Wicked Bun owner blames Harrow Council over Covid grant error

Fahim Niz, who runs The Wicked Bun in Harrow’s Station Road, claims he has been messed around by Harrow Council after he applied for vital money to keep the business alive.

He applied for a £12,000 ‘restart grant’ from the council but it was not approved and the application deadline has now passed. 

Mr Niz explained he has already been forced to let two staff members go in order to pay bills and suppliers.  He feels this will only get worse without the support.

He said: “I need this money to survive until things return to normal. The pandemic has had a massive impact.

“We’ve seen a 60 per cent drop in income – we used to take around £400 to £600 a day, now it’s £150 to £250.”

“The council could easily help us but it appears they don’t want to support businesses – and I’m sure I’m not the only  one in this situation. 

“They are happy to send me bills for business rates, rubbish collection and so on but they don’t want to give us the support we are entitled to.”

Mr Niz said an “admin error”, was not picked up quickly enough by Harrow Council – so he missed the deadline of June 30. 

The paperwork was submitted on June 24 but he did not heard back until July 12 – he believes this was slow – based on his previous dealings with the council.

He added: “I know they could help out. The money is there, anything that isn’t spent will be returned to the Government, and they must have plans for exceptional cases such as this where the business simply made a mistake.

“I think the problem is we have been too honest. We’ve had no issues before and we told them about the change in company status because we thought we should. There are so many dodgy people out there who will have got payouts.”

The council have asked him to apply for a discretionary grant – but he says the £2,000 on offer is “peanuts” and would not help him enough.

Harrow Council said it could not comment on individual cases.