A woman's kitchen has been left in disrepair for more than five months by the council because of a computer error.

Broken tiles on the floor, cupboards hanging off hinges, and unusable drawers are all things that council tenant Emma Churchill has had to put up with.

For Miss Churchill and her two sons it means that the kitchen is unhygenic.

According to the council the only reason it has taken so long to make the needed repairs to the kitchen is because her details were lost in a computer system failure.

Miss Churchill, who has five dogs, said: "The kitchen is absolutely impossible to keep clean. It's unhygenic. It's hard enough to keep things clean with the dogs but this has made it an absolute nightmare.

"The way the council has treated this has been absolutely appalling.

"I've had to phone them continuously and each time I was palmed off to a different person who never really knew what was going on.

"It's a disgrace. I can't believe this is the way that one of their tenants could be treated."

In early May, Swindon Contractors carried out an assessment of her house, and said her house would need to be repaired as soon as possible.

She hoped it would be done by the end of the summer, but when there was no sign that the problem was being dealt with she started calling the council to find out what was going on.

Last week she was told workmen would be coming on Wednesday, so she re-arranged job interviews to make sure she would be home.

They never showed up, and the same happened again on the Thursday.

The workmen were scheduled to come today to complete the work.

Council spokeswoman Sue Pycroft said: "We are sorry that Miss Churchill's repairs have not been carried out sooner.

"Unfortunately we lost the details of her job during a computer crash and on top of that we failed to keep the appointment we had made for Wednesday.

"We are sorry that we failed to come up to standard on this occasion and do apologise to Miss Churchill for any inconvenience we may have caused."