Ambitious BID to put £15m into city centre

Oct 3 2007 by Graeme King, The Journal

BUSINESSES are being asked to sign up for a new scheme which could see £15m spent on improving Newcastle city centre.

The City Centre Partnership (CCP) in Newcastle wants to launch a Business Improvement District (BID) for city companies to contribute to a fund to optimise Newcastle as a centre for business.

Measures it could implement include more street cleaning, improved signage, extra police or street wardens for better security, more entertainment on the city’s streets and more investment on marketing the city.

The BID would work through making an extra charge on the business rates of the 3,300 businesses in the city centre.

This would add 1% to the rateable value of each business, raising a total of around £1.5m each year for the five-year life of the project. That cash would then be matched with contributions from bodies such as One NorthEast.

If it was to get the go ahead, the Newcastle BID would be the biggest of its kind in the country.

The CCP has already undertaken extensive research with around 500 businesses – including such big names as Fenwick and John Lewis – about what they would like to see a BID achieve.

And director Sean Bullick hopes it can deliver real benefits to the city and its businesses. He says anything the BID achieves will be on top of what taxes pay for and will be specifically targeted according to what businesses want.

Mr Bullick said: “We’ve got a fantastic city, but if we want to match and better the best that European cities have to offer, this is a mechanism to achieve that.”

Coun David Faulkner, deputy leader of Newcastle City Council and chairman of the City Centre Partnership, said: “I think we need to up our game in the city. By championing the BID, it encourages businesses to invest in the improvements to the general climate and environment of the city, in addition to the investment the council is putting in.”

A six-page document outlining what the BID is, and what it could achieve, will be sent to all 3,300 businesses in the next fortnight, together with a questionnaire asking for business owners to prioritise what is important to them.

Once those results have been collated, the CCP will draw up a draft business plan for the BID and then late next year, all the businesses will have the chance to examine that plan and vote on whether to establish the BID.

For the vote to be won, it must be supported by not only a simple majority of those voting, but also by a majority of the rateable value in the city centre.

This is intended to ensure that the vote cannot be won either by a large number of small businesses voting one way or the other, nor by a small number of large businesses backing a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote. The concept of a Business Improvement District comes from the US and was imported to the UK several years ago. There are now 42 BIDs across the country including several in London, as well as in cities such as Brighton, Liverpool and Leicester.

The North-East Chamber of Commerce has given the principle of establishing a BID in Newcastle qualified backing but said it still needs to see the detail of the proposals.

Neil Barker, chairman of the chamber’s Newcastle committee, said: “In broad terms we are supportive of the concept, but until we see the detail as to how it will impact on both the smaller and larger businesses within the proposed area, it’s very difficult to advise our members on what impact there may be.

“We are always concerned for the business community where additional business rates are proposed. We need to know that this will be properly targeted and everyone will know exactly what money they are putting in and what it will be spent on.”