Five-year-old fined 150 pounds for selling lemonade illegally
Officers showed up demanding a permit from the little girl. Photo courtesy: The Guardian
(Web Desk) - A five year old girl was fined £150 for setting up an illegal lemonade stand in east London.
According to The Independent, the five-year-old and her father had decided to sell cups of lemonade to hundreds of people who were attending the Lovebox festival in nearby Victoria Park.
However, within half an hour of setting up the stand four council enforcement officers approached the girl’s table and began to read to her from a legal letter informing her that because she was operating a lemonade stand without a trading permit she would be fined £150.
Seeing this the girl and her father quickly packed up the stand and left.
Writing about the incident in The Telegraph, Spicer, the girl’s father, said that he was a professor at a business school and should have known that some sort of permit would have been required. But implied that the response of the council officers was too harsh as “this was a five-year-old kid selling lemonade. She wasn’t exactly a public safety hazard.”
He also said that his daughter sobbed all the way back home as she thought that she had done a bad thing. She even declined to open up another lemonade stand when her father offered to get her a permit as it was “too scary”.
Seeing the bad publicity that the fine was generating the council withdrew it and also issued an official apology to Spicer and his daughter. A spokesman for the council stated that they expressed regret for the incident ever having occurred as they expected their “enforcement officers to show common sense and to use their powers sensibly.”
