The truth about the Portas funding ‘fiasco’

Given that there was no timetable for spending the Portas funding, it’s odd that the pilots have been heavily criticised in the press for not having spent all the money yet.  I thought I’d have a coffee with Ben Barker, secretary of the Greater Bedminster Community Partnership (GBCP) who set up the Portas pilot town team in my neighbourhood, to find out if the fiascos we’ve read about are the norm.

Bedminster was actually the highest spending pilot, yet still came in for ill-informed criticism from Paul Turner-Mitchell, who’s FOI request sparked the original unresearched Independent article that’s been repeated ad nauseum across the press. Blogging on the Guardian online he said: ‘There are countless bad examples. Bedminster Council spent £15,510 on consultants …’: but Bedminster isn’t a town and there’s no such thing as Bedminster Council. It’s an urban suburb of Bristol so Bristol Council is the accountable body, who have spent none of the Portas money because it’s all held by GBCP.   The word ‘consultant’ is deliberately incendiary; this is a £100k project (actually more like £200k now) overseen by volunteers and they made the perfectly sensible decision to employ a fixed term worker to co-ordinate its delivery.

Turner-Mitchell made sweeping criticism of all the pilots when he added, ‘Why does the government think that schemes to reverse years of decline on the high street can only be delivered by councils? If you want to see creative solutions, real innovation then you have to open up schemes like this to entrepreneurs, creatives, community groups. You’ve got to bring fresh thinking into the room. At the moment they’re sinking in bureaucracy.’

Bedminster’s pilot is in fact delivered by a community group involving creatives and entrepreneurs (including the mayor George Ferguson who is an independent local entrepreneur) in exactly the bureaucracy-free way Turner-Mitchell states will make all the difference.

The FOI asked each pilot what had been ‘spent’ at the end of 2012, so that was the very narrow remit of the information provided: Bedminster had ‘spent’ just over a third of the award. However, had it been asked what’s been committed then it could have provided more valuable information showing that the whole £100k is committed and will be spent by March. They’re not in the business of paying contractors up front and would be rightly criticised if they were.

In Bedminster the Portas money is being used to develop a Business Improvement District (BID), a long-term scheme by which local businesses pay an additional levy to fund improvements to retail areas above and beyond what the local authority provides. In Bedminster there are 230 businesses with a rateable value making them eligible to vote, from huge players like Asda to tiny family businesses, all of whom need to be engaged for the BID to be successful (starting to understand the need for that co-ordinator now?).

This engagement work was carried out in the first phase from May to October and the pilot is now coming to the end of its second phase, or demonstration period, with the remaining funding being spent on events, markets, street arts, greening of urban streets, theatre in the shops, lighting projects, a Bedminster bug trail to rival the Bristol gorillas and a host of other delights. It’s easy now to see why they employed a co-ordinator.

All of this activity has itself levered in cash and in-kind contributions that well exceed the original £100k, including one day a week economic development officer time from Bristol Council (which brings in assistance from other council departments) and £25k council cash for ‘pocket parks’; pro bono marketing and legal work; cash donations from larger retailers; and arts council funding. The police have provided masses of in-kind work devoted to crime reduction and bringing the many local publicans together to work collaboratively.

Phase three is the BID vote in March with results due in April which, if successful, will generate upwards of £85k per year for the next five years along with an organised business community dedicated to improving Bedminster’s retail streets. Its core aims – to create vibrancy, reduce crime, joint purchasing to reduce costs, advocacy, and marketing – are dedicated to giving retailers the best chance of surviving not only evolving shopping habits, but also this crippling recession. This is not empty PR or vacuous celebrity pixie dust.

Whilst the Portas experiment might not be empty PR locally, nationally the government hasn’t bought into the principles and last year hiked business rates by 5.6%, looting an extra £350m from the high street. They’ve compounded the increase by pushing back the 2015 business rates revaluation until 2017, effectively forcing businesses to continue to pay at 2008 pre-crash property values for an extra two years in a move they claim is beneficial because it provides certainty over future rates. Bad enough they kick retailers in the teeth with the postponement which was predicted to reduce rates for the majority, shameful to then tell them it’s for their own good.

Mary Portas herself seems to be doing her best to make a success of the scheme. Her recent visit here wasn’t the disruptive irrelevant showboat we’ve read in the press about other places. She was positive and encouraging, she endorsed the work being done by letting the team know they’ve got a good reputation amongst the wider initiative. She covered a lot of ground, visiting as many shops as possible, giving praise for innovative ways of working. The visit gave the town team’s work a burst of positive local publicity just prior to the BID vote and helped keep momentum rocketing along during this final stage of activity.

It was simply unfair of Turner-Mitchell to criticise and write off all of the Portas pilots because he was unhappy with some of them; and simply lazy of the press to repeat his views without looking deeper.