Network
February 8th 2012
The Bristol Pound won’t save our town centre
Not a lot happens in Bristol: one of the headlines on the BBC website over the weekend was ‘Bristol unaffected by snow falls’. Today we were treated to ‘crash lorry doesn’t fall in river’ which must have trended on Twitter within minutes. Amongst all the shock and horror one positive thing caught my eye: Bristol is to launch its own currency in May, imaginatively named the Bristol Pound or the £B.
The scheme will be administered by the Bristol Credit Union and for every ‘real’ pound deposited the account owner will be receive one £B. Going a bit further than other local currencies, the £B will be able to be transferred electronically and by mobile phone. In an innovative step forward the city council is taking part in the scheme and local traders will be able to pay business rates to the council using the £B.
The currency is an attempt to boost the local economy by stopping the flow of cash out of the city, with the £B only being accepted in Bristol by participating businesses. So far about 100 businesses have signed up and, as with other local currencies around the country, they are local independent traders. Big business just isn’t interested in local economics, with Bristol-based finance house, Hargreaves Lansdown, warning that if the scheme is too successful it could alienate national companies and ultimately drive up unemployment. The £B’s developers have done deep analysis on this problem and concluded that Hargreaves Lansdown worry too much. One can only assume they don’t think it will be that successful.
The scheme’s director trotted out a favourite Bristol delusion: ‘One of the great things about Bristol is the diversity of the places and people within the city’. This means they’ve managed to sign up micro breweries, wine bars, specialist bakeries, cafés, and assorted pretty shops that sell lovely things and incense. Diverse they are not: they cater to a very specific, narrow market: one that can afford to pay £3.50 for a loaf of artisan bread with a rock-hard crust and more air than dough for innards.
If, after two years of talking to traders, they can’t do better than this in terms of businesses signed up, then it’s difficult to see the incentive for average high street shoppers in a recession to use the currency given the restrictions on where they can shop and what they can buy. These types of shops are very expensive in comparison to less trendy establishments, which means all the shopper can expect from using the £B is a sense of self-satisfied virtuousness while being overcharged for something nicely wrapped.
If enough of these niche traders decide to pay their business rates in £B I wonder quite what the council will do with it all if it can only be spent on posh coffee and trinkets? As trading it back into sterling will cost 5% commission I’m wondering if the Bristol council tax payer might be being conned here.
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry though; the scheme was heartily endorsed by the leader of the council along with a promise of officer time. In true Bristol tradition that means someone with no relevant experience will be tasked with messing with it for three months, while no one thinks to link it with any other council strategy, after which it will slip down the back of the sofa to join all the other bright ideas rotting away in the city’s lost potential heap.
Latest figures show that despite being an affluent city, nearly a quarter of Bristol shops are empty, compared with 14.3% nationally. Can the downward trend in using shops be reversed when consumers are increasingly using other methods? You can shop online from your phone these days, let alone your computer. It seems counter-intuitive in regeneration terms to let high street shops die off, but is struggling to keep them alive just nostalgia for an age that’s not coming back?
I’d miss my local high street terribly; it’s the heart of my community. Maybe we need to put services that people need into empty units, such as doctors, dentists, banks or local police stations (or is that just more nostalgia?).
A cynic or wot?
Come on then. What’s your idea. You’re clearly an armchair critic. A know-it-all sniping from the side-lines.
If you had the slightest idea about urban regeneration you’d know how powerful a local currency could be if delivered correctly.
It takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but at least they’ve had the balls and the determination to have a go. All you can do is have a moan.
Hats off to entrepreneurs.
@Mikeriddell62
I think Keren has a point.
To me a local currency is a distraction. If you really want local spending to stay local you need local businesses, employing local people, supplying what local people (or businesses) want to buy.
If you have this you don’t need a local currency to artificially lock in people and their money.
I think there is a lot to applaud about this scheme. I think it does more than give someone a sense of virtuousity, and, an attempt to boost the multiplier effect in declining high street spenders. It fosters a sense of local attachment as it removes the distance a consumer can feel when they purchase something in a clone high street shop. If it’s ‘really’ local businesses, then this is good. But does it boost and sustain (in the need for) a strong local economy and generate growth and prosperity, I’m doubtful. It is a start.
I think Karen’s last point, although quite glibly put, there is some real opportunity. Personally I believe we have an opportunity to engage and then link up the 3 major debates we all seem to be interested in: creating better places to live in, access to local services we all need, i.e that is, public services, and trying to reinvigorate the town centers or high street of places – economically by having a reason for people to be attracted to use them. Let’s join up placemaking with welfare and local service sustainability with social sustainability by improving the public realm. We don’t shop online or remotely for a dentist, for doctor, for a garage, for a post office, for a CAB, or for any of those. We still need the physical presence of these. Maybe, and it’s a big maybe, if we get to that, we lay these new foundations for assisting the entrepreneurs (and the public services) to locate, redesign their service, in the town, not be forced to go elsewhere i..e due to business rates and costs that young SMEs, and particularly, the creative enterprises, which I know Bristol prides itself on. We need to marry up the sustainability of place with the sustainability of services – isn’t this what people want (and what our local economies need)? We can’t even sustain our local community centers where I live. One knocked down, 2 more to go in the town’s housing estates where I live. A sad and sorry tale. Come on the High Street, step up the plate and lead the way!
You’re right Mike, I am cynical. But I do have some idea about urban regeneration and my last comment about services having the ability to bring life to the high street is based on my experience of seeing a massively successful high street reduced to a graffiti strewn dustbowl of empty units once the banks, the dentist, the optician and the launderette all moved elsewhere. There wasn’t even a cash point within a two mile radius. Once those facilities left, people went elsewhere to access services and naturally did their shopping in those elsewheres whilst they were at it. It took 15 years to repair the damage and in the end it simply wasn’t possible to recreate what had once been. And, although it may be fashionable to hate national supermarket chains, it was thanks to Morrison’s agreeing to build a store there that nearly 8000 residents now had somewhere they could shop and be employed locally. No other supermarket was interested because this wasn’t a trendy part of Bristol, not the sort of place that campaigns against Tesco, but somewhere people desperately needed shops. The work I was involved in helped to bring other services to the same location, so people now have other reasons to visit as well as shopping. The whole development has made a huge difference to people living in poverty and exclusion.
I’m not particularly opposed to local currencies and I think they have the potential to boost trade in particular settings with plenty of independent traders, but this usually means the fairly affluent parts of any city. To be frank I’m not concerned with how affluent shoppers shop and I think urban regenerators should channel their energies into areas of need and not tinker about with lifestyle choices.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good rant, eh, Karen? I hear some of the first businesses to sign up are plain old high street stores including local chains like Parsons. £3.50 a loaf? Pull the other one!
It’s easy to criticise resources going on programmes outside regen areas. But ultimately the better off you are the bigger your footprint; environmentally, socially and economically. How these people spend their money has an impact on the less well off and we should aim to make this a positive rather than a negative impact.
The customers of *some* of these shops might be above the average income for the city, but the jobs protected and created will be from a broader base of Bristolians.
The poor will always benefit disproportionately from money circulating around regional cities and towns more times before it goes out to London and overseas because the poor have more of a stake in the local economy, tending not to have as much in the bank and not being renown for their investment portfolio.
It’s a shame because we (Bristolians) do need to ensure a broad range of retailers take up the currency and it doesn’t become too one-sided. To this end I hope Karen does keep an interest in and an eye on the progress of the £B project.
Mark, admittedly I am a bit ranty, but that’s my style, it’s not the £B winding me up. But ranty doesn’t mean ignoring the facts. If you stroll 100 yards from my local Parson’s you can buy an artisan loaf for £3.50 from Mark’s bakery, should that be what’s taking your fancy. Then again have you seen the price of Danish in Parson’s? My advice is stroll 100 yards the other way from Parson’s up to Denny’s (a long-standing independent trader) for an enormous Belgian bun at a fraction of the price.
Interesting you should mention Parson’s bakery – if you’re in Bristol you might have seen the BBC’s Inside Out West programme about the £B which featured the manager of my local Parson’s getting her laptop repaired by a computer repair company that was also a member of the £B scheme. We got an outdoor shot of the computer repair man arriving in his van, featuring in the background directly across the street two local computer repair shops who had clearly lost the business to a company from outside the area. Actual footprints across the road would have saved a bit of carbon footprint there and kept the money local. One can only hope they join up and stop losing trade to businesses outside of the neighbourhood; I use them both and would hate to see them close down.
Seems I’ll have to keep an eye on the £B developments: I never dreamt it could be so controversial.