Letters to the editor
Alongside our topical cartoon of the week, here’s what got readers writing in…
BID demand is an unwanted ‘tax’
I’m writing as a concerned business owner in Spalding, and as someone who can no longer stay silent about the deeply flawed implementation of the new Business Improvement District (BID) and the financial burden it places on traders.
My name is Ellis Uttley. I run VOOR Architectural Design, based above Flowers 'n' Things on Red Lion Street. Like many others, I was shocked to receive a backdated BID levy bill with no clear benefit in sight and no meaningful consultation beforehand.
It must be said plainly: this cost will not stay with businesses; it will ultimately land with consumers.
Just like any tax or forced charge, the economic reality is that increased overheads are passed through in pricing.
So, this isn’t just a squeeze on traders; it’s a hidden cost on the public, wrapped in the language of civic progress.
If the town wanted to support local shopping, penalising shopkeepers is a bizarre place to start.
We are being asked to believe that taxing small independent businesses will somehow improve business. But as every entrepreneur knows, the most important factor in business survival is cash flow and this levy directly undermines that.
We are told it's an “investment.” I ask: in what, exactly? Bureaucracy?
Branding exercises? Empty newsletters?
If the goal is truly to improve Spalding’s commercial landscape, then the solution is not more taxation, but less. Look at Monaco, Dubai, or the freeports of Singapore.
These places attract business not through compulsion, but by creating conditions for freedom, growth, and private initiative.
And yet here in Spalding, improvement has been imposed, not chosen. The BID passed by the narrowest of margins, only because South Holland District Council cast 18 votes in favour. Without those, it would have failed. That is not representation, that is interference. It is an insult to those of us who were not even aware a vote had taken place, let alone what it meant.
Winston Churchill once said “we contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”. That’s exactly what this BID represents: a self-defeating burden camouflaged as strat-egy.
So, I write not only in frustration, but in solidarity with other traders who feel equally blindsided and unfairly treated. My question is simple: how do we push back against a system that claims to speak for us while taxing us and ignoring our objections?
Ellis Uttley
VOOR Architectural Design Ltd, Spalding
Concerns over water safety
Having spent over a decade talking to children on behalf of the RNLI about water safety and telling them that the chains are a safey feature in case they fall in, I am concerned that biodiversity plantings around High Bridge are now rendering these chains inaccessible. Anyone falling in is liable to injure themselves on the stakes supporting these plantings.
Looking along the river, there are areas where these chains are missing or broken.
I agree the town needs tidying or the river utilised more as an attraction.
T E Carter
Spalding
