Why is Andy’s council trying to take him to the cleaners?

H&F Documents demand
Originally uploaded by andytgeezer

You may have heard the story already. Andy Hoang, creator of myREALwall.com, is wanted by the council for apparently operating a business and generating an obscene amount of waste. £5,000 worth of waste apparently.  

If you're not fimiliar with the story, Mr. Hoang runs www.myrealwall.com, a mailart website where he posts REAL postcards and the like which he receives on his acclaimed website.  He recently received a letter instructing him to register his business or up to £5000 to account for all the extra waste he generates as Owner/Manager/Co Director.

Why?

Borough councils are just like any limited company, they make money and then they spend it. Despite the fact they’re there to look after us, they have to maximise their profit because otherwise they would lose money and we, as the ones who pay for them in the first place, would end up paying for this.

Councils spend money on: schools, hospitals, street cleaning, housing, social services, roads, etc etc etc

Councils collect money through: council tax, parking fines, government grants, advertising (i.e. hiring out poster sites), interesting cases such as Andy’s etc etc etc

Therefore, simple economic logic in this case would actually say the council is being completely reasonable because that’s what it is there to do. But, here’s the thing: how did Andy’s council calculate that he generates £5,000 worth of waste?

The simple answer is he doesn’t. The guys at the council have surely sat down and though about how much money they’d actually have to spend BEFORE they get any money from Andy.

Here’s what their list of tasks associated with extraction of money from Andy might look like:
Someone finds Andy’s postcard on the floor
Produces some paperwork about this
Submits the paperwork to a manager
Manager takes time to look at paperwork
Manager takes time to make decision
Decision goes through approval process
Manager does some administration
Passes all on to Administrator
Administrator raises some paperwork
Some kind of legal protocol is surely issued (and at some point time was spent on producing this)
Paperwork is sent to Andy
Paperwork will be tracked
Andy will retaliate and the process will carry on towards infinity.

The above process is just the tip of the iceberg and, in the end, even if Andy were to cough up £5k, the council and we would still be worse off. The irony is, if they had just asked him for £2 as a prize for tracing a random postcard all the way back to him, they’d probably be better off.

Being the council is not fun, it is never black and white, it is simply a big grey mess.

The article has even made the local paper! http://www.flickr.com/photos/andytgeezer/3995464606/