A PENSIONER claims police officers assured him the constabulary would pay for repairs after smashing open his door – but he’s now been lumbered with the £200 bill.

David Barlow arrived home after a day in London to find “a circle of police and neighbours” outside his gate and two holes in his front door.

Neighbours “were worried that they’d not seen any sign” of the 72-year-old all day before calling the police in the evening, wrongly believing he may have collapsed.

Four officers attended the Barbourne property and had bashed in two door panels, before searching his home and ordering a repair company to fix it.

Mr Barlow had been out since 6am and returned home just before 9pm on March 23, having spent the day taking photos at an Anti-Brexit march in the capital.

He said officers at the scene told him the constabulary would pay for repairs, but he was later sent an invoice from RapidSecure for £204.

“I was assured by the officers that as I was not a suspect, and was not, for instance, being busted for drugs, it is for the police to pay the cost of the repairs to my front door,” Mr Barlow wrote in a letter to West Mercia Police.

“Indeed, they had, it turned out, ordered such repairs shortly before I had returned home. I was also advised that, on occasion, the repair people sometimes, mistakenly, send the bill to the address of the repair, rather than to the police.”

He was told if this happens to call 101 but said when he did so, on numerous occasions, they told him they had no record of it and to call the investigating officer.

However, with the officer on holiday at the time, Mr Barlow has struggled to get reach him.

“What concerns me about this, as much as anything else, is that, bearing in mind the obvious implication that your force has some kind of tendered-for contractual arrangement with RapidSecure of Norfolk, nobody on 101 knew anything about them,” he wrote.

He told the Worcester News: “If I’d not been informed by the police that they’d pay for the temporary repair, I could have asked them to cancel their order for it and done it myself in a quarter of an hour.”

West Mercia Police said officers went to see Mr Barlow yesterday to explain the actions taken and his claim for reimbursement was being looked into currently by the force’s legal department.