Life without BID (3) – Businesses can come together in other ways, and we can have a more inclusive business community without BID.

Let’s remember that BID is an ‘exclusive club’ of selected business, and if you’re not ‘specially selected’ to pay the BID tax you’re not part of the club and don’t ‘benefit’ from BID activities or have a say in your town through BID.

BID does accept voluntary members, but there’s just one mentioned on the BID website – great endorsement eh? This alone demonstrates that non BID businesses see BID as a poor investment, otherwise surely they too would be lining up to join? Equally there are many businesses that would rather opt out of the BID club they have been forced to join!

But by having a BID club of selected businesses, it’s not really an inclusive business group that is representative of the whole Minehead business economy, what about Mart Road businesses, or all the hotels and holiday lets, or Alcombe businesses who are all left out, bit selfish isn’t it? Even Minehead Town Council recognise this and asked BID to consider including Mart Road in BID2.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all Minehead businesses worked together and prospered as a whole through co-operation? Sadly, BID doesn’t work this way and so by having a BID we’re letting down Minehead’s wider economy and fellow businesses Minehead also relies on.

As an alternative way for businesses to come together there are other collaborative business associations, CIC or town partnership type bodies which could be considered. Minehead Chamber of Commerce is just one option, funny how it has been given no effort to resurrect since BID has been in place. These bodies are voluntary, and ok, they don’t raise significant funds through taxation, but given how much money has been wasted we don’t need the vast amounts of money BID has raised and wasted.

So be it a Chamber or another business / traders association there are alternative ways a wider cross section of businesses can come together to help each other, improve trading and have a collective voice.

These bodies can raise funds through voluntary membership, sponsorship, access grants just like BID, and be given or ask Councils for funding. So even BIDs claim they’ve raised £X extra funds isn’t anything special, all that money was available to Minehead without a BID.

In the same way these other bodies can access funding just like BID, they can also lobby, and let’s remember that lobbying costs nothing! BID is not a special lobbying body, it’s just something they say they can do, but BID have shown themselves to be ineffective at lobbying for us, just look at the lack of action and lobbying that has been done over the years for seafront toilets.

So let’s not have a special BID club, let’s look at other ways in which a wider selection of Minehead businesses can work together without unfairly taxing some.

n.b. This is just one post talking about life without BID, so please also read the other posts aswell to get a complete picture.