Council accidentally tells residents to pay with cheese

A spelling mistake on a parking permit form left residents being ordered to pay for their parking in a rather more unconventional manner.

Scarborough Borough Council sent a form to households with instructions on how to request a new parking permit.

But while presumably they would have preferred payments to be made by 'cheque', a spelling error instead meant residents were told to "enclose a cheese made payable" to the council.

Twitter user @groveshall noticed the error and posted a photo of the letter on Twitter, remarking that "Spellcheck doesn't always work".

Other Twitter users also saw the funny side, with @R_Good4nuffinMP stating it was good to see the council "dealing with our money Caerphilly".

Small mistakes can have big consequences

While we're sure this minor error will have no further repercussions (to date there have been no reports of the council being inundated with cheese-filled envelopes), this isn't always the case.

In January, we reported the story of how a spelling mistake by Companies House forced a family engineering business under.

Taylor & Sons Ltd was a successful engineering firm in Cardiff, with 250 employees, when an administrative blunder by Companies House destroyed the business overnight.

The Metro reported that the problem arose when an administrative assistant was updating the details of a similar-sounding company that had been wound up. The real liquidated company was Taylor and Son Ltd in Manchester. The administrator confused the two firms, and mistakenly indicated that the Cardiff firm was in liquidation.

They corrected the mistake three days later, but by then the damage was already done. The details had been passed onto credit reference agencies, so their suppliers all believed that the company was going down the tubes.

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