BBC: not Boston Borough Council but

Barnum and Bailey's Circus

A question that we’ve been asking for months has at last been answered.

It concerns the government granting of £52,631.58 to Boston from a £3 million package shared between 57 towns and cities which the Department of Communities and Local Government felt were blighted by empty shops.

As is commonplace with the BBI, the council spent months talking about what to do, and involved a number of unlikely local organisations in the discussions  – including the Giles Art Academy, Age Concern, Phoenix - the NHS non smoking service – and the BBI’s favourite charity … the South Lincolnshire Community Volunteer Service.
The outcome was a game of three halves.
Short term measures involved buying “bespoke graphics” to decorate the windows of empty shops. Being “bespoke”, they could only be used in the shops they were designed for and not be transferable. Apparently, no one had encountered the self-cling film commonly used in shops everywhere which regularly change their window displays.
The medium term measure involved the creation of the community “Hub” – another BBI goody two-shoes enterprise which added an arts centre and an “anti smoking” shop to the town’s dazzling panoply of shops to complement the widest range of mobile ‘phone and charity shops in the area.
The long term measures involved offering grants towards the cost of business rates for retailers occupying empty shops. The condition for qualification was that the use must be for retail purposes. This requirement was not applied to the empty shops in Strait Bargate, and if it had been it might have produced a more worthwhile outcome. Not surprisingly – given that there was no discernable publicity for phase three as far as we can tell - there were no takers.
With its customary flair, the BBI accepted estimates of £20,000 to bring the shops up to scratch and then discovered that meeting building regulations would bump the costs up by a staggering sixty per-cent – to £32,000. Why the council’s own department which discovered the need for these works did not consider them ahead of the estimating process is anyone’s guess.
On top of all that it was estimated that another £10,000 would be needed to cover the landlords’ management/insurance fee, fit out the shops, pay the BID Levy and cover the utility costs.
Piling on the agony, after vandals smashed a window that cost £2,300 it turned out that this was not covered by the insurance, and the wrong assumption that the SLCVS would get discretionary rate relief cost another £5,750.
So, after months of delay and incompetence, the bottom line is that after initial financial estimates of £12,000 for the short term, £30,000 for the medium term, and £10,000 for the long term – the true breakdown of funding is: short term – nil at for now, but up to £5,000 allocated for large scale maps produced by Boston BID (better take a ball of string with you); medium term spending ended up as a ridiculous £47,000, and the long term figure was nil.
On the subject of shops opening and closing, do you remember the smoothie bar in Dolphin Lane? It opened without planning permission for change of use from retail purposes, and had a retrospective application refused by Boston Borough Council – which was then overruled after an expensive planning enquiry.
We noted a few weeks ago that the milk bar had vanished, and has now been replaced by a shop displaying jewellery in the front window, and some sort of banking facility at the rear of the shop.
According to the borough’s list of planning applications, it appears that the request for change of use in this respect was only registered on 3rd March, and has not yet been decided.
Is history repeating itself?

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