Who decides?
As part of the process of developing a Business Plan for the Torquay BID, we invited all the businesses in the BID area to complete a questionnaire to tell us what they feel the priorities should be to drive their businesses forward over the next 5 years. The Business Plan reflects the results of that consultation.
The pie chart above illustrates the three broad priorities that resulted from that survey. It clearly shows that Street Scene Improvements are the highest priority (36%) with Marketing and Promotions to attract footfall at 33% and issues around security and safety (31%) as the third most important.
In addition to this business consultation we have the results of the independent town assessment carried out by Skillsmart Retail carried out in June 2009. In that assessment they conducted 100 on-street surveys to ask the public their opinions of the town. There was a substantial majority who thought the town needed to be cleaner and they wanted to see more events such as markets in the town centre; so the evidence from the public is very similar to the opinions of those with businesses in the BID area.