Fife Council, in Scotland, was supposed to pay the man £59.95 a week, but accidentally paid £59,395 per week instead – and didn’t notice until around £297,000 was paid out.

The payments have been blamed on a “keying error”, The Courier reports.

Most of the cash has been recovered and a repayment plan has been put in place to recover the remaining sum, around £12,000.

Service manager Jacqueline Armitage said: “The incorrect recurring payment should have been picked up as part of our normal checks, so we’ve now put an additional reporting mechanism in place to create a dualchecking system.”