CJTCP – meeting 24 April 2014: feedback

1 min read

I apology for the delay on this report. As usual when I attend the Clapham Junction Town Centre Partnership (business associations) meeting, I give a quick feedback on some specific points that were discussed.

End of funding for the business organisation

The main and starting point of the meeting was the Economic Development Office explaining that decision has been made by Wandsworth Council to remove funding for the business organisations of each town centres in the borough.

The financial year 2014-15 will be a transition time for the Town Centre initiative as the financial cover provided by the Council (about £100,000 for each of the 5 town centres per year) will stop after April 2015.

Due to financial restrictions the Council has decided that the different town centre business organisations needed to move to self funding. In order to achieve that, several solutions are suggested:

  1. Setting up of a Business Improvement District (BID) for each area where 1-2% of the business rate value of each business participating will go to fund the organisation.
  2. Voluntary membership scheme / Voluntary contributions
  3. Nothing

Business votes will also be counted in portion of the business rate contribution (therefore big business will have more weight in the vote).

The Council is going to contract a firm to provide support for a BID within the next couple of months. The first step will be the need to demonstrate what a BID can achieve (security, marketing, public realm…).

Pavement

The state of new paving on St Johns Road was already discussed last August. Again business and residents are complaining about the very dirty state of the paving (see our article). The Council says they have no budget for water pressure cleaning (and therefore no progress was made). However they are trying the possibility of applying a sealant on the new pavement and could spread it on large areas if trials show good results.

Implementation of the “Behave or be Banned” proposed by the police

With the scheme, people arrested (not convicted!) for shop-lifting and criminal offence will be automatically banned from shops (their photo will be displayed on a website and shops will be able to consult who is on the list to ban them from entering the shop). The maximum sentence could be a life-ban!

Did you like reading this article? Help us write more!

Clapham Junction Insider (formerly known as the CJAG website) has been publishing local news for over 14 years and remains committed to providing information about the local community and engaging in public interest journalism.

Our goal is to feature a wide range of community campaigns and initiatives, local societies, charities based in the area, fundraising efforts by residents, and provide assistance to residents.

We have always been dedicated to these endeavours and have no intention of changing. In fact, we would like to expand our efforts further.

Until recently, all the stories, analyses, and reports published have been made possible with the invaluable help of many volunteers. However, it requires a significant amount of time and effort, and we are frustrated that we cannot do more. There are numerous topics we would like to cover, but we require financial resources to provide regular information.

Therefore, we kindly ask our readers to consider offering financial support to sustain these efforts. Any contributions made will help support community and public interest news, as well as the expansion of our coverage in this area.

2 ways of supporting our project

Do you think what we are doing is helping the community and you want to encourage us to do more? We have set up two ways of supporting our project:

  1. Paypal: For one-off contributions, you can just use your bank card. However if you wish to encourage and support us regularly with a small amount, you will need a Paypal account to set up a monthly subscription. Click here to donate.
  2. Patreon: this is a well-known membership platform that connects content creators with supporters. Mainly, it offers financial tools that let supporters subscribe to projects that give creators a predictable income stream as they continue to create content. Click here to subscribe and support us regularly.

If you do support us in this way we'd be interested to hear what kind of articles you would like to see more of on the site – send your suggestions to the editor.

CJI editor and Clapham Junction Action Group co-founder and coordinator since 2008, Cyril has lived in Clapham Junction since 2001.
He is also funder and CEO of Habilis-Digital Ltd, a digital agency creating and managing websites and Internet solutions.