A PRESTON mother has slammed the city council for failing to clean up the garden of her council-owned home before she moved in.

Tenant Caroline Norcroffe, 24, claims the garden of her Weeton Place home, on the Larches estate, is littered with bottles used to store potent drugs.

And last week, following complaints from Caroline, council workers removed a needle found in her garden, believed to have been used by drug users. Now she and partner Steven Taylor, 27, are calling on the council to make their land safe for their two-year-old son Arron to play.

"I paid a gardener £100 to level out the garden, but he only cut the grass because he found the syringe and wouldn't do any more. I don't blame him, no one wants to risk getting infected from an old needle.

"I don't want Arron to go in the garden and hurt himself," said Caroline, a nursery nurse at Kindercare, Ashton.

Although the couple have been told that the garden is their responsibility as tenants, they are pressing the council to do the job for them over concerns for their own safety.

A spokesman from the cleansing department at Preston City Council said: "We've contacted the family. Ordinarily we only do needle sweeps when someone first moves into the house and there's more than one needle. Every other case is dealt with individually."