A council leader today demanded the resignation of two councillors following the publication of a damning report on East Sussex social services.

Peter Jones, leader of East Sussex County Council, said his predecessor, Lib Dem councillor David Rogers, and former cabinet member for social services David Tutt should quit.

The report follows a joint investigation last summer and autumn by the Audit Commission and the Government's Social Services Inspectorate.

It highlights a range of serious weaknesses, especially in services for the elderly, while finding a lot to praise in children's services.

The report says: "Many older people and some vulnerable adults have poor access to services in East Sussex with long waits for assessment and for service delivery.

"Many of the services offered to them are both traditional and expensive with too little effective support in the community.

"Too many older people wait to be discharged from hospital.

"These significant service weaknesses lead the Joint Review Team to conclude that, overall, East Sussex is not serving people well."

Coun Jones said: "This is a damning indictment of the record of the parties of the Left in East Sussex in the past eight years.

"Councillors Rogers and Tutt had direct responsibility for this failure and should now do the decent thing and resign."

Coun Jones said advice from the former director of social services to transfer all care and residential homes to an independent organisation had been ignored which meant the council had lost the opportunity to free up millions of pounds for other services.

He said: "They put political dogma before people and we now have the task of supporting our professional colleagues with extra resources to modernise and improve services for our elderly citizens.

"This involves working more closely with our health partners to develop effective programmes to help people out of hospital and provide quality support for them in their own homes."

The department was given a zero rating in the first ever social services star ratings published by the Department of Health last month.

The council has until November to put an action plan into place or an external team will be sent in to do the job instead.

Councillor Tutt said today: "I am sorry Councillor Jones has thought to politicise the issue.

"The previous administration struggled for years to cope with low funding.

"We constantly lobbied MPs to ask the Government to take into account the high elderly population in the county.

"We always had a policy of working towards helping older people to live more independently but we always had to work within limited budgets.

"We have no intention of resigning. Instead we plan to concentrate on the job in hand."

David Neighbour, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for social services, said: "We were criticised for the amount of resources we were putting in to the department.

"The new administration is now benefiting from extra Government funding and we hope they will make good use of it."