Mysteries of Manchester City Council: part one in a series of ten billion billion

Tenants of Manchester City Council have a 13-digit tenancy reference number. Until recently this could be keyed into the City Council website to make a rent payment or taken along to the payments counter at the town hall. However this was obviously MUCH too easy for everybody.

So tenants have been given another number, a 19-digit ‘rent card number’. Letters about rent now carry the 19 digit number and also a ten digit ‘tenancy reference’ letter and number combination that seems to bear no relation to the previous tenancy reference number.

Yes, 19 digits to key in when making a payment. Enough to make you go cross-eyed. Just to confuse things a bit more the form asks for your ‘reference/policy number’.

So now they have nearly ten billion billion different rent card numbers available to use. However the total population of the City of Manchester is only around 450,000 people and only a fraction of those are council tenants.

Reassuring to know they can now give every one of the 7 billion people in the world more than a billion rent cards each.


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