Our Philosophy
Why SIBA exists. Who it is here for. And what it is built on.
If you are reading this
If you are a business owner in PR8 or PR9 who has spent years paying a levy you do not fully understand, to an organisation you did not choose, for outcomes you cannot measure, this page is for you.
If you have asked where the money goes and not received a straight answer. If you have watched certain businesses get promoted on publicly-funded platforms while yours was ignored. If you felt something was wrong but had no way to document it.
You were not wrong. Nobody had simply sat down and read the documents carefully. SIBA did.
The belief we are built on
The people who pay for something have a right to know how it is spent, who decided to spend it, and what relationships shaped those decisions.
That belief is not complicated. It does not require a political position. It does not require anger or grievance. It requires only the willingness to ask questions that should have been asked years ago, and the discipline to source every answer from documents that already exist in the public domain.
Companies House filings. Published committee minutes. BID business plans. Council websites. Freedom of Information requests. Everything SIBA has found was already there. Nobody had read it carefully. We did. And we published what we found.
The businesses we are here for
The independent restaurant on a side street that has never been mentioned on Southport's publicly-funded tourism platform. The retailer paying £2,400 a year who got a letter saying their levy had increased and did not get a reply when they asked what it was spent on last year. The cafe owner who cannot get a straight answer from the BID. The hotel on the seafront that is not part of a connected commercial group and has never appeared in a BID feature.
These are the businesses SIBA was built to serve. They are not anti-investment. They are not against Southport's regeneration. They want the town to thrive. They just want to know that the money they are compelled to hand over is spent fairly, governed honestly, and accounted for in public.
That is not an unreasonable thing to want. It is the legal minimum. SIBA is making sure it happens.
What the BID replaced
Before the BID existed, businesses in Southport talked directly to each other. Horizontal. Peer to peer. A restaurant called the hotel next door because the hotel was good. A retailer collaborated with an events organiser because the partnership made commercial sense. Nobody sat in the middle. Nobody controlled who got promoted and who got ignored.
When the BID was established, it inserted itself between those businesses as a mandatory intermediary. Businesses no longer reach out directly. They route through the BID. Or through BID-controlled platforms. Or through BID-contracted media. The levy funds this intermediary. The intermediary is compulsory. And the intermediary is governed by a board.
That board decides where the money goes. Who gets promoted. Which suppliers get contracted. Which businesses appear on the tourism platform and which do not. When members of that board have undisclosed commercial relationships with the businesses that benefit most, the entire structure becomes something other than what it was sold as.
SIBA is the alternative model. No levy. No board. No intermediary. Direct relationships between businesses, direct access to digital tools, direct accountability to the people we serve. If we are not useful, businesses do not join us. That is the correct incentive structure and it is written into our founding charter.
Three things worth stating clearly
We are not anti-business.
The businesses paying the BID levy are businesses. The independent restaurants, the retailers, the hotels on the side streets. They are the businesses SIBA was built to serve. We are not against investment in Southport. We are against the compulsory extraction of money from those businesses to fund a governance structure that serves a connected network rather than the people paying for it.
We are not anti-regeneration.
Southport needs investment. The Marine Lake Events Centre, the restored Victorian buildings, the hospitality investment on Lord Street. These are real and welcome. What we question is not the investment but the governance of the institutions allocating it. Public money spent well is a good thing. Public money spent through an opaque network of interlocking interests without proper disclosure is a different thing entirely. The two are not the same and conflating them is how accountability gets suppressed.
We are not a campaign.
SIBA does not campaign for political positions, endorse candidates or align with parties. We publish documented findings. We file Freedom of Information requests. We offer right of reply to every party named in every publication. We correct factual errors promptly and transparently. We let the evidence speak and trust readers to draw their own conclusions. That independence is not a constraint. It is the source of everything SIBA has achieved in its first days. The moment a transparency organisation becomes identified with a political position its findings become deniable. We will not let that happen.
Transparency is protective, not destructive
Every party named in a SIBA publication is offered a right of reply. Every factual claim is sourced to a public document and linked directly. Every FOI response is published in full. Every contact received in connection with the investigation is logged publicly.
This is not aggressive journalism. It is accountable journalism. The difference matters. We are not trying to destroy reputations. We are trying to establish facts. If the facts are uncomfortable for some people the discomfort is a consequence of the facts, not of the journalism.
Four days in, SIBA has documented a governance conflict at the heart of the BID board, a pattern of selective promotion on a publicly-funded platform, an undisclosed commercial relationship between the BID's contracted media partner and its Treasurer's employer, and a council officer running the town's tourism platform while sitting on the BID board. All of it from public documents. None of it required inside information. It required only the willingness to read carefully and the discipline to source every claim.
We have submitted 15 Freedom of Information requests to Sefton Council. Every response will be published in full. If the answers are unremarkable, we will say so. If they reveal further questions, we will ask them.
We are not finished.
We are not stopping.
And we are not for sale.
If you are a business in PR8 or PR9 and you want to understand what the levy costs you, what it should be doing, and what SIBA has found, start here.