Evidence a BID can take to a ballot.

A BID renewal passes only if it wins a majority of the businesses that vote and a majority of the rateable value they hold, and the second test is the one that catches people out. In February 2021 a proposed BID for Basingstoke won 52 of 94 votes and still failed, because those 52 businesses held £3.13 million of the £6.42 million in rateable value that voted.

Not everyone votes, and the ones who do decide it. When NE1 renewed in Newcastle in October 2023, 630 businesses voted from the 1,371 it balloted, a little under half, and it won 93% by number and 88% by rateable value, which is about as strong as a renewal gets. Stratford-upon-Avon's BID drew 60% of its 292 businesses at its last renewal. The gap between those two percentages is the whole story. The large ratepayers are harder to win than the small ones, and they are the ones most likely to ask what a particular line in the budget actually did.

Why the trail is in the wrong column

Every BID has a list of things levy payers like and can't put a number on. Hanging baskets, Christmas lights, the summer festival, a heritage trail. When the renewal business plan is drafted, those things sit in a column of their own, and the column is the first place a sceptical board member looks for savings.

That is a fair criticism of most trails. A set of boards and a printed map produce no evidence that anyone walked them, let alone that they walked past a particular shop. The trail was approved because it felt like the kind of thing a BID does, and at renewal it is defended in the same terms, with a photograph of the launch and a sentence about visitors.

A levy payer who has sat through five years of meetings will let that sentence go once. They won't let it go when it sits beside a request for another five years of levy.

What you can claim and what you can't

This is where most BID ballot renewal evidence for a trail falls apart. If the trail records what happens on it, you can make some claims and not others, and knowing the difference before someone asks is most of the job.

You can claim how many people started the route, how many reached each stop, which days and hours they walked, and how long they stayed at each stop. Those are counts of something that happened. You can say which stops sit on which streets, and so which streets the walkers actually reached.

You can't claim the trail caused a change in footfall across the town centre. Footfall moves with weather, school holidays, a new shop opening, a road closure and a hundred other things, and a levy payer who runs a business on that street knows all of them. You can't claim spend, because walking past a café is not buying a coffee. And you can't add a multiplier from a visitor economy model to a count of walkers and call the result impact. Somebody in the room will ask where the multiplier came from, and the honest answer will lose you the item.

The claims that survive are small and specific. A sentence like "this many people, following the route, walked past these shops in July" is one nobody can take apart. A sentence like "the trail brought this much money into the town centre" is one somebody will.

A method that holds up

Year-on-year comparisons are the usual method and the weakest. This October against last October has too much else in it to mean anything, and the room knows it.

A cleaner method uses one quarter either side of a change. If you have footfall counters, take the counts for the streets on the route for the three months before launch, and the same streets for the three months after. Do the same for a comparison street in the BID area that the route doesn't use. If the route's streets rose and the comparison street didn't, you have something. If both rose, the trail didn't do it, and it is better that you say so than that someone else works it out.

The same method works without a launch. Move a stop, add one on a quieter street, or promote the route for a fortnight, and compare the quarter before with the quarter after. It is modest evidence, and it is evidence you can defend line by line, which matters more.

Tie it to the streets the levy covers

The levy is collected from a defined area, and the evidence should be drawn on the same map. A route that wanders out of the BID area for its best stops is good for the town and hard to defend at a ballot. Count the stops inside the boundary, and report walkers reaching those stops separately from the rest.

Then put names to it. Levy payers think about their own street, so show them that people walking the route reached their part of the town, on which days, and how long they stayed nearby. A café owner on a side street who can see that walkers stopped outside all through the summer holidays will defend the trail at the next meeting more convincingly than any chart. This is the same discipline as evaluating a trail for a funder, aimed at a harder audience.

When to start

Later than you think you have.

The formal timetable is short. The BID has to tell the council and the Secretary of State that it intends to ballot at least 84 days before it submits its proposals, and the ballot date has to be published at least 42 days before the ballot. But the evidence goes into the business plan, the business plan goes out for consultation months before that, and a trail launched eleven months before a ballot has at best two clean quarters of data by the time the plan is written.

If the ballot is a year away, collecting starts now, with the counts you already have as the baseline. If it is eighteen months away, you have time to make one change to the route and measure what it did, which is the strongest thing you can put in front of the room. The same evidence helps if the trail is also meant to move visitors somewhere quieter, though that argument needs a different kind of proof.

If your ballot is inside the next eighteen months and a trail is part of the case, tell us the date and we'll tell you what evidence there is still time to collect.