Feasibility study mistakes: Bridge Street

Bridge Street is one of the street’s we have highlighted in our mistakes summary, and this page shows our sample research for Bridge Street based on the draft proposed BID map. A small margin of error could perhaps be acceptable, but we’re confident our research shows that:

• The voting property count should be 21 (instead of 31 stated by Taunton BID / the BID Consultants).

• The total annual RV should be in the region of £529,650 (instead of £642,250 stated by Taunton BID / the BID Consultants).

Using the Taunton BID map and the Governments’ National Non-Domestic Rates List 2017 (NNDR), these are the properties we’ve identified as being within the draft proposed BID area:

Please feel free to look at Bridge Street yourself if you’d like to re-check the figures, it’s actually quite an easy street to research. And if upon checking you find we are the ones who have made the glaring mistakes then please show us your workings and we will apologise, but we’re pretty confident in our look at Bridge Street.

We think we’ve spotted the error though!

We think we’ve identified the error of the BID Consultants, and identified the 10 properties that are not within the BID map that have been added. The properties we think have been added are circled in green on the map to the right and are listed below.

When you look at the street numbering it appears that the BID Consultant’s have just assumed that every property upto 31 must be within the BID map, without appreciating the actual numbering of the properties on the ground. Surely if good fieldwork was done, it would have shown this?

When you add the 10 properties below then you come to the feasibility study count of 31 and within £1,600 in RV, which is pretty close!

As we’ve already stated, we accept that our “sample look” may not be 100% accurate, after all, unlike the BID Consultants we haven’t been paid public money to spend copious amounts of time doing detailed research as the basis for a feasibility study. But we believe we’ve clearly demonstrated that the Bridge Street voting property count and cumulative RV, are in reality both much lower than they are stated in the feasibility study. We’ve not even checked all the BID area streets, but along with the mistakes we identified in missing out council properties, there certainly appears enough evidence to throw doubt on the competence of the BID Consultants’ feasibility study work. This is important because it’s a matter of trust, in addition to the study being the fundamental basis for the current proposal and business plan being developed.

P.S. Don’t forget to look at our summary of mistakes here.