I WOULD like to take this opportunity to write to you and explain to yourselves a few facts about the Trowbridge Business Improvement District and to enlighten you of the reasons why a Vote NO campaign was established.

The Trowbridge BID awareness group was set up in January 2016 by Edward Kirk and Matthew Brown when they learnt that the council were trying to propose a BID. It was solely by their efforts of organised meetings that many local businesses learnt and understood what a BID was. It was after these meetings and a Mosaic business workshop that myself and many other traders decided that we could not support a BID for the following reasons.

Mosaic totally failed to engage with all potential levy payers.

The voting procedure is proven to be undemocratic with the facts being that ballot slips are not via recorded delivery or to the rate payer's billing address, only to the property addresses, which could be empty, and in some instances the levy payer only knows about the BID when they get the levy, as proven in Chippenham.

Also the BID proposer sends ballot slips to head offices of national companies knowing that they will get a yes vote as they have already worked together in other towns that have established BIDs.

We believe the council should abstain from using their votes as it is a conflict of interest as they want the BID established. We are led to believe that Wiltshire Council have as many as 20 votes and this includes car parks, again as proven in many other BID areas this is enough votes to affect a democratic result.

A BID company when formed should be transparent and accountable. Setting up a private company to run the BID is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and so this allows them to spend the money on what they see fit and remain unanswerable. There are many examples of BID failing, BID companies massively overspending proposed budgets and BID personnel operating for self-gain. With this in mind it is totally possible for the town council to run the BID.

The idea of a BID is for business improvement with the hope of increasing footfall and turnover for the levy payers. It is our belief from many examples of BID business plans that so-called additional services will not help businesses, they are just in reality top-ups on services that the council should already provide. There is definitely a severe lack of hard evidence with many established BIDs that business is truly improved.

When a BID is established, more often than not it will continue into many terms after its initial five years, private BID companies then have the power to increase the levy as they see fit. This will only lead to BID areas becoming more and more expensive to operate from resulting in the area being less attractive for new independent traders to set up business and can even prevent established businesses from continuing. There is plenty of worldwide evidence to support this.

These are only five of the main reasons for our Vote NO campaign, points two and three are the most critical and we believe that these can be rectified easily. If these points were addressed we would be happy as a group to engage in a consultation.

If not, our Vote NO campaign continues, we have currently over 130 businesses supporting our views as well as lots of local support from our own customers and members of the public which is increasing weekly as our campaign gathers more momentum.

Paul Silk

Silk Money

Silver Street

Trowbridge