Let Bedford Work
This is the third in a series of papers on rebuilding Bedford. The first made the case for rejecting decline. The second focused on restoring order and civic pride. This paper sets out the path to local prosperity, through decentralisation, economic freedom, and radical trust in the people of this town.
Reclaiming Bedford: Paper No. 3
Towns like Bedford don’t die because of one single act of destruction, they die from slow suffocation. From economic overreach. From a creeping belief that only government can fix what’s broken. But government is not working. And it hasn’t worked for a long time.
Bedford doesn’t need more top-down plans from people who’ve never run a business. We’ve already seen the failure of these approaches, those expensive town centre 'masterplans' that waste our money on consultants and branding, only to result in more empty units and less footfall.
What Bedford needs is space to breathe. It needs the freedom to build. And it needs to trust the instincts, drive, and creativity of the people who live and work here.
This is a call for radical localism, inspired by Jane Jacobs, who defended the bottom-up vitality of real neighbourhoods, and Friedrich Hayek, who showed why the central planner can never match the collective wisdom of free individuals making their own decisions.
This paper sets out five bold actions Bedford can take to unlock its potential: trust local knowledge, scrap top-down planning, create an economic free zone, cut taxes and audit every penny the council spends.
Action 1: Trust Local Knowledge
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs warned against the fantasy that cities could be engineered like machines. “Cities,” she wrote, “have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
She saw what we see now: planners don’t understand real life on the ground. The heartbeat of a town. The hidden economy. The informal exchanges that make a place tick. When government tries to control that from above, it flattens everything that makes a town thrive.
Hayek echoed this in The Use of Knowledge in Society, where he explained that knowledge is “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory information” held by individuals. Government can’t replicate it, it can only get in the way of it.
So the implication is simple: the more we trust people, the more they’ll build.
Innovation doesn’t come from strategy documents or consultations. It comes from people trying things, quickly, freely, without waiting for permission.
But under government bureaucracy, that spirit gets buried. Under high taxation it gets suffocated:
A café wants to put out a few extra chairs - there’s a form for that.
A barbershop wants to play music - they need a licence.
A business wants to hire someone - they face a minefield of employment law designed by union-backed politicians.
All of this under a tax regime that bleeds businesses dry, choking off the profits that fuel ambition and innovation. Government has abandoned its purpose and become a parasite, treating every penny you earn as theirs to seize at will. Let’s call it what it is: legalised state racketeering.
Bedford doesn’t need more red tape. It doesn’t need fairness lectures from people who’ve never made payroll. It needs to unleash its builders, traders, and entrepreneurs.
Action 2: Scrap Top-Down Planning
Jane Jacobs spent much of her life fighting modernist planners who wanted to bulldoze neighbourhoods and replace them with “rational” developments. What they left were dead zones: soulless towers, failing estates, and streets nobody wanted to walk down. She called it “a senseless order, imposed by command.”
That same spirit is alive in our councils and government departments today: endless frameworks, consultation exercises, performance indicators, but no life, no urgency, no instinct to say yes to people with ideas.
As Hayek put it in The Road to Serfdom, “The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” Every licence, restriction, and delay is a barrier between a good idea and action.
Top-down planning doesn’t build towns. It kills them.
Bedford needs permissionless action, the freedom for people to trade, test, build and create without waiting for bureaucratic sign-off.
Action 3: Create an Economic Free Zone
Local businesses are the heartbeat of Bedford but they’re being strangled by business rates, rent, energy costs, regulation and unfair competition.
The Problem with Business Rates
Business rates were meant to fund local services through a tax on commercial properties. But in today’s economy, they’ve become a weapon against local businesses, an outdated tax crushing the very entrepreneurs that give towns their character.
In theory, they’re simple: your property gets a rateable value based on what it might rent for. That value is multiplied by a government-set figure (currently 49.9p for small businesses) to give your bill. What’s not simple is the world local businesses are now forced to compete in.
Unfair Playing Field
Online shopping has changed everything. People now order with a click, and high streets pay the price. Soulless retail parks, built with parking, scale, and tax efficiency in mind, leech life from town centres. Supermarkets no longer just sell food; they’ve moved into clothing, electronics, pharmacies, cafes, and even banking, colonising every high-margin sector once served by independents.
And then come the multinationals.
Take Starbucks. They don’t just open a single store, they cluster multiple locations across towns to maximise visibility and convenience. With global supply chains and vast marketing budgets, they can offer slick branding, loyalty schemes, and seasonal promotions that small independents can’t match. Landlords often favour them with better rent deals, seeing them as stable, big-name tenants. And while local cafés pay full whack on business rates and taxes, Starbucks has been widely criticised for using complex international structures to minimise their UK tax bill. The money flows out, the independents fold, and we’re left with a high street that looks the same in every town.
And their coffee is crap.
Why Local Matters
The local café owner buys milk from the corner shop, beans from a UK roaster, pays local wages, and reinvests their profits back into the community. Every pound spent with them circulates through the local economy 3–4 times, building resilience, not extracting it. Yet they’re hammered by high rents, punishing business rates, and taxes on everything from space to staff to waste.
And what do they get in return?
This isn’t just bad policy, it’s economic vandalism. If we don’t act, our town centres will rot into ghost towns: boarded-up shops, chain-store mediocrity, and a fertile ground for the growing problem of anti-social behaviour.
We must not accept this. We will not accept this.
That’s why Bedford’s town centre should be an Economic Free Zone: zero business rates for small, independent, locally-owned businesses. This wouldn’t apply to chains. It’s targeted relief to restore fairness and revive our town centre with the personality of the people that live there..
As Hayek said, ‘Competition is a discovery procedure’, a way to reveal what works by unleashing many independent attempts. But that only happens when people are free to try. And right now, locals are taxed out of the race before it begins.
Ah, but business rates are a statutory tax set by Westminster. Councils have discretion to offer rebates or local relief schemes, they should use that power boldly
Action 4: Cut Council Tax, Restore Freedom
Council tax has risen by 36% nationally over the past decade, but in Bedford, it's even worse. Band D households now pay over £2,356 a year, a 44% increase.
And what do we get in return? Fewer police, more crime, a high street which is dying.
Does council tax need to rise every year? Absolutely not. So why does it? Because there are virtually no constraints. When a council lacks fiscal discipline, it simply raids the pockets of hardworking residents.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Councils should commit to reducing council tax year on year, not as a gimmick, but as a moral and financial imperative. This doesn’t mean cutting essential services. It means putting first things first: safety, cleanliness, and core infrastructure. Everything else must prove its worth or go.
As Hayek warned, “Once it is recognised that the function of government is not to ensure particular results to particular people, but merely to provide a framework within which individuals can pursue their own ends, the justification for taxation beyond the minimum required for those functions vanishes.”
Lower council tax means more money in people’s pockets, more dignity, and more economic freedom. It also forces the council to confront the hard questions it’s been avoiding…
Action 5: Audit Everything. Cut the Fat.
We need a full, public audit of every pound spent by Bedford Borough Council, not just to find waste, but to ask: should the council even be doing this at all?
Councils have expanded their scope far beyond what’s reasonable. They’ve become quasi-governments, running PR departments, sponsoring “inclusivity” officers, funding vanity schemes, duplicating services already handled by charities or the private sector.
We must embrace constraint.
Constraint focuses the mind. It forces prioritisation. And it restores public trust, because right now, few people believe the council spends their money wisely.
The council’s role must be redefined:
What must it do?
What might it support?
And what should it never touch again?
Everything else should be left to civil society, business, volunteers and the community. The people who already do the real work anyway.
This approach requires humility, the recognition that no central body can solve every problem for every citizen. The more a council tries to solve, the more it undermines the very foundations of society: initiative, responsibility, and self-reliance.
That’s why we start with a line-by-line audit of council spending. Every contract. Every job role. Every department. No sacred cows.
We should ask:
Is this essential?
Could it be done more efficiently?
Should it be done at all?
This process begins with a freeze on all non-essential spending. A review of procurement contracts to eliminate waste and sweetheart deals. An end to funding lifestyle activism, PR departments, fringe initiatives, and political pet projects. A discipline to say no to the creeping belief that the council exists to fix every grievance, subsidise every want, and cushion every personal hardship.
This isn’t austerity. It’s clarity. And it’s the path back to liberty through discipline and responsibility.
From Civic Dependency to Civic Action
Jane Jacobs called cities “problems in organised complexity.” You can’t solve them from spreadsheets. You can only steward them with trust and freedom.
Hayek called this spontaneous order, the emergence of structure and value when free people act on their knowledge without central instruction.
That’s the Bedford we want: not micromanaged into mediocrity, but alive with civic energy. Where locals take responsibility, clean streets, open shops, support neighbours, host markets, build culture.
A town not controlled, but thriving. Not directed, but dynamic.
Final Word
We don’t need another five-year plan. We don’t need more consultations. And we definitely don’t need another government-funded ‘town centre revitalisation scheme.’
We need freedom. We need trust. We need government to step aside and let Bedford work.
