Business improvement districts, explained

In some towns, the Christmas lights, the events and the extra cleaning in the town centre are paid for by the shops, cafés and offices themselves. They do it through a business improvement district, or BID: a partnership the town centre's businesses vote for and pay into, which spends the money on the town. Each business pays an extra charge on top of its business rates, whether it voted for the partnership or not. Four rules in the law decide who pays and who gets a say, and the one that surprises most people is that there's no minimum turnout.

In England the rules are in the Local Government Act 2003. It lets a council set up a BID for all or part of its area, so that projects "for the benefit of the business improvement district" can be paid for by a charge on the businesses in it. The law calls that charge a levy; it's simply what each business pays.

1. Nothing happens without a vote

A BID "is not to come into force unless" its proposals "are approved by a ballot of the non-domestic ratepayers", which means a vote of the businesses paying rates in the area. The proposals are the plan that lands on each business's doormat before the vote, and they're what everyone is agreeing to pay for.

2. Two majorities, and no minimum turnout

The vote passes only if two things are true. Most of those voting must be in favour, and the premises voting yes must, between them, be worth more than the premises voting no. The value that counts is the rateable value, the property value business rates are worked out from, which is printed on every rates bill. The law sets no minimum turnout at all.

So a crowd of small shops can't carry the vote on numbers alone, and a few big stores can't carry it on size alone. Say, for example, four small shops rated at £10,000 each vote yes, and one big store rated at £100,000 votes no. The shops win the count, the store wins on value, and the partnership doesn't go ahead.

The missing turnout rule matters just as much. When Leatherhead voted in December 2025, 25% of the businesses entitled to vote took part, and that quarter decided Leatherhead's new partnership for the whole town centre.

3. Everyone it covers pays, however they voted

The proposals must say which businesses will pay, and every business that fits that description owes the charge. How it voted doesn't come into it. Each partnership sets its own description and its own rate: Leatherhead's is a charge of 2% on premises with a rateable value of £8,000 or more. A business below the threshold pays nothing, even though it trades on the same street as everyone who does.

4. Five years at most, then another vote

Each term lasts for a period "not exceeding 5 years", and carrying on needs another vote that passes the same two tests. Some towns have voted to carry on more than once: Kingston First has worked in Kingston since 2005, and Go Epsom is in its second term, 2023 to 2028. A vote to carry on is the one where businesses have most to go on, because by then they've had five years of what the partnership actually did to set against what it said it would do.

If you run a business and the voting paper arrives

Vote. With no minimum turnout, staying at home simply hands the decision to whoever does vote.
Read the plan against your own trade. Which of the projects would bring you customers, and which would you be paying for on someone else's behalf? A café lives on passing trade, and an accountant's office upstairs may see almost none of it. That imbalance is the trade-off in every local business network.
Check whether you'd pay, and how much. The description and the threshold are both in the proposals, and your rateable value is on your business rates bill.
If it goes ahead, use what you're paying for. Go Epsom runs a business directory and a What's On calendar, both on our page for businesses in Surrey and South West London, and Leatherhead's partnership takes event listings by email and invites businesses onto its working groups.

Not every town goes down this road. Surbiton has no charge and no vote. It has a council-backed partnership and a growth strategy paid for with public money instead, and Surbiton's town centre plan makes a useful comparison.

These are the rules for England. Wales has its own regulations, and elsewhere in the UK the law is different again.