Ever tried approaching your local council for business support? It often feels like sending a message in a bottle, except the tide is going the wrong way, and the bottle somehow ends up back at your feet six months later, unopened.
Yet, fail to position your wheelie bin at exactly the right angle to the pavement, and suddenly, the council’s communication systems rival MI5’s. Within 24 hours, you’ll receive a sternly worded letter, a passive-aggressive flyer, and possibly a knock at the door from an official wielding a clipboard and a disappointed expression.
When you set up a business, councils promise a wealth of support: funding, advice, networking opportunities. But in practice, getting hold of this support is like playing a game of bureaucratic whack-a-mole. You call, they transfer you to someone else, who transfers you to another department, who transfers you back to the first person, who is now mysteriously unavailable. Emails disappear into the abyss, and if you’re really lucky, you might get a generic response several weeks later that could just as easily be an automated reply from a robot trained in vague encouragement.
Need a real world story? We reached out to a business team and, miracle of miracles, got a reply! They asked what we needed, so we cheerfully responded: information on business support, mentoring, and signposting to grants like the one we had just applied for, “Grant XYZ.” Ten days later, they finally got back to us, with a link to Grant XYZ. The same grant. The one we had already applied for. The one that had now closed.
We politely pointed this out and asked, “So, what else can you help with?” That was over six months ago. We’re still waiting. And we’re not the only ones stuck in this slow-motion game of business support. We are lucky enough to have back up support systems, but put yourself in the shoes of one of our veterans trying to get some advice…
Meanwhile, in Bin Enforcement Land: on the flip side, let your bin lid be slightly ajar, and it’s as if you’ve committed a major civic crime. The level of enforcement is breathtaking. There’s CCTV, patrol officers, and possibly even a secret division dedicated to the precise alignment of household waste receptacles. One can only assume the council has an elite task force monitoring bin positioning from an underground command center.
In contrast, finding your bin when you get home sometimes requires a treasure hunt, especially during the winter months. You wake up the next morning to find the only one remaining is the one withh a nasty trail of slime at the bottom – certainly not the one you fastidiously cleaned out a couple of weekends ago…
Of course, councils have a lot on their plate. But wouldn’t it be nice if they applied the same enthusiasm they have for bin placement to actually supporting local businesses? Imagine a world where business grants were processed as efficiently as parking fines, or where an actual human picked up the phone when you called with a query instead of being sent on an automated loop resembling a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Until that day arrives, business owners will have to navigate the maze of council bureaucracy with the same level of patience and perseverance as a contestant on Takeshi’s Castle. But at least, we can all rest easy knowing that our bins are being closely monitored.
Because at the end of the day, nothing says ‘well-run town’ like a perfectly aligned wheelie bin.
Photo by Shane Rounce
