A mother said she feels insulted by the Prime Minister after his staff called her seriously ill daughter a boy.
Natasha Dye, of New England Quarter, Brighton, wrote to David Cameron desperately seeking help.
Her three-year-old daughter, Scarlett, suffers from chronic lung disease and other serious health problems and they live in one of the worst streets in Brighton and Hove for air pollution.
After failing to get assistance to move from Brighton and Hove City Council, Ms Dye wrote to the Prime Minister.
But the reply she received from the Department for Communities and Local Government said they were sorry to hear about her “son’s” ill health.
Ms Dye said: “I was livid when I saw the letter. It’s insulting. I was reading it but had to stop because I was so upset.
“I have done everything I can – appealed to the council, spoken to my MP and even gone to the Prime Minister.
“People were saying to me ‘David Cameron’s had a disabled child – he must understand what it’s like to be struggling to cope’.
“I’m quite aware he’s busy running the country and has more important things to do than help me move.
"But if he’s going to get someone else to reply to me they should at least read my letter and have realised Scarlett is a girl.”
Health problems
Scarlett has struggled to take in air since her birth and frequently goes blue and stops breathing.
She recently had open heart surgery and will have to have another operation in May.
She can’t talk and has had to eat through a tube all her life.
Mother-of-three Ms Dye regularly has to call ambulances and rush her youngest child to specialist hospitals across the country.
But paramedics have struggled to get life-saving equipment up the stairs to Ms Dye’s second floor flat.
She said: “I have done everything I can to try to get us moved.
“The most frustrating thing I have found is that I am not being listened to."
A spokesman for the Department of Communities and Local Government said: “We can confirm that in our recent letter to Ms Dye we mistakenly referred to her ‘son’ rather than her daughter.
“We have now written to Ms Dye to apologise. This was an unfortunate mistake and we deeply regret any offence that our error caused.”
A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said: “We sympathise with Ms Dye and will do everything we can to help but our choice-based lettings system is fair and transparent and is designed to provide housing to those in the highest need and who have been waiting for longest.
“More than 80 properties have been available for Natasha to bid on that she would have been eligible for and we understand that people should be able to choose the property they want to live in, but the consequence of this in a city with such a chronic housing shortage is that they will have to wait longer.
"Indeed they may not get the property they want in the location they desire at all.”
The Argus contacted Number 10 but received no reply.
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