A Wigan Address Does Not Mean A Transsexual Up Here.
Mint balls, missing millions, and a weekend without horses on the high street.
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So here I am, up in my second home. In the northwest. Continuing to write the way I always do — not knowing anything about anything, and making it up as I go. Why stop. I’m up here. My readers know me by now, and expect little else. So why break the habit of a blogging lifetime? For the next few days, I will be focusing on local issues — without a protest in either earshot or sight. I’m on the Wigan/Salford border, in the rural-urban territory of Greater Manchester. I get the benefit of both worlds. So to speak.
Having a Wigan address doesn’t mean a transsexual up here.
I bet, for starters, you didn’t know there is a place in the north where mint balls have been made since 1898 and where, right now, twenty thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three people owe the council money. One of them — someone, somewhere in Wigan — owes a penny. Not spent. That’s the council’s department. The machinery of local government has logged it, filed it, and surrendered it under the Freedom of Information Act. The penny sits in the spreadsheet next to £33,286,560.81. This is not a metaphor. This is just another day, in another week, in another year, up here, apparently.
Come from Bristol, and the north does something to you. Back home, Bristol talks about itself constantly — its harbour, its history, its housing crisis, its progressive credentials. Wigan, from where I’m sitting, does not appear to be doing any of that. Wigan appears to be getting on with it. Whether that’s a virtue or a coping mechanism is a question the town has probably stopped asking. It has no need to.
Because while I’ve been away, Bristol has been doing what Bristol does at weekends.
Yesterday — 21 March — Bristol marked the fifth anniversary of the Kill the Bill riots with another march through the city centre, ending at Bridewell Police Station. And on 28 March, Castle Park hosts a No Tyrants anti-Trump protest — Bristol’s contribution to the geopolitical order. Trump, one assumes, remains unaware.
Bristol has not had a quiet Saturday since August.
Up here, the weekend passed without incident. No dispersal zones. No Section 60AA orders. No horses on the high street. Just a rural-urban border, a mint ball factory, and the particular silence that arrives when a place is not performing itself for an audience.
Manchester, it should be said, has its moments too. However, not this weekend. Shoppers can go about their shopping uninterrupted, in peace.
I find I don’t miss it.
Which brings me, by way of contrast, to a forty-year-old man from Platt Bridge — a place the sat nav finds without drama. He sat down recently and wrote a song. His name is Chris Winnard. He had been bereaved. Grief does not follow instructions, and Chris Winnard found his outlet in an unlikely direction: AI apps, archival photographs, and 127 years of confectionery history. The result is The Toffee Works — a song and slideshow video about Wm Santus and Co, the Wigan business that has been producing Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls since 1898.
The bosses of the factory are delighted.
I’d like you to sit with that for a moment. A grieving man used artificial intelligence to research a sweet factory, wrote the lyrics, curated the pictures, assembled the video, and produced something that made the people who run the place happy beyond measure. Just a man who needed somewhere to put his grief, and he put it somewhere good.
Grief does not follow instructions. Sometimes it makes a song about mint balls.
Wigan Council, meanwhile, chose this moment to launch something called Be Well For Less. A third off fitness memberships, children’s swimming lessons, and other leisure activities, for residents who meet certain criteria. The name is functional to the point of poetry.
Be well. Spend less. Here is a discount. Here is a swimming pool. Here is what we can offer you.
I’ll leave you to decide what you make of that. Bring cynicism and it looks like a sticking plaster on a structural wound. Bring a child who needs swimming lessons and it looks like a lifeline. You know where you stand on it already — I don’t need to tell you.
Now. The FOI response about council tax debt. Let’s go through this together.
A note worth making: this FOI request was not mine. I arrived here to find it already answered — which, in itself, is something. Wigan Council responded. The figures exist because someone asked, and the council replied. Perhaps someone should dispatch a delegation south to Bristol, where the Information Commissioner’s Office has had cause to intervene in the matter of FOI compliance. Just a thought. Wigan managed it without a tribunal.
Total unpaid council tax across Wigan borough: £33,286,560.81.
Of that, £9,555,756.44 relates to the 2024/25 financial year alone — debt accumulated within a single twelve-month period. The largest individual debt stands at £12,817.50. The smallest is 1p.
Twenty thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three people are currently in arrears.
These are not statistics about fecklessness — I want to be clear about that. They are statistics about pressure. The accumulated weight of costs rising faster than incomes. Decisions made at kitchen tables between one bill and another. A system that extends credit it expects to reclaim and finds, increasingly, that the money is simply not there.
The penny at the bottom of the list is not a joke. It is the edge of something very large.
And then there is the matter of the 1p debtor. We can only imagine the letter. Although, on reflection, we don’t have to imagine very hard. Bristol City Council would almost certainly have it covered.
BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL — REVENUES AND BENEFITS SERVICE FINAL NOTICE OF OUTSTANDING LIABILITY STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Resident,
Our records indicate that, as of the date of this letter, you are in arrears with regard to your council tax account to the value of £0.01 (one penny).
This matter is now considered serious.
Despite previous correspondence — which you have, frankly, had quite enough time to act upon — the above sum remains outstanding. We write to inform you that if payment of £0.01 is not received within seven days of the date of this letter, Bristol City Council reserves the right to pursue the following recovery action:
— Referral to our appointed enforcement agents (bailiffs), who will attend your property to recover goods to the value of the outstanding debt, plus applicable fees of £75.00 for the first visit.
— Application to the Magistrates’ Court for a Liability Order, at a further cost to yourself of £62.50.
— Attachment of earnings, whereby your employer will be instructed to deduct the outstanding sum directly from your wages.
— In exceptional circumstances, committal proceedings.
We trust this will not be necessary over one penny.
Payment may be made online, by telephone, or in person at any of our offices during normal business hours. We are also able to accept cash.
Please note that a 1p coin remains legal tender in the United Kingdom.
Yours sincerely,
T. Bureaucrat Senior Revenues Officer Bristol City Council Revenues and Benefits Service
If you are struggling to pay, please contact us. We are here to help. Please also note that the cost of producing and posting this letter significantly exceeds the amount owed. We are also currently unable to respond to Freedom of Information requests within the statutory timeframe. We appreciate your patience.
A Wigan address, it turns out, contains multitudes. A mint ball factory that has outlasted two world wars and is still delighting people. A bereaved man. A song about mint balls. A council scheme. A swimming pool. A third off. Thirty-three million pounds of unpaid debt, logged to the penny.
I came up here not knowing what I’d find on this visit to my second home. What I found was a place doing what places do.
Getting on with it.
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication covering UK institutional dysfunction, political accountability, and the things that happen when no one is supposed to be watching. This week, it is watching from further north than usual.