Fashion Enter is a not-for-profit business and skills support organisation, offering a unique range of support initiatives to emerging local fashion and textile designers – to primary and secondary schools, but particularly, those highly talented students from the Arts Institute in Bournemouth, and plenty of others besides.

In addition to promoting the business of fashion, and hand-holding these designers through the process of learning what it takes to set up new business enterprises, Fashion Enter manages a wide range of education and training programmes, working with primary and secondary schools. More importantly, it delivers practical projects and work experience opportunities to young people not in education, employment or training, and other unemployed people too often disadvantaged in the labour market.

In so doing, and by drawing on experience of working independently in other parts of the country, Fashion Enter contributes positively, and in an inspirational way, to meeting the economic development and regeneration agendas of the area, and helping many local people realise their full potential. And it does this by helping many people use or develop their skills, and improves their prospects of finding real jobs or going into a business of their own.

In recognition of this work, Fashion Enter was kindly offered boutique space by the owner of premises at the Royal Arcade in Boscombe. This local entrepreneur clearly recognised the value of a high profile location to showcase the work of these emerging designers, and also as a training and development centre. Prompted by major successes elsewhere, he saw the good in what we were trying to achieve.

Our problem, however, is that Bournemouth Council has missed the point entirely. It considers the boutique to be nothing more than a branch of a retail business – and ignored the main purpose of the Fashion Enter organisation. Yes, it looks like a normal shop, but it is actually a small part of the bigger project, and does not run on commercial lines, as might other fashion outlets. Looks can be deceiving.

Yet it is on this short-sighted basis that Bournemouth Council has determined not to offer any Discretionary Rate Relief (DRR) on the shop, and it is insistent that we need to pay £14,000 per annum. This decision completely undermines what Fashion Enter wants to, and can achieve to benefit the local economy by supporting the growth of skills, jobs, and businesses, and bringing new educational qualifications. These are some of the key indicators that all local authorities are trying to achieve for their residents, their businesses, and their young people.
 

So why should there be any difference with Bournemouth? Well – there shouldn’t. But the fact remains that we have a running dispute with the Council, when all we want to do is help students and other fashion designers by providing a platform for them to showcase their designs.

The Bournemouth Echo, the Daily Telegraph, and the industry-leading journal, Drapers Record have all picked up on this story as well. The local MP for the Boscombe area also takes a sympathetic view and recognises what we are trying to achieve. Just like the benefactor of the Royal Arcade, and development agencies elsewhere, they can see the bigger picture, and fully recognise and understand the opportunity and value that Fashion Enter can bring to Bournemouth.

To remind you again, the proposed boutique would house some of the best in new fashion from local designers and students clothing, and attract people in to buy. But the real purpose of the shop floor would be a training workshop in which, through its various initiatives, Fashion Enter can develop and enhance skills, particularly for unemployed people and get them back into work.

Fashion Enter argues that bigger picture needs to be taken into account. It now calls upon your support to help us challenge the current opinion of the Council, and put pressure on the Council to sensibly apply discretion in its current decision not to grant rate relief on what it thinks is just a shop. We hope you will agree with us that Fashion Enter is actually a organisation that has identified in Bournemouth a place in which we can again make things happen, and fashion a success for its people. Fashion Enter is committed to helping and improving opportunities for local people, and keeping some of the best in local talent in the area rather than losing them to other cities.

We are confident that you will get behind us, and support our campaign to ask the Council to review its position, to retract its stance on Discretionary Rate Relief, to allow the boutique to open, and actually to become a partner in the success we know will flow from the delivery of an innovative support organisation.