…and I would claim five hundred more,

but I wouldn’t admit being overpaid

until the press were at my door… fa, la, la…”

Sorry about that, but it strikes me Lancashire’s PCC is very much a Pro-Claimer Commissioner, as it were.

You may remember the Lancashire Telegraph breaking a story about Mr. Grunshaw being overpaid on his expenses as PCC, but being unable to report the extent of the difficulty due to a “we’re not telling you that without an FOI request” attitude.

Well, Grunshaw appears to have succumbed to pressure from Jack Straw and told the Lancashire Telegraph’s competitor paper the Lancashire Evening Post that the amount overpaid was £796.70, and the paper reports this represents the difference between claims at 45p per mile, as opposed to entitlements of 12-13p per mile, which is actually a larger discrepancy than the 65p v 45p rates first theorised by the Lancashire Telegraph. All claimed by accident on his behalf by someone else and not Mr. Grunshaw, we hasten to add – though he apparently didn’t successfully check the claims himself.

If Grunshaw was overpaid at 45 – 13 = 32p per mile, and ranked up £796.70 of overpayment in the process, that would suggest he was overpaid for, er, something like 2,489 miles before someone, not Mr Grunshaw, noticed he was being paid at the wrong rate.

This, as it happens, would be more than enough distance to transport him all the way from his Fleetwood home to Newfoundland, Canada, which Google tells me is a mere 2,186 miles away.

And what, you are asking is the relevance of that?

Well, he would then technically be on the right continent to “send back a Letter from America”, as another Proclaimers song goes.

Which, funnily enough, could probably make it to his office faster than a certain letter from Fleetwood.

The PCC’s office have obviously been dealing directly with the press on this, and not the great unwashed, as there is nothing on the PCC’s website about it – just a tweet promoting the No Excuses campaign.

Sorry, really, “No Excuses”? How apt!

The recorded claims that are disclosed on the Commissioner’s website are at the reported 45p per mile, but sadly none at a length of 500 miles. Strangely, on what I downloaded, they stop in November of last year. Given they are supposed to be updated quarterly, that suggests there are at least two quarters of updates missing here. But he has been very busy. Too busy to do it right obviously.

Driving, mostly.

Does he still have that milk-round?