DURHAM City Council has been criticised for cutting the home visits that care wardens make to pensioners.

The council's Liberal Democrat leaders say the warden service will be more flexible and responsive and blame cuts in Government funding for the decision.

But Labour opponents say they have wasted money.

The cabinet approved recommendations that all users be checked at least once every six weeks instead of every two and that each warden has their own area to cover.

Councillors were that told the council would have to raise £200,000 through increased charges if changes were not made and that the warden service was under pressure from an expected further reduction in funding from the Government's Supporting People programme and an increase in demand.

A report to the cabinet said the service's control room was also responsible for the city's security cameras and the workload out-of-hours had increased because police now needed to view incident footage sooner.

Emergency calls from pensioners for help from wardens at night had increased substantially, the number of people living at home was expected to increase and some users had requested that routine warden visits stop.

The report predicted the streamlining of other health and social care services to the point where accessibility to services is reduced and that 24-hour response services "are more likely to be focused around providing advice rather than home visiting"

Councillor Carol Woods, cabinet member for finance, said: "The increasing requests for out-of-hours service have placed a great stress on the service and we need to react to that. The cuts in the Supporting People Grant that fund it have left us with a significant financial problem.''

Council leader Councillor Fraser Reynolds said reducing routine check-ups on more able pensioners would allow for more visits to more vulnerable users.

Labour leader David Bell said the Liberal Democrats were squandering the inheritance of a cutting-edge service set up in the 1980s.

He said three posts in the service were going along with 49 others across the council in a restructuring and that his calls to seek funding from the police, health and social services had been rejected.