Primera’s Ruth Duston on two decades of business improvement districts

Divvy London up into submarkets as a real estate professional and you’ll encounter few arguments over what lies where in terms of postcodes and parcels of land. But Ruth Duston, founder and chief executive of regeneration consultancy Primera, wants you to think also of another way to carve up the capital: its business improvement districts, or BIDs. These schemes see businesses in certain boroughs or neighbourhoods pay a levy that is reinvested into the area, channelled into activities such as security and street cleaning. Since the first was launched in the UK two decades ago in Kingston upon Thames, hundreds have been set up across the country. In the capital there are 70, with 12 of those in central London managed by Duston and her team at Primera. That includes four in Westminster, covering Whitehall, Northbank, Victoria and Victoria Westminster; five in the City of London – Aldgate Connect, Cheapside Business Alliance, Culture Mile BID, Eastern City BID and Fleet Street Quarter; the Harley Street BID; the Hatton Garden BID; and the Central District Alliance, which covers Central St Giles, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Farringdon and Clerkenwell. Those BIDs raise £20m between them every year, representing more than 1,600 acres of central London, 3,000 businesses and more than 1m employees. But Duston believes there is little understanding of the ways they can transform an area such as Victoria in terms of placemaking and the environment – and she wants the real estate industry in particular to learn and get involved through the creation of property owner BIDs in which landlords and investors also dig into the coffers. “I’d like to think we make an impact that leaves a legacy in London, that builds on what our future generations need from a more sustainable and resilient city,” Duston tells EG. “I do it because I love it, because of my regen background. It’s all about opportunity and giving people chances. There’s no real margin in running BIDs – you either love it or hate it. It’s a Marmite thing.” Neighbourhood focus Born in Stratford, east London, Duston grew up in Upminster before moving to Plaistow and then Beckton. A love of east London is apparent when she discusses all those locations – and her pain at the times she was pulled away is also evident. A stint early in her career in the mid-1990s, working as the single regeneration budget manager at Stevenage Borough Council in Hertfordshire, was great for her career, she says, but the move out of London left her pining for some urban excitement. “Hertfordshire’s new towns’ economies were built around bringing people in from east London to pick up jobs within certain sectors, particularly manufacturing and engineering,” she recalls. “But it was wholly dependent on those sectors so had a lot of social issues as a result. I moved to Stevenage, which I hated. No Tube, no corner shop.  Just the fact that you were a little bit more remote trying to get into central London.” By 2002, Duston was back in central London, taking a role as head of programmes at the Paddington Regeneration Partnership, the chief executive of which was Jackie Sadek. Paddington was among the pilots for a BID, to be funded by the single regeneration budget through Pat Brown and team at Central London Partnership. Duston was among a team sent by the Home Office to visit the US and see how partnerships could work there. “We were already taking bits of it from a lot of the neighbourhood regeneration we were doing,” she says. “Neighbourhood wardens [for example], that was being cribbed from these BIDs that were operating in the States.” Two years later, as the Paddington BID launched, Duston, having shifted into consultancy work, established Primera. By 2006, Graham King, head of strategic planning at Westminster City Council, had recommended that Landsec speak with her about proposals the company was working on for a BID in Victoria, where its sprawling development was under way. “Everybody said to me, ‘Don’t touch it. It’ll be a complete nightmare’,” she says today. “But I didn’t listen. I thought, ‘I’m going to give it a go. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work’.” The naysayers had a point. “They felt the area was very disjointed,” Duston says. “We’ve got quite a large residential community there, a very affluent community, very vocal, very well-connected. They were opposed to the whole redevelopment that was planned at that time by Landsec, where you were going to see this decade of rejuvenation along Victoria Street. So there was a lot of noise in the background. And then overlay that with what at the time was perceived to be these business partnerships – because BIDs were very new still – coming in with this extra layer of civic governance. Who are they? What are they going to deliver on?” Lessons learnt The Victoria BID went to a ballot, right in the middle of the global financial crisis. But on a 53% turnout, despite a postal strike, the BID was approved, with Primera managing the scheme. “That was my first fully fledged BID that I can totally hang my hat on,” Duston says. “I had the experience from Paddington but this was the first I led and developed.” And that experience came with lessons. “The learnings were all about communication,” she says. “You really cannot underestimate how much comms you need to do. And it isn’t just with the businesses that are going to vote. It’s with the public sector providers as well, like Westminster, TfL. It’s also with the residents, because what you don’t want is a lot of negative noise.” With Victoria established, Duston was tapped to manage Landsec’s Cheapside Retail Initiative in the City of London – not a BID but a bringing together of retailers as Landsec developed its One New Change block. “We were embarking on a retail revolution for the City,” Duston says. “Landsec worked really hard to shift the dial on that – retailers really didn’t want to come to the City, but they did a lot of work to bring them in. And some of those retailers performed better in the City than they were performing in the West End.” The next BID to emerge was Northbank, voted through in 2012. And bigger challenges were to come as Duston looked to the Square Mile. The City of London had historically said it would not sign off on BIDs within its boundaries, Duston recalls, arguing instead that the Square Mile itself operates, as she puts it, as “one big BID”. “But there is a need for hyperlocal activity, neighbourhood focus,” she says, and the Cheapside Retail Initiative, had shown the benefit of the kind of collaborative venture also found in BIDs. Duston and other BID backers kept pushing, and with the help of City Corp insiders such as Mark Boleat, then chair of policy and resources at the time and who had also sat on the Cheapside Retail Initiative board, turned perceptions around. The first BID in the City of London covered Cheapside – it’s small, Duston acknowledges, generating about £400,000 a year, but it proved a point and “the City started to see the merits of what could be delivered at a very local level”. Since then BIDs have been launched to cover Aldgate, Fleet Street, the eastern cluster of office towers and the Culture Mile.   Landlords step up Now it’s time for property owner BIDs to take off, Duston says. Having an occupier BID in situ is a pre-requisite for launching a property owner BID. The latter can then be overlaid within the same geographic boundary (it can cover a smaller area but not a larger one). For now, the only two property owner BIDs are run by the Heart of London Business Alliance and New West End Company. But a property owner BID for the Central District Alliance will go to ballot in October 2025 and Duston hopes a Victoria property owner BID will be voted on in 2026. “We’re going to see the emergence of property owner BIDs coming into London,” she says. “Part of the reason for that is because there’s much more focus and emphasis on the private sector coughing up money for infrastructure and placemaking and less coming from the public purse. In essence, you can double your budget overnight by having a property owner BID and an occupier BID. It gives much more say to that kind of business community, the land owners. And let’s not forget, if you’re investing all this money in improving an area, it’s their assets that benefit from it in terms of their values. So it’s in their interests to be part of that and to invest in them.” What are the real estate companies engaged with this kind of initiative, such as Landsec, demonstrating? “First and foremost, they’re really supportive,” says Duston. “They absolutely see the merits of it – EC [the Square Mile’s eastern cluster] is a really interesting one. It was Patrick Wong at [real estate investor] Tenacity who saw what BIDs could deliver. And it was him who funded the feasibility work for us to establish a bid for the eastern City.” But there is still a lot standing in the way of BIDs and the benefits they can bring, Duston says – not least in the real estate world. None of it is insurmountable, she hastens to add. “I think there’s lots more we can do,” she says. “We’re slightly handcuffed by planning policy and business rates, particularly at ground-floor usage with the empty units we’re all seeing. It would be nice to see a review of how that can be slightly relaxed. Property agents are the gatekeepers to the property owners, and I don’t think they understand BIDs in the way they should. They are the biggest hurdle to us gaining access to some of these empty units, but I do think in the future, there’s going to be much more opportunity for business because we’re so agile and flexible.”