Market Traders Angry Over Pitch Fee Increase

Traders at Stourgate’s Tuesday and Saturday market have raised objections to a proposed increase in pitch fees.

Roy Halls said, ‘I’ve been selling bed valences here since the 60s and my parents did the same. If this 10% increase happens it’ll be the end for me. I only make around 70% profit and I’m lucky if I clear £800 a day. They’ll be taxing our fags next, bloody Burnham.’

Mr Halls said pitch pricing had caused trouble before. He pointed to what long-standing traders still refer to as the valance price wars of the 1970s, when three separate stalls sold bed valances within twenty feet of each other and undercut one another week on week until, according to Mr Halls, ‘you could get a full box-pleat for the price of a bag of chips.’ The dispute ended after one trader relocated to Dunton and the other two agreed an informal price floor that is, by several accounts, still observed today, and which is understood to be the subject of a long-running Competition and Markets Authority investigation.

That investigation, traders say, is one reason the proposed fee increase has been met with suspicion rather than simple complaint. Several repeated a claim that the market has been infiltrated by government moles gathering information on cash transactions ahead of any decision on pitch fees. No trader was able to name a specific individual, though two separately pointed to a man who ’looks funny’ and has attended the market most Tuesdays for the past year without ever being seen to buy anything, except once, when he bought a teapot.

One trader said, ‘We get famous people like Ray Barnes of the Town down here, buys his fags off the stall near the church end most weeks. Never shares his fags though. He’s probably on three hundred a week, tight bastard.’

Traders said falling footfall was doing more damage to takings than the fee increase itself. They pointed to the number of tobacconists and gambling shops that have opened nearby in recent years, saying trade has dropped as traders spend increasing amounts of time in them rather than at their pitches. One trader said it was not unusual to find a neighbouring stall left unattended for twenty minutes or more during a quiet afternoon, and suggested this was one reason opposition to the fee increase had so far struggled to organise itself into anything more than conversation.

Asked directly about the proposed fee increase, longtime trader Dave Pursley said, ‘Fifteen quid for a packet of fags now, it’s a joke. My old man used to get forty Number Six for two and six down the arcade. Mind you the rat’s still down there under the fish stalls, been there since the eighties they reckon, size of a small dog, nobody’s ever caught it. State of the packets these days as well, half of it’s tax by the time you’ve bought the bloody things.’

The council has not yet confirmed when a final decision on the pitch fee increase will be made.