A MALVERN family has been left seething with anger after their daughter's grave was driven over.

Doug Meadows, of Tennyson Drive, said his wife Mary and daughter Kelly visited Malvern Cemetery yesterday (Thursday) afternoon to put flowers on the grave of their late daughter, Karen.

To their horror, they saw that the tracked vehicle used in the cemetery had been run across the grave, damaging the surface.

Mr Meadows said he wanted a written apology from Malvern Town Council, which is responsible for the cemetery, and for the authority to learn from its mistake.

He said: "If they had just put a couple of construction planks across the grave, they could have run the bulldozer across that and not damaged the grave.

"I was an area service manager before I took early retirement, and I know you should have a code of practice for this sort of thing. If the council doesn't, it should pull its finger out."

He said the family earlier had to pay £95 to Malvern Town Council to have the gravestone secured after the controversial testing programme.

"It's absolutely soul-destroying when something like this happens," said Mr Meadows. "It's devastating to the parents and disrespectful to the dead. They really should make sure that it doesn't happen again."

Charles Porter, the council's operations manager, said: "We wholeheartedly apologise for this. It's not our intention to upset anybody at all and if we do, we take the matter very seriously. Our workers are top-notch and they usually take great care."