A woman is demanding Brighton and Hove City Council pays up after it stopped collecting her council tax by mistake.

Louise McNeil believes Brighton and Hove City Council should pay after it accidentally wiped her direct debit details from its data records and left her debt to mount up for a year before demanding payment.

The mistake follows another blunder in which the council failed to collect more than £10,000 in direct debit payments from residents because staff failed to input their details correctly.

A group of 28 residents received letters demanding last year's council tax on top of this year's after they and the council failed to notice the money was not being collected from their bank accounts.

The blunder came to light ten months after the data was typed in, when one of the residents realised his monthly bills had not been collected.

Officers found a further 27 had not been paying council tax.

The unwitting debtors have been sent an apology which demands payment for the last financial year's bill on top of this year's tax.

Although Miss McNeil's details were originally typed in correctly, the council has admitted it wiped her records by accident and said the blunder was human error.

Miss McNeil, 26, of Norton Road, Hove, said: "If the council has made an error, it must have some insurance against it.

"I have asked about compensation or a write-off but was told there was no way they could do this."

Miss McNeil had been paying her council tax by direct debit for a year.

She did not realise the payments had stopped until she received this year's demand for £717.31 with a note on the bottom of the form saying she also owed £723.81 in arrears.

She could be left paying more than £120 a month.

Miss McNeil, a Seeboard operations manager, said an apology was not good enough.

She said: "The council never notified me there was a problem or that I was accruing arrears.

"The whole point of direct debit is that once you have organised it, the money is paid and you don't have to worry."

She had set up an account specifically for bill payments and transferred money into it.

She said: "They have said I have failed to pay but in fact they have failed to collect and it's their error."

A spokeswoman for Brighton and Hove City Council said: "Miss McNeil's case is different from the other 28 and appears to be an isolated case.

"What appears to have happened is that she lives in a building where there are three flats and one person moved out. Unfortunately we vacated her in error on our system."