Chorley pensioner without heat or power after burst pipe is told it will take 5 days to fix

Carole Swanton, who suffers from severe arthritis and other medical complaints, says she was told she was a "priority case" when she reported the leak on Saturday morning.

Yet, despite numerous calls and emails to Your Repair, her SOS remained unanswered over the weekend. Now she has been told today by text that she must wait until Wednesday before an engineer can get to her. So she may now have to pay a private plumber and electrician to come and do the job.

"I don't think I can wait until Wednesday. If I'm a priority case then I'd hate to think how long a standard call-out would take," said Carole, 65, at her bungalow in The Farthings, Chorley. "If they had told me when I first reported it that I would have to wait five days I would have said 'forget it' and called in private tradesmen to fix it. But they kept on assuring me - when I could get through to them - that someone was coming, so I hung on. And, anyway, I pay around £26 a month for this service and I didn't want to have to pay again for something I should already be covered for.

"I get that it must be a busy time for plumbers after the big freeze. But why couldn't they tell me the truth instead of leading me on like that. I've had a miserable weekend and now I'm facing another couple of days or so without any heating or electricity. It's disgusting."

Carole, 65, discovered the leak in her attic when the Arctic blast started to thaw on Saturday. At one point she had two inches of standing water in one of her rooms and her garage.

"The water made the electricity supply trip and I haven't been able to get it back on since, so it needs and electrician as well as a plumber," she said. "It's been very cold and I couldn't even boil a kettle to get a warm drink. They told me I was a priority case and they would get someone to me as quickly as they could."

All day Saturday and Sunday she had to sit tight, wrapped up with coats, scarves, gloves and a sheepskin rug to ward off the cold. She said her service agreement with Stoke-on-Trent based Your Repair promised a call-out within four hours. But no help came.

"I lost count of the number of times I contacted the company asking when someone would be coming," she said. "I have severe medical needs which risk being made more serious by sitting in a cold house with no power or hot water. I've got arthritis, as well as everything else, and that gets worse when it's cold and damp. So I've had a pretty miserable time to say the least."

A spokesman for Your Repair said: “We have been in direct contact with the customer and have arranged for someone to attend the property tomorrow (Wednesday) to rectify the issues at no cost to them, regardless of their policy terms. One of our tradespeople also visited yesterday to repair one of the leaks and implemented a temporary solution for the second issue, which will be addressed with a more permanent fix tomorrow.

“Unfortunately, over the weekend our service engineer was unable to attend due to the considerable volume of calls and faults that were reported as a result of the extreme weather conditions across the UK.”