Are council votes fair? A look at how council votes create bias in a BID ballot and why they should abstain.
Local authorities with properties in a BID area will be charged just like any any other non-domestic properties, and with that comes a vote for each property. That sounds fair you might say, but lets consider the counter arguments of what it means for the BID ballot, and importantly the businesses whom the Taunton BID proposer is saying the BID is really for.
Just to clarify what we mean by property, it is any hereditament that has a non-domestic rate-able value (RV), and interestingly includes anything from shops and offices as you’d expect, to ATM installations, advertising hoardings, car parks, communication stations / towers, beach huts and much more. Within the proposed Taunton BID area any property owner with a RV of £5,000+ will have to pay the levy, which then gives each property a vote in the ballot.
Hereditaments are hugely important to a BID proposal, especially if the local authorities or other landowner has voting rights for a large number, as they can make a big difference to a BID ballot result. Guess who appears to be the biggest single voting organisation in Taunton? You guessed it, Somerset West & Taunton (SWT) Council with at least 11 properties (we wait to be corrected from Taunton BID’s feasibility study count of 8, see here for our findings about Taunton BID missing out SWT council properties in the feasibility study and launch presentation. Somerset County Council have 2 properties shown in the feasibility study, and a central government owned property (brendon House on the High Street) was added to the revised BID map on 16/12/19.
It’s also important to understand that it’s not just the number of votes that are important to a BID ballot, as a YES vote has to pass both the following tests:
Majority by number of voters.
Majority by total aggregated RV (and the amount of RV is essentially proportional to the size of property).
When you consider that some of the council properties such as car parks are some of the biggest RV properties in the BID area, you can start to appreciate why the council / public authority votes matter to the BID proposers for a YES vote. Of all Taunton BID properties with a RV value over £150,000, the councils owns over 17% of them. For reason of both number of votes and RV weighting, you can see why Taunton BID have already identified how important it is to try and secure the votes of both councils, even before informing most businesses a BID proposal was coming.
Many BID’s across the UK have been voted in with slim majorities, and given the reality of council’s commonly voting YES for BID’s (see our views on BID & council partnerships here), one is right to question the YES bias effect of council’s in BID ballots. For example lets take what was reported in the November 2018 Andover BID ballot:
“the BID was voted in by the use of votes cast by Test Valley Borough Council.”
“Andover’s BID was ‘elected’ within a maelstrom of controversy. The majority of businesses in Andover voted against the BID, many claiming ‘immoral use’ of borough council votes.”
“51.1% of ‘businesses’ in Andover were in favour of the scheme, however the vote was swung by Test Valley Borough Council’s ownership of car parks in town; this enabled them to vote in favour of adopting the BID.”
The Andover saga continues and a Press article on 17th August 2019 reports how an Andover Councillor is making a stand against his own councils, after recognising the undemocratic way council voting bias influenced the BID YES vote. Read the full article here.
And here’s another scary example of council voting bias, read this article 'Scarborough Council has ignored the concerns of businesses'. Like Andover the BID was narowly voted in, but the council’s cast 1/3 of all YES votes (81 in total)! Do the maths and this BID was voted in by only 10% of voting businesses (non-council properties), no wonder they are having problems now and the business community is trying to overturn the BID decision.
Wellingborough Borough Council is another interesting voting case, given that in previous BID ballot’s they’ve voted YES, in addition to NO, and guess what, the BID decision went the way of the Council each time. So for Wellingborough BID’s next ballot (September 2019) the Council decided to ABSTAIN, so it truly was a decision by the businesses whom a BID is meant to be for (and the BID still failed to get a majority).
The Taunton BID proposers keep telling us that the businesses will decide on whether the BID is voted in, but in reality it’s the businesses plus the local authorities, and in a close ballot the vote can easily swing towards a YES by the percentage of council votes combined with high RV values. Do you as a business think it’s right the car parks and toilets have equal voting rights to you, and in fact greater voting bias where RV is concerned given car parks can be quite large; when you’ve been told it’s you businesses that will decide! Just doesn’t seem fair does it?
One can see why car parks are sometimes “tagged” onto a BID area by the BID proposers, take for example Taunton’s Wood Street car park which is dubiously added in whereas the business next to it aren’t, and also Canon Street car park where no public access to the car park is even included on the BID area map. Of course the positive aspect is that money will be raised from the two council’s, higher RV means higher levy payment, and according to the feasibility study (before our suggested corrections) the council’s will pay £22,103. By law the council’s will have to find that budget like any of the levy payers. But look at it another way, if voted in the BID private tax is taking public funds by demand whether the council votes YES or NO; these are funds that the council’s could perhaps invest into Taunton town centre anyway if they wished, such as reducing car parking fees for example.
How would you feel if like Andover, Taunton BID was voted in by such a slim majority that it was the council votes that swung it, and not really the businesses that have been told by Taunton BID that it’s they who will decide? For Taunton, if Somerset County Council, SWT Council and the DWP Central Government bulildng vote YES and given average BID ballot turnout of 46.42%, our figures show that public authority votes would equate to:
7% of the total number of votes.
17% of the cumulative RV votes - nearly a fifth! To put this perspective, this public authority RV vote number would be equivalent to the RV of over 80 BID businesses on Corporation Street, Hammet Street, Bridge Street, St James Street & Magdalene Lane.
For just two voting decisions this is significant voting influence on the Taunton BID ballot. As you can see, council votes appear to exert too much influence on the outcome of a BID (effectively voting bias), when the BID is being sold to us as “for the businesses, voted in by the businesses”.
We request that the Taunton Chamber of Commerce ask the local authorities to abstain from voting.
If a Business Plan is produced by Taunton BID for ballot, in the same way the YES side will be lobbying both the Council’s to vote YES, we could contact both Council’s with a view to meeting and having the NO case heard. But we believe that even a council NO vote is also a vote against businesses that would like a BID, thus creating the possibility of voting bias the other way.
Hence we have a suggestion that firmly puts the voting decision with the BID businesses. If the BID proposal eventually goes to ballot, we request that the Taunton Chamber of Commerce formally asks both Somerset West & Taunton Council and Somerset County Council to ABSTAIN from voting.
We have already made this request to Taunton BID three times, but unfortunately the third time they said no. After proper consideration we’re hoping there’s a chance Taunton BID might change their mind though! Each Council has 3 voting options; YES, NO or ABSTAIN, and we’ve seen these three options for the Council’s minuted here in Taunton, so abstaining is a serious consideration for both council’s.
Clearly the final decision to exercise their vote or not will be the prerogative of each Council, but if the Taunton Chamber of Commerce really want to put the BID businesses at the heart of a Taunton BID vote, surely they would agree to at least formally write to both council’s and request them to abstain? If not, it demonstrates that Taunton BID are not really interested in listening to the wishes of the voting businesses, and in an attempt to force through the BID are happy to accept the possibility of council voting bias against those businesses.
This spreadsheet is based on “final” SWT hereditament list released 28/1/20.
This beggars belief and demonstrates map manipulation at it's finest!! Why on earth do Taunton BID suddenly think the Job Centre would naturally be a good addition to the BID area, whilst still excluding businesses like Morrisons? It stinks of subjective map manipulation in an attempt to secure massive council / public authority RV votes, to meet their narrow minded pet project aims at the expense of doing the right thing by Taunton businesses. Taunton BID are obviously desperate and will do whatever they can in sneaky ways to secure the RV vote this time!