BIDs have invested over £1 billion into high streets. Is this private money for public good or an undemocratic overstep?

 

There isn’t a one-size model for BIDs. They range from one of the smallest in New Addington, south London, to “super-BIDs” in London, which link a series of places together, such as Heritage Quarter in London (formed of the Victoria, Victoria Westminster, Whitehall and Northbank BIDs) or those that span a whole district (North Notts with over 1,100 businesses). 

 

BIDs don’t just mean decorative gestures like Christmas lights, street cleaning and hanging baskets. As Mary Portas said in 2011, they should be about more than “grime and crime”. Security is, nevertheless, the single biggest concern for high-street businesses today. The 2025 BID survey found the rise in crime and antisocial behaviour was a top priority, with 80 per cent of BIDs involved in “business crime reduction partnerships”. Phone snatching, retail theft and graffiti are daily realities that not only harm businesses but shape whether people feel safe in a place and whether they choose to return.

 

Some BIDs employ security staff that liaise with police. In Birmingham, the Central BID’s Safe Radio Network operates 260 digital radios across the city centre, connecting businesses to each other and to West Midlands Police and council CCTV operators. Bath BID created a “safe bus”, a permanent resource parked in the city centre to aid the night-time economy, providing first-response and welfare support. In its first 35 weeks it handled 298 incidents, preventing 116 people from requiring emergency services. The evidence suggests that BID crime interventions do work, though research also notes a displacement effect, with criminal activity shifting a mile or so beyond BID boundaries. 

 

Climate change issues are frequently promoted by BIDs – urban greening, air quality, flood resilience, thermal comfort, energy usage – when they align with local economic benefits such as boosting footfall. Pedestrianisation is a predominant theme. Living Streets’ Pedestrian Pound survey found 95 per cent of London BIDs agree that a safe, attractive walking environment is good for business. In Shrewsbury, BID-led pedestrianisation improvements drove a 25 per cent increase in sales. In London, the Northbank BID led the pedestrianisation of the Strand and Aldwych – one of central London’s most congested and hostile streets for pedestrians – a project that would have been inconceivable without sustained BID lobbying and fundraising.

 

 

High streets increasingly demand an experience beyond functional retail, and BIDs help achieve this, whether through organising licensing changes (more tables on streets) or promoting regular activities. Nairn Connects BID in Scotland has demonstrated this through its food and drink festival, a car rally, shop-local campaigns, painted shopfronts and new lighting. Investment has transformed this modest market town into a place that is vibrant and visited, bringing footfall and return-visitors after the events, as well as making it somewhere people want to work. 

 

Altrincham (south of Manchester) was a ghost town in 2010 with 30 per cent of shop units boarded up and the centre in visible decline. The BID set a deliberate vision for the town to be a “gastronomic destination” with independent shops, a revived market and improved public realm. It pursued this idea with enough consistency and for long enough to reverse the trajectory, and in 2018 the town won the Great British High Street award. It was also voted one of the best places to live in Britain by the Sunday Times for five consecutive years. That turnaround is due to the BID’s sustained effort rather than a single intervention. 

 

Aberdeen Inspired’s Upper Floors Project, winner of the Association of Town & City Management’s Best Business Support Scheme in 2025, addressed decades of decline on Union Street in the city centre. The BID assembled a task force of local-authority planners, architects, developers and letting agents to identify innovative uses for these empty spaces, reinstating something like a neighbourhood community above the ground-floor retail, and halving vacancy within just 18 months. “What Aberdeen has achieved in terms of tackling vacancy on Union Street already makes it a national beacon,” says Iain Nicholson, founder of The Vacant Shops Academy.

 

 

Better Bankside BID, currently in its fifth five-year plan, was backed by 92 per cent at its most recent five-year ballot. Public art and parklets have stitched heritage and green infrastructure back into a fragmented place that has suffered decades of intense pressure. Meanwhile, public art was taken to new heights by Leicester’s BID – funding an 82-metre-high graffiti mural painted on the side of a tower block by local artists, Europe’s tallest piece of street art. 

 

Regardless of an area’s size, a rule of thumb is that to successfully operate, a BID needs to raise around £100,000 a year. Because the levy is calculated as a percentage of rateable value, a BID’s ambition is partly determined by the property values in its territory. In lower-value areas, a BID has little room for anything beyond operational basics. But there is also a subtler distinction that BIDs can make about where to set their rateable value threshold (which decides which businesses are brought into the levy) and this decision can quietly determine the kind of organisation a BID becomes.

 

“If you set your threshold at zero then every barber, every newsagent, everyone, is paying you fifty quid,” says Pitkeathley. “But they feel it, and they want their hanging basket or their pavement fixed, their ‘pound of flesh’ out of you. Which is fine, but it means that the BID stays constantly distracted and localised. Whereas if your threshold’s higher, you’re dealing with the bigger businesses in an area, who can generally take a more strategic view.” 

 

Is there a risk of it being exclusive? “The reality is the smaller business gets the benefit, but they don’t have to pay,” says Pitkeathley. The challenge for BIDs is to ensure they are not ignoring the needs of those smaller, independent traders who give the place a unique character.  

 

 

Property ownership is another crucial part of the jigsaw. Much of what BIDs do directly benefits landlords as much as the occupying businesses, yet in nearly every UK BID, it is the occupier who pays the levy. This is unlike North American property owner models and entirely due to the UK not having data on property ownership. Absent landlords represent what Pitkeathley calls “the concrete ceiling to many town centres’ evolution”. They are the hardest stakeholder to engage and the one with perhaps the most power to obstruct or enable change. 

 

Heart of London Business Alliance (HOLBA) is a 500-strong multi-sector business membership organisation in the heart of London’s West End). It now operates as the UK’s first BID with a dual occupier and property-owner model, bringing landlords formally into the model. If this model travels beyond London, it could meaningfully shift the dynamic in town centres where ownership is fragmented and disengaged. 

 

Not every BID succeeds. The five-year ballot is the model’s most important accountability mechanism and it has real teeth – around one in ten BIDs do not make it to renewal, amid campaign groups such as Against BID publicising every failure. The reasons vary: a BID may grow too focused on its largest levy-payers at the expense of smaller businesses, it may duplicate what the local authority already does, or it may simply lose the trust that comes with transparency.

 

 

Economic pressures can be terminal. A good relationship with the local authority (which both runs the ballot and collects the levy) is crucial to survival. “It’s a tough tightrope between the local authority and the business community,” says Turner. The model cannot guarantee success, but it is arguably quicker to respond to failure than public-sector processes. 

 

Camden Highline, a proposal to transform a stretch of disused railway into a linear public park connecting Camden to the wider area, has been in development for six years. It is now in what Pitkeathley calls a “treacly” phase of legal negotiations, but it is still moving forward. A voluntary charity would struggle to sustain this kind of long-arc project through six years of bureaucratic friction, but a BID can. 

 

“Mostly what you get with a BID is a salaried team,” says Pitkeathley. “A lot of the money goes on people. And if you’ve got a good team and a good sense of direction and vision, then you can get things done.” The team size varies. Half of UK BIDs have only one or two staff, about 40 have no staff at all and rely on their board, while others might be able to pay a dozen employees. 

 

But even a salaried team can only do so much – after my interview with Pitkeathley, the BID announced that it was pausing the Camden Highline with immediate effect due to rising costs. Despite its uncertain future, the Camden Highline’s conception illustrates how BIDs can fund and develop a long-term vision for a place. 

 

“Going out and asking people what they want is usually fairly fruitless,” says Pitkeathley. “BIDs do that to their businesses all the time, and the business says ‘I don’t know, put up a hanging basket’, and there you go. I think you have to have something, an idea. It doesn’t mean you don’t go out and test people’s thinking and then refine it, but it’s an iterative process. You want to work with people who want to work with you because some people just want to moan. That’s fine but that’s the balance: trying to keep an eye on the vision while bringing as many people with you as you can.” This isn’t standard “consultation”.   

 

 

The gap that BIDs cannot fill is the residential one since their mandate is businesses. A BID serving a commercial high street has no mechanism (and arguably no business) representing the interests of people who live nearby but do not trade there. 

 

Community improvement districts (CIDs) were proposed as a counterbalance, the resident-led equivalents of the BID, piloted in 2022-23 by seven areas which each received £20,000 funding, as well as matched funding from the Mayor of London for two pilots in the capital: Wood Green and Kilburn. The initiatives produced meanwhile projects, community hubs, repair and reuse centres and a “toilet hackathon”.

 

The pilot project reached a simple conclusion: that CIDs are an approach, not a model, and their success depends heavily on local champions who can forge greater community connections. This was noted in the House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s 2024-6 report on high streets. This suggested that BID models might be expanded to require community representation beyond business owners. The model is evolving in response to its critics, but without abandoning what makes it work. And already, 36 per cent of BID boards now include community representatives while 88 per cent include local authority representation. 

 

Scotland is furthest ahead. Its Scotland’s improvement districts model, launched in 2018, reframes BIDs explicitly as “corporate-community-public partnerships” and integrates social outcomes with economic ones. There are 60 per cent more BIDs per capita in Scotland than in England, partly attributed to direct government funding. Scotland is testing BIDs, CIDs and hybrid models simultaneously, making it streets ahead in evolving the model. 

 

BIDs also use their might to influence national policy. “We are both constant and catalytic,” says HOLBA. “We demonstrate how BIDs can deliver locally while influencing change nationally, supporting businesses through rapid change while unapologetically advocating for their interests: from shaping local policy and securing regulation of pedicabs.”

 

HOLBA is also “leading the national conversation on business rates reform”. The current system, it says, disproportionately burdens those with physical premises. With digital and online business growing, this is a dire blow to struggling high streets. Retail and hospitality businesses represent an estimated 9 per cent of the economy yet contribute an estimated 34 per cent of all business rates, whereas the digital economy, contributing an estimated 20 per cent of economic output, pays an estimated 7-to-9 per cent of total business rates.

 

 

The consequences are felt not just by businesses but by consumers, as rising costs suppress spending and reduce the activity that makes a centre worth visiting. HOLBA proposes change through a “hybrid business rate” that combines a reduced property levy with a modest digital sales rate levied through the existing VAT system. It is hard to imagine an individual business or local authority mounting a challenge alone in the way that this super-BID has.  

 

There have been various competing organisations speaking for the BID network nationally and this confusion has not helped public understanding of BIDs. British BIDs is now the lead trade body, uniting them under a common (voluntary) membership and producing annual survey data which provides meaningful comparisons through statistics. This survey is refreshingly factual, with no images or promotional gloss, and goes straight to the government. This incentivises input.

 

Monthly bulletins help BIDs navigate issues like clarifying overlapping funding streams (from government funding, such as Pride in Place, to the Future High Streets Fund and Heritage Action Zones). Boosting their levy with funding is vital for BIDs to enact significant change – in 2025, 112 BIDs accessed government funding initiatives in some form. BIDs are starting to see themselves as not only spenders in their own right, but people who bring money in too.

 

“I would describe my job as a lobbyist, really,” says Pitkeathley. “I don’t have that much resource to play with. But I can pump-prime things, and then lobby to get additional resource or support in. That’s the fundamental job.” 

 

BIDs are not a substitute for well-funded, effective local government, nor a civic utopia. They represent commercial interests, operate within limits and are buffeted by the structural pressures – austerity, the rates system, the post-pandemic high street – that generate the conditions they work in. 

 

But the evidence does not support the idea that they are privatising public spaces or rolling out homogeneous gentrification. Instead, BIDs can provide a constructive alternative in the gap between budget-stripped local authorities and individual businesses too small to act strategically.  

 

Asked about the future of BIDs, Turner says: “It’s possible that we’ve reached what I would loosely call ‘peak normal BID’. Many of the larger towns and cities up and down the country have now got one, but there’s a question mark about what happens to the smaller business communities that don’t make some sort of notional viable threshold of around £100k. 

 

“Small-town BIDs need government support. The government needs to be putting money into these organisations to make them work. Small towns must be revived, and they will not be by simply relying on council tax and business rates because there is not enough money to do that.” 

 

BIDs need less criticism from those who misunderstand them and less marketing wash from those who endorse them. Developers, architects, local authorities and communities must engage with how BIDs can work best, including their funding mechanics, structural challenges and continual learning. 

 

“I see BIDs as a Robin Hood principle,” suggests Turner. If the private money is there, the challenge is for the public good to follow. 

 

---

Harriet Saddington is an architect and writer who works to bridge the gaps between those who commission, design, build and live in our built environment. She won the Feature Journalist of the Year 2025 at the International Building Press Awards.