunications company Imagine Communications Group announced last month that it would create 304 new jobs in an Armagh-based contact centre. According to Morrison, this trend is likely to continue as the Republic's rapidly expanding economy runs out of space.

But along with these successes are the inevitable closures. In May, Prudential announced that it was axing 500 jobs in Belfast. In March, the West Belfast-based medical company Trivirix, employing 80 people, went into administration.

A few miles from the Trivirix plant, the old IDB industrial estate of Springbank consists of several deserted purpose-built factories for companies that either failed to turn up or came and went. There's the 3,901sq m (42,000sq ft) former home of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Multimedia InfoTech that promised 150 jobs in a relatively deprived area. It received £4.23 million in financial assistance from Invest NI and its predecessor, the IDB, and employed just 70 people before going into receivership.

At least two other overseas companies that were handed new premises at Springbank also went bust, failing even sooner to meet the promised job targets.

Morrison is surprisingly dismissive of the problem, an attitude unlikely to endear him to local politicians.

"Simply because an area requires jobs doesn't mean that they should go there. What we do is try to ensure that we get value for money in projects we support. If they did all succeed, we wouldn't be taking enough risk," he says. "We're quite happy to have some free property."

He is also less concerned about netting large job-creating projects than his political counterparts might like. He points out that unemployment is running at a fairly benign 4.5 per cent, although the economically inactive, at 26 per cent, still leads the rest of the UK by five percentage points. "The issue is not unemployment - the issue is income," he says. "I do feel that the move into tradeable services is the way forward. You only get wealthier if you have a relative advantage. If it's true - and I think it is - there's an advantage to doing those things here."

Does the criticism bother him? "It's the nature of the job. People expect radical improvements and think we can provide it. There have been incremental improvements, but you can't radically change the thing if you don't have control of macro-economic policy. We're a public service organisation.

"We have many objectives, many stakeholders. It's impossible to satisfy the wishes of everyone."