Thinking about Business Improvement Districts
Sitting through a discussion about Business Improvement Districts and their future one speaker caught my attention. ‘We risk breaking the BID model, because public services are broken.’ Much of the debate that followed featured descriptions of how BIDS are being dragged away from additionality, providing more than core services, to needing to augment or deliver core services as local authority provision shrinks.
The first and most striking insight I had into that conversation was that you could have replaced the word ‘BIDS’ with town councils, and had much the same conversation. Increasingly, in the town council sector, the experience is that striking the balance between core and additional services is more and more difficult, and Town and Parish councils are being asked to assume responsibility for core services.
As a sector, Town and Parish councils can’t always be as outspoken about the state of public services as our colleagues in the BID sector can be. Nor can we be as outspoken towards the BID sector as we might wish to be. One example came up during the discussion about the new accommodation sector BID in Manchester. The BID model in England is built entirely around the BID only being accountable to its levy payers; Anna Minton and others have been consistently critical of the way in which BIDs can replace rather than supplement local government, and with good reason. The extent to which BIDS are an urban phenomenon is relatively under-researched, and may be a feature of their design, as policy focusses increasingly on urban issues to the extent that even urban places in a rural context aren’t easily able to access the BID model.
Those criticisms of BIDs have been around since the early 2000s and they haven’t in a sense, changed. Parliament grants powers to the BID to collect a levy that is indistinguishable, to many people, from a tax, and the BID in turn acquires place shaping powers that would formerly have rested with the local authority.
In a very English way BIDS, as corporations established by statute, aren’t a new thing. In Berwick we have the Freemens Guild, a corporation and charity established by statute who hold considerable sums of money and other assets, and who have significant impacts on Berwick as a place by encouraging and enabling development of some of the land they own. When I began as clerk at Berwick a portion of the council agitated vigorously for the funds of the freemen to be spent on projects that were socially valuable rather than on growing the investment portfolio. On a moral basis I understand the case for that argument; the problem, as with BIDs, is that statutory corporations are not necessarily accountable to anyone other than the members specified (either by name or as a class) in the legislation.
A purposeful public conversation about BIDs, and where they fit in a democracy, would be a good thing. However, my view is that there’s a wider discussion to be had about a much broader area of how corporations privileged by statute are held accountable, and how they fit into much broader place making partnerships. I never thought I’d say this, but from this perspective, with hindsight, the strategic partnerships of the noughties and the frameworks that sat around them may have looked like new magistracies, but are better options than where we are now. BIDs take the same problem that strategic partnerships had and push it further along the road towards what looks like a new feudalism, where property rights are more privileged than individuals.
