Danczuk Expense Porkie Busted

Rochdale’s nominally Labour MP Simon Danczuk is once again under fire, and once again the subject is public money, and the ability to trouser More And Bigger Amounts Of It For The Benefit Of Himself Personally Now. What is also clear is not just the scepticism of the media towards Danczuk’s answers, but their increasing ability to dig around, get to the facts, and then call him out for his lack of honesty.

Rochdale Online, which is becoming less and less enamoured with its MP’s behaviour with each exposé, has also picked up on the “Bananas” story covered recently on Zelo Street, titling its article “The Danczuks ‘go bananas’ with overtime payments”. Before he became the town’s MP, Danczuk’s campaign went after his Lib Dem predecessor Paul Rowen, claiming that he was an excessive claimer of Parliamentary expenses.

It’s all so different now. “Simon Danczuk paid his wife, Karen, a total of 621 hours overtime on top of her salary whilst she was employed by him as a 'caseworker' - the highest of any MP; now a Freedom of Information request has revealed that the overtime was paid at time and a half” readers are told. And that employment would have been during the period Danczuk was called out for poor record keeping.

He was also late in registering payments for outside earnings. His opponents have raised more than the odd eyebrow at the revelations: “Dave Hennigan, former Liberal Democrat agent in Rochdale, said that when he was working for Paul Rowen, Mr Danczuk's supporters subjected Mr Rowen to ‘personal attacks’ about his expenses, yet they were significantly less than Mr Danczuk’s”. Indeed.

So how did Danczuk explain himself? “Asked to comment, a spokesman for Simon Danczuk said: ‘This member of staff was on a part time contract of four hours a week for a significant period over the last Parliament, but regularly worked additional days during busy periods … These days were correctly recorded as overtime, which accounts for a substantial portion of the overall overtime figure’”.

However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, “a significant period over the last Parliament” is in actual fact less than a year. Yes, Kazza was employed full time up until June last year. And she was still scoring hundreds of hours of overtime. Paid at a rate of time and a half. In addition to being a Rochdale councillor. And in addition to supposedly running Danczuk’s Deli in Rochdale town centre.

So when we hear “Simon believes in paying his staff properly for the work they do and ensuring they are compensated for working outside their contracted hours … He does not consider an average of less than 2.5 hours of overtime a week over five years to be excessive”, ask yourself how Kazza could have justified being paid full time, and paid for out of taxpayer funds, for all that time. Or perhaps not.

Rochdale’s MP still has questions to answer on this one. Hello there Simon.