COUNCIL MISTAKES

A mother has described how she returned from a weekend break to find the council had boarded up her home. Patricia Driscoll was told the shutters had gone up on her three-bedroom Cardiff council house because officials thought she had abandoned the property. She had to spend the night with a friend after the authority mistook her home for a flat on the same estate.

The council has apologised and replaced the backdoor which was damaged in the work, and sent Miss Driscoll flowers. Care assistant Miss Driscoll, 39, lives on the Brynfedw estate in Llanedeyrn with her 13-year-old daughter, Amber. Her 19-year-old son, James, was house sitting for her while she was away for the weekend in Blackpool and Amber was at her grandmother's.

She said James had been at the property until 12.30pm on the weekday that she returned home, from the railway station some four hours later. "As we drove up, I could see that there were shutters on my window frames. The first thing I did then was that I panicked and looked for black smoke marks on the house, but there weren't any. Then I thought the house had been smashed in."

She said the council's contractors had just finished the shutter work and were in the garden packing up to leave. "They said 'we have been ordered to do this because you had abandoned the property'. I said 'I've been away for the weekend!' They said I couldn't stay in it because it was a fire hazard while the shutters were on. So I had to stay at a friend's overnight and wait till the morning to go to the council to find out what was going on."

She said it turned out the message from the estate's caretaker about an empty flat on the other side of the estate had been misunderstood. The caretaker reported the one-bedroom flat, no 215, but the numbers were somehow rearranged to Miss Driscoll's house number. She sais, "They said 'the caretaker reported your flat empty'. I said 'hold on, flat? I live in a house'."

"They are not really sure how the number got twisted up, but the fact that it was a flat and I live in a house is a dead giveaway, isn't it! The thing is, I had just cut the grass last week. There was fresh food in the fridge. When it first happened, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but I'm laughing about it now."

A spokesman said, "Cardiff Council extends its sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused to Ms Driscoll. The authority owns and manages 14,000 homes around the city. Whenever a property falls vacant we fit it with security screens, if appropriate. Local housing officers were wrongly informed by colleagues that Ms Driscoll's home had been abandoned. They acted properly in arranging for it to be screened. When Ms Driscoll drew the error to their attention, they ensured that the screens were quickly removed."

Embarrassed council bosses had to arrange for Christmas trees to be removed from a town centre, after complaints from residents. Shoppers in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, were shocked to see council workers putting the trees up in the Market Square at the end of September. Aylesbury Vale District council apologised for the mistake.

Council leader John Cartwright blamed the enthusiasm of council workers for the trees going up so early. He said, "It was a case of poor judgement. The council workers did not check with us. You can argue they showed too much initiative because they had the required machine on hire and it had a few spare hours. They put up the trees because it was a job that had to be done. They just showed bad judgement and now they have had to take the trees down again."

Martin Clark from Paula's Petals, a shop in the market square, could not believe his eyes when he saw the trees going up. He said, "I was just amazed to see men in shorts, T-shirts and sunglasses putting Christmas trees up with all the tinsel in September."