Five-year-old girl reduced to tears after council shuts down lemonade stand

A five-year-old selling lemonade to Londoners heading to a music festival was reduced to tears after the local council shut down her stand and issued her father with a £150 fine.

The girl’s father, Andre Spicer, said his daughter broke down and told him “I’ve done a bad thing” after Tower Hamlets council enforcement officers shut down the rogue traders for operating without a permit.

They had set up the lemonade stand near their home in east London’s Mile End as thousands of revellers headed to the nearby Lovebox Festival last weekend.

The council has since apologised and withdrawn the fine.

But Mr. Spicer, a professor at City University, was furious. “It’s not like she was trying to make a massive profit”, he told the London Evening Standard. “This is just a five-year-old kid trying to sell lemonade.”

“She just wanted to put a smile on people’s faces. She was really proud of herself.”

Mr. Spicer said four council officers stormed up to the table just half an hour after the pair had set up the stand, where they were selling one large glass of lemonade for £1 and a small cup for 50p, causing the girl to burst into tears.

A council spokesman told the BBC: “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.”

Mr. Spicer branded the saga “lemonadegate” and expressed confusion over how best to entertain his child instead. “Setting up a lemonade stand is obviously far too risky”, he said.

Mr. Spicer added that things like lemonade stands were commonplace in America, where he has family, and that such an incident would be a national scandal should it happen there.

In a cruel twist of fate, it seems a five-year-old girl in California was indeed also left devastated recently after a man called the police to shut down her lemonade stand.

The girl’s father, Richard LaRoche, detailed the incident in a Facebook post. He claims that after a man approached his daughter and threatened to have her sent to jail for her unlicensed stand, she ran home in tears.

But the story soon made the local news, and the next day the girl set up her stall again, with her lemonade selling out within hours as neighbours turned out in force to show their support.