When the 2008 Financial Crisis crossed the Atlantic and took hold of the UK’s economy, even relatively prosperous towns like Wimborne Minster started to feel the pinch. A group of concerned local businesspeople who saw the recession coming and worried about what it might do to their town, got together and decided to avail themselves of a new scheme called a Business Improvement District (BID). Setting up a BID would allow businesses to work together to raise funds from commercial rate-payers and other sources in order to improve their area and to help.
After a long and at times acrimonious campaign – asking people to pay an annual levy of 1.5% of the rateable value of their business in the teeth of a recession is never going to be universally popular – the BID team achieved enough votes to be set up. In order to win that election, the BID needed both to receive more than half the votes cast by ratepayers by number, but also more than half of the ratepayers calculated by the value of their rates paid.
Nearly five years on and Wimborne’s BID is seeking re-election for a second term, so it seemed an appropriate moment to sit down with the Chairman of the BID, Ian Faulkner, to see how he thinks the last five years have gone, what has been achieved, and what is yet to achieve.
Although he has been a BH21 resident for a couple of decades – since coming down to work at Frizzell’s as the board member responsible for strategy – Ian is not connected to a business in Wimborne, and this perceived impartiality was, along with his wealth of business experience an important factor in why he was chosen to join the board 15 months ago. His independence, along with his experience of being Chairman of a large and active homeless charity (now called St Mungo’s Broadway), made him the chosen candidate to be co-opted to chair the BID after Philip Maunder stepped down.
One of the first things he was asked to do was to make a presentation of the ‘Myths and legends of the BID’ and to say which, if any, he agreed with as an independent voice.
‘The primary myth,’ says Ian, is that the BID directors are all somehow in it for the money. None of the directors has taken a penny out of the BID, even Chris Slocock whose business has done printing for the BID, did it at cost. All the Directors on the board, and all the directors of the BID I have known, have done this only out of a passion for improving Wimborne.
‘It’s certainly been a tough eight or nine years for businesses in general and the directors have put their heads above the parapet by trying to do something, so people will be bound to have a go. It’s incredibly easy for someone to say “Well my takings aren’t up over the last four years,” and where are they going to point the finger? The BID’s an easy target .’
An easy target, perhaps, but an unfair one. Whilst it is impossible to prove that every business in Wimborne is better off – or indeed not as badly off as it might have been – because of the BID, it is pretty reasonable to say that national companies would not be pumping money into supporting the local independent stores in the same way without the BID levy, nor would there be the additional £30,000 spend available to the BID (on top of the roughly £90,000 it levies from commercial rates payer).
The BID levy is a very pure form of taxation; the money raised is spent in Wimborne, on Wimborne. The use of a levy also means that no-one gets a free ride. Were it just a voluntary contribution, the financial burden would most likely fall on those who were already doing the most.
So what goals did the BID initially set out to achieve, and how has it fared with achieving them. The original BID Business Plan covered projects in four areas, with a combined objective of bringing more people in to Wimborne. The four areas were:
• Making sure that the people that businesses want to come to Wimborne are aware of what is on offer.
• Supporting activities that make Wimborne a destination.
• Ensuring that the town is seen as clean, tidy and safe.
• Getting the best for Wimborne businesses. Giving businesses access to advice and services that help them improve.
Traditionally, the last of these is an area in which BIDs excel, as one of the things that BIDs ‘do’ is aggregate businesses to obtain lower rates for commercial recycling, but that’s not really come to pass in Wimborne as some companies are already immensely well catered for in this regard.
‘There was,’ says Ian, ‘also an ambition to create Wimborne Ambassadors, and that’s not really happened. Equally there was a specific workstream, which was about connecting businesses with the Dorset Mentoring Service and for whatever reason, the take-up on that was limited.
It’s fair to say that one area where the BID successfully put in a lot of work was on events that brought people into the town. Since the Square’s refurbishment, it is a hotspot for activities in the town. In terms of BID mk 2 (the years 2016-2021) the areas that the board wishes to address are:
• Parking
• Signage
• More/better marketing and advertising
• Making Wimborne a ‘destination’
• Moving people around town better
• Working together better
• Better use and alignment of internet, social media and physical presence
• Better environment
Some of these are extensions of the first BID, others
– like parking – are newer issues that have forced their way onto the agenda. Probably key to these, say Ian is ’to create a more cohesive, collaborative community structure to help the town work with itself to the benefit of all. There are things you can do to make a town better, but I don’t think we’ve got miles to go.
‘The BID has evolved, he continues, ‘a lot of my working life has been organisational change where a third of the people will be behind you whatever you do, a third of the people will be dead against what you do and a third of people are there to be persuaded.’
What is interesting, Ian reveals is that the naysayer’s argument doesn’t change; it’s precisely the same argument that was used in 2009: ‘I was talking to one of the new BID directors, and said to him to go out and about and talk to levy payers. “Because you’re new, people will give you their honest opinions,” I said. When he came back he said “Well, they certainly gave me their honest opinions,” and I was able to say to him exactly what all the “anti” people were saying and yet we’re in a very different position now than we were in 2011. In 2008/2009 the question was are we going to something or are we going to do nothing. Having decided to do something, it was then a question of what to do to keep Wimborne vital.
‘We did a consultation earlier this year which has created “A vision for Wimborne”. What we are looking at is how to get all the organisations that operate in Wimborne to operate together – Chamber of Trade, Town Council. EDDC, (in particular around what happens to Crown Mead). We’re starting to talk to EDDC about how we can turn Wimborne into a Historic Market Town that’s fit for the 21st century. Some of that is about working together better, for example it took 18 months to get a sign put up to show the businesses on West Street, just because f the number of authorities involved in doing that. So the number one thing is about trying to get the town to act cohesively.
‘After a year of effort, the BID and Chamber of Trade are working together much more closely, we’re getting the logo used more; we’re encouraging businesses to use that logo on their websites and literature and then we can use that imagery and tone of voice and phraseology so that the brand of Wimborne is much more recognisable everywhere.’
‘Looking forward [from what levy payers have been saying] we will probably see less financial support for events, but more effort into making sure the town looks as beautiful an experience both physically and otherwise and making sure that the town is represented outside of BH21 more effectively.’
The BID is faced with two paradoxes. The first is that the Wimborne Minster branding is much more important and visible than the BID’s branding, which is what the town needs to promote it. But to get re-elected, the BID needs the levy payers to understand what it has done for the town. If it markets the town too well and itself too little, it could successfully brand itself out of existence.
The second paradox is that the more successful the BID helps Wimborne to become – by marketing its wonderful mix of independent stores and wonderful uniqueness – the more footfall the town will receive, the more national chains will want a foothold in the town and the higher the commercial rents will go, which then threatens the independents. ‘I am a supreme optimist about the outcome of the BID re-election,’ says Ian, ‘but I’m also well aware of the issues.’
While the argument for the BID is a sophisticated one to comprehend and a difficult one to make simple, Ian Faulkner does his best: ‘I’d simply like to ask the smaller traders how they would make Wimborne better on their own, and at a cost of just 50p a day [the average cost of the levy on independent stores].’