Nanny and her councils can be nasty pieces of work, as Andre Spicer's five year old daughter found to her cost.
My thanks to a loyal reader who pointed me to a summary of what occurred.
The girl was fined £150 by Nanny's gestapo from Tower Hamlets for trying to sell lemonade in the street.
Andre Spicer said his daughter burst into tears and told him “I’ve done a bad thing” after enforcement officers read out a lengthy legal letter before issuing him the notice.
Mr Spicer said four officers stormed up to the table just 30 minutes after the pair had set up the stand, where they were selling one large cup of the fizzy drink for £1 and a small glass for 50p.
The five-year-old and Mr Spicer, a professor at City University, were given the fine for "trading without a permit" after they set up the make-shift stall near their home in Mile End.
After it was contacted by the Standard, Tower Hamlets Council promised to cancel the fine "immediately" and said it would contact the family to apologise.
No surprises there then, when Nanny is confronted she backs down!
A spokeswoman for the council said:
“We are very sorry that this has happened. We expect our enforcement officers to show common sense, and to use their powers sensibly. This clearly did not happen.As I have repeatedly said, councils are the enemies of the people!
The fine will be cancelled immediately and we will be contacting Professor Spicer and his daughter to apologise.”
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Yes, unfortunately Nanny makes you jump through hoops when it comes to selling food and beverages.
ReplyDeleteLicences must be obtained, health certificates, hygiene standards must be met, quality of goods, etc. etc.
All this is very expensive and time consuming…………………………..and the guy that owns the café up the road had to do it all, and he has to adhere to those standards to keep his business.
Yet some snot-nosed little kid’s parent’s think that they can get their 5-year-old to bypass these regulations because of her age, and then have the audacity to complain to the media.
Sorry Ken, you are way off base on this one.
Anon - do you seriously think that a university professor was using his child to make serious money from serious trading and was a serious threat to real vendors? He was probably trying to teach his five year old a lesson about money in a fun way. He'd probably worked it out that they could sell 10 drinks in two hours (by which time a five year old would be bored) and make a fiver; he could then point out to his daughter that she'd made £2 profit and that's how business works.
ReplyDeleteNo I don't seriously suggest that this was potential business venture.
ReplyDeleteAs a University Professor he could have given his porch monkey a pen and paper to discover the same thing.
A more revealing lesson in how business works and the mountain of bureaucracy that has been created was handed out by the local council, don’t you think?
Anon - Indeed. Bureaucracy stifles initiative and traders have to put up with local nanny (personally I prefer the word "mafia") extorting money from them. But what is the issue here, that the regs themselves are wrong or that the council would have been wrong not to issue a fine in this case? My personal view is that the regs themselves are wrong but that the council was unnecessarily heavy-handed in its reaction to a kid selling a few drinks. Would you suggest that a teenager knocking on neighbours' doors offering to wash the car on the drive for a couple of quid be subject to the full force of the law (there must be one covering that sort of activity!)?
ReplyDeleteBTW the term "porch monkey" seems misapplied.
A fine cannot be given to a 5 year old.
ReplyDeleteThe parents should have realized how 'Nanny' would have reacted and simply left their kid in front of the X-Box.
This may seem like a small thing, but this was not a scene from a Simpson's episode set in 'small town' US of A. This was Mile End, London and the parents should firstly have more sense (University Professor, etc....) and secondly, not gone whinging to the media when the inevitable happened.
As far as car washing is concerned, I did that as a child. Of course it cannot be allowed nowadays, there is the obvious Heath and Safety issues to contend with, not to mention the pedophiles behind every door.
I'm still in the dark why you took issue with Ken's post in the first place. Are you aggrieved on behalf of professional traders on the grounds that a five year old snatched business away from them (lol), or is it that a middle-class parent thought that he could flout the law or that he was too stupid to realise that he couldn't get away with it in Mile End?
ReplyDeleteNever mind, now that the East End Lemonade Stall racket has been cracked resources can be channelled into bringing acid attack perpetrators to justice.
Have a nice evening.