Budget £75,825. Operating costs are an important consideration when looking at a BID business plan, because before even £1 is spent on front-line project ideas like marketing, events or crime, there is a private limited BID company to be set up, run and managed that will be responsible for delivering the Business Plan for BID members. Here’s our review of the BID operating costs and money SWT Council will make out of it.

£120,000. This is one big events budget and after BID operating/administration costs it’s a massive c60% of all the front-line project initiative funds, which effectively makes Taunton BID an events BID. This is our review of the ‘vibrant Taunton - events & activities’ part of the Taunton BID business plan.

Budget £30,000. This is our review of the ‘marketing - shout for Taunton’ part of the Taunton BID business plan. Whether the budget is a realistic figure really does depend on what BID’s planned and costed marketing initiatives they’ve come up with are. But whatever they are, do you agree that it should be BID’s place to create Taunton’s brand?

£20,000. Attractive & welcoming is essentially public realm upkeep, which really is the Council’s responsibility, so why should businesses be paying ontop of the rates they already pay to make sure it’s done better? The real fundamental public realm change Taunton needs is coming as the Council implements it’s garden town vision, the plans for which are very exciting and involve significant town infrastructure improvements for the town centre public realm.

Budget £10,000. This seems an underestimated budget for their cost saving ambitions. Saving businesses money will cost money upfront and this budget doesn’t even seem enough to pay a consultancy for their utility cost reduction services as other BID’s, let alone any left over to maybe consider reducing waste costs, subsudising Park & Ride fares, pay for training or any other cost reduction initiatives.

Budget £14,000. Any form of business representation and lobbying is good, but it does of course happen now anyway. So we’re not denying ourselves anything if BID is not voted in, and our district council at least seems willing to take input from all quarters. The BID telling it’s levy payers what’s going on is important, but should the approach be more inclusive with mechanisms to collect feedback and involve the businesses in decisions, unfortunately this statement of intent is missing.

Budget £15,000. It appears BID might have “missed a trick” by not conducting a proper research and consultation process around crime, all because they decided very early on it isn’t important. This has led to a business plan containing nothing more than some token effort statements on crime, as opposed to any properly costed, targeted and tangible actions to help solve Taunton’s big crime problems for BID businesses. There seems little point dressing the streets and marketing the town in an attempt to increase footfall, if Taunton’s crime and anti-social behaviour problems haven’t been tackled.

We inspected the BID ballot voter list and were shocked by the number of mistakes, such as properties within the BID map not included in the list to vote, and the inclusion of properties outside of the BID map able to vote. It’s important that a fair ballot is conducted, so we immediately made the Council and BID aware of the situation. The negligence shown by Taunton BID is staggering, they really don’t even know who their own voters are, so how on earth could they be trusted for 5 years if voted in? Looks like we’ve done the Council, Taunton BID and all the BID businesses a big favour, at least you can trust us!

Here’s some feedback we’ve received so far about the Taunton BID business plan and there’s much more in this article. “They don’t need best part of 300 grand to do all this talking, negotiating, encouraging and looking at.” “The council are going to love this, we can now really see how they will benefit from us picking up the tab for the town”. “I’m still annoyed Morrisons won’t have to pay, where’s the justice in that for us small businesses struggling to keep our heads above water?“. It’s interesting how concerns we’ve been raising for months are coming through from voters reading the Taunton BID proposal.

Perhaps the Taunton BID proposers and their yes supporters not worrying about having to pay the private BID tax, should actually give some moral consideration to those small businesses that just don’t need the extra cost forced on them.  When high street and town overheads are high enough as they are, and even Taunton is crying out for businesses to occupy units, why on earth do we want to discourage small independents from setting up, or even staying in town by having an extra mandatory business rate? BID affordability is proven to be an issue for many businesses.