Patients in Swindon face hospital waiting times which are among the longest in the country, according to official Department of Health figures.

The typical wait for an operation under the Strategic Health Authority, which is responsible for town services, is almost three months.

That makes the Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire SHA the third worst in the country in a league table of England's slowest health authorities.

Kent and the South West Peninsula had the poorest records, at 3.39 months and 3.08 months respectively.

Patients in the best-performing areas face significantly shorter waits.

In Birmingham they can expect to get their operation one month earlier than in Wiltshire.

Nationally the Liberal Democrats said that the figures revealed serious disparities in hospital treatment. Paul Burstow, the Lib Dem health spokesman, said the performance was not good enough.

He said: "Patients are still waiting far too long for their operations.

"In an NHS fit for the 21st century, patients should not have to wait for months."

And he said the Government had to accept its share of the blame, in spite of pumping millions of pounds into the NHS.

He said : "It is the result of decades of under investment, and the failure of this Labour government to invest in the NHS when they first came to power."

Mr Burstow insisted there were fewer hospital beds now than there were under the Tories.

He added: "The NHS will only improve when Ministers stop meddling and let local doctors and nurses get on with the job of treating patients."

But the health figures also showed in-patient waiting times across the country had been cut since Labour came to power.

In 1997, the typical delay before an operation was 3.36 months. By September of last year this had fallen to 2.71 months.

Health minister John Hutton warned that the figures did not accurately reflect big reductions in the longest waiting times. And he insisted that the NHS was on course to hit its targets.

He said: "Speeding up access to treatment is patients' number one concern. We are committed to continuing this progress by bringing long waits down, while starting to offer patients a choice of where they are treated."

An Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire SHA spokeswoman said: "Speeding up access to treatment is patients' number one concern, and we have made good improvements in the past twelve months.

"While it is true that the waiting time is on average 2.9 months, this is only nine days more than the national average."

She added that the number of inpatient cases waiting more than nine months fell from 3,000 in March 2003 to one patient.

The number of outpatient cases waiting more than 21 weeks has reduced to zero, and those waiting more than 13 weeks reduced to 1,555, compared to 2 and 4,331 in March 2003 respectively.