…is presumably what would-be North Wales Labour candidate Terry Renshaw’s comrade Ricky Tomlinson would have said, though it was not the precise choice of words made by Lancashire Police Authority’s Chief Executive when updating the authority on transition arrangements this morning. A similar meaning got through though.

New PCCs will have to pack quite a lot into a short period of time, but the period traditionally used to take an early judgement on a US presidency is seen as unhelpful. The PCC takes office on 22 November. About 2 weeks later they should know how much money will be coming to them from central government, which gives them, oh, another two weeks to meet the deadline of notifying the Police and Crime Panel of their proposed Council Tax precept by 21 December. Bang goes the Christmas Party!

Other things we learned at the Police Authority meeting were that:-

• The Home Office will issue briefing papers for potential PCC candidates, and these will include a briefing about the ‘Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’. People seem to be calling this APCC – really guys, APaCCs is much better. You can pronounce it for a start.
• The APA Transition Seminar at NPIA Ryton, Warwickshire will be open on 29th June (for free) to prospective candidates and ‘interested parties’, with an outline programme available by the end of this week.
• A new website for APaCCs (see, I’m persistent) should be up by Friday?
• The Association of Police Authorities are “still engaging with the LGA with the aim of establishing a more cooperative partnership approach, as both the APA Board and the Board for the APCC believe that this would be the most beneficial outcome for PCCs and the public. However, if no compromise is reached, it is possible the LGA will continue to operate in competition with the APPC until PCCs are in a position to decide what they require from a national representative body. In the meantime, APA are clear that only the APCC has been commissioned by the Home Office to provide the national representative body function for PCCs between November 2012 and the end of March 2013.” Seconds out, round one…
• It looks like new Commissioners will all have ‘policecommissioner.gov.uk’ domains if they want them. Don’t know what happened to ‘and crime’ or user-friendly website names. Doesn’t anyone want to buy my TopOfTheCops.co.uk domain? There’s £2.50 down the drain!

In other news, ACPO have released some slides and what-not from their conference last week. Hopefully the three English Democrat candidates who attended found it useful, but this perhaps means they could have saved their cash. How the English Democrats plan to stand in 38 of the 37 English police areas up for election this year (yes, you read that right) I don’t quite know, nor how they will finance the nearly £200,000 it will cost just to get on the ballot papers, without printing a single leaflet, when the LibDems appear to be struggling. If they do that, then sorting the budget by day 30 of the first 100 days should be no problem. They will have seen a reference to that first 100 days at Session 4 on day two of the ACPO conference.