BID Barometer - Q3 October 2020

As we said in our second Barometer, three months ago in July, the purpose and uses of this new BID Barometer are multiple. It allows a quarterly snapshot to be taken of the BID community in the British Isles for policy makers, both local and national; it allows Chief Executives of BIDs to benchmark themselves against their peers and colleagues; it allows Boards of BIDs to both benchmark and identify key performance indicators for their BIDs; it allows levy payers and members of BIDs to ensure that they are getting all the services that they should, and it allows new and developing BIDs to design their services and operations in the most effective fashion. 

The first and second quarters were during a dramatic time – the Covid-19 pandemic was, and is still affecting BIDs across all parts of the British Isles and we were able to use the data and the contacts to help the industry and the MHCLG with both the operational funding support and a great deal of training and development. We are now following that up with a more qualitative Annual Resilience Survey, which will come out at the annual conference in November. 

This Barometer continues to use the quantitative data from the Business Plans of each BID as it comes to ballot; the British BIDs (Bb) team also analyse BID websites, local papers and social media continually to make sure that our data is as up to date and accurate as possible. We have added some further details in response to members’ feedback and will continue to do so. 

The Covid-19 pandemic, and the Coronavirus Act 2020, meant that many BIDs were able to delay their ballots until March 2021 and similarly, most of the developing BIDs seem not to be coming to ballot until the future is clearer. Nonetheless, ballots are now starting to take place, and a list of forthcoming ballots is given in this Barometer. 

Thus, although the data in this Barometer reflect primarily our continual fine tuning and updating, and new data sets requested by members, the changes quarter on quarter at the moment are small.