 Good news for the job market last week: the number of people out of work fell by 8000 to 208,000 between January and March 2011, the sixth consecutive reported drop, taking Scotland s joblessness rate below that of all but the richest regions of England.  Like any politician worth his salt, re-appointed Finance Secretary John Swinney took the credit for his administration, saying the figures  emphasise the importance of the measures we are taking to support the creation of new employment and training opportunities .  But there is a far bigger helping of political credit at stake on jobs. Paradoxically it relates to last week s bad news on jobs, reported a day or two earlier.  a new UK-wide survey by the TUC found West Dunbartonshire   which includes post-industrial Clydebank, Dumbarton and the Vale of Leven   has overtaken London s poorest boroughs to record some of the worst unemployment statistics in the whole of Britain.  according to the survey, there are more than 40 dole claimants in the region for every vacancy in March this year. In other words, there were 3786 people chasing  the 94 opportunities advertised in local jobcentres.  But West Dunbartonshire s statistic are the ones that we should be watching for good news.  Most people are aware that slight increases in the national employment figures are down to many factors often unrelated to political interventions. But to impact Scotland s blighted post-industrial corners signals far more exciting prospects for accelerating Scotland s GDP growth. and bad publicity notwithstanding, West Dunbartonshire can claim to be transforming itself in ways that statistics have not yet caught up with.  If and when they do, this overlooked post-industrial pocket may provide the key to transforming Scotland s chronically weak growth performance.  Bad publicity on a national scale has not fazed Councillor Ronnie McColl, head of the minority SNP-led West Dunbartonshire Council. To him, the figures describe the past. He has already made  tough decisions  to improve the future, and has staked his reputation on making it work.  It s always hard to read headlines that single us out, it s a knock that we don t need. We can t argue with figures, they just make me more determined to ensure that we don t have headlines like that any more.  McColl, a shrewd, no-nonsense former small business operator who likes to lead from the front, has a clear view of what has gone wrong here in the past few decades, and of how it has to change.  Things have stagnated to a certain extent. There has been no willingness to look at how things are in the 21st century. The industry is not going to come back, not just because West Dunbartonshire is not good at it, but because it s not needed, not just in the west of Scotland but anywhere.  We need to look at what we can bring to the area. There has been an unwillingness to look at changes to the economy to fit with modern reality. Why isn t this area involved in manufacturing for the green economy? We should be skilling people up to work in that sector as it s only going to get greater and greater in the next 10 or 20 years. We should be skilling people to work in tourism because that s something we can do, and which can be done a lot better.  For McColl and community planning chief Peter Barry, the public sector s role in a small and manageable council area of multiple deprivation is to find ways to get those  furthest away from the jobs market  into a state of confidence that leads to sustainable jobs, and to make it a matter of common sense for businesses to take them on. The council has stripped out the  too many cooks agencies and initiatives that cluttered the landscape and wasted a lot of time. McColl remains wary of externally generated interventions that confuse the picture.  We have the intelligence about the area and we can react quickly, which is good as I like things done yesterday. Having looked at the outcomes that have been achieved, or rather not achieved over the last 10 years, we have to start getting a more confident and skilled workforce, and to get partnerships going between the public sector and small business.  Most of the work available now is in service-industry jobs. Tourism is a big thing here, Loch Lomond is known worldwide. We have got to make sure that the workforce knows what their job is, it s not just about going in and pulling a pint if we want people come back and spend money here.  West Dunbartonshire s practical approach, some of it borrowed from other councils, is to use its outsized public and third-sector welfare apparatus as an ally in its efforts to promote employability. It takes a pro-active approach to determining what small businesses need, and helping to supply it.  Peter Barry outlines schemes such as job brokerage   matching former benefit claimants to jobs; wage subsidy   offering incentives to employers by topping up wages for new workers for a 28-week trial period that will benefit the worker and is expected to lead to a sustainable job; and job rotation   where a business that needs to upskill workers by sending them for training can fill in the gap from a pool of interns keen to get work experience.  The council, adept at extracting money from central government, is also trying innovations like the securitisation of assets, borrowing ?35m against future rents from its property for investment in building new schools, restoring shopping centres, and other infrastructure work. all such spending is on a spend-to-save  basis, with future returns having to be clearly evident.  West Dunbartonshire now demands to be judged on the difference it makes,  not just tick-box outcomes, but real differences to real lives , says McColl. He lacks patience with the post-1980s West of Scotland way of  saying what s wrong and how it s not their fault, but don t say how you would fix it. I m not saying that everything we do will work, but we are sure as hell trying .  That view is supported by Gordon Barraclough, a business consultant who heads the 200-member Dunbartonshire Chamber of Commerce. He sees the area starting to defy decades of stagnation.  I am a fairly critical person but the council s economic development team are very much on the ball in their knowledge of the business in the area. They have a very focused, well thought-through programme,  says Barraclough.  There are too many people who are doing too much good work for it not to have a good medium and long-term outcome. In fact you can already see the difference. These are not  council jobsworths, they are committed to making a difference.  The difference needed should not be underestimated. The headline unemployment figure sits at the tip of a pyramid of negatives, which can easily become self-reinforcing (see panel). This being Scotland, it is of course the bad news that has dominated perceptions of West Dunbartonshire since the de-industrialisation of the 1960s and 1970s and the loss of giant employers like John Brown Shipyards, which at its peak employed more than 10,000 people, and sewing machine-makers Singer with 22,000 staff, mostly women.  In the decades that followed, a one-party political culture disgraced the nation (Google the X-rated 2007 audit Scotland report on council behaviour), generating screeds of targets, strategic waffle, and futile measurements of money spent and people processed. None of which made a difference to West Dunbartonshire s reputation as problematic Scotland in microcosm, or to the complicated lives of the long-term unemployed and their often academically low-achieving children.  Unglamorous, long-term, and unlikely to attract political, media or corporate attention, the grass-roots drive to make West Dunbartonshire a place where people choose to live, work, visit and invest has far more transformative potential for Scotland than other more fashionable growth areas like offshore renewables or bioscience.  Says McColl:  In the past we focused on how many people went through the system and how much money we spent, which didn t tell us how many people went to a different place. We need to find measures that stay with people, so that if someone knocks on our door once, they  