Not everyone was pleased to see the snow on Monday.

For council tenant Emma Clark, whose young family was stuck without heating or hot water, it meant things were going to get even colder.

Emma, of Rush Green Gardens, Romford, waited 24 hours for an engineer to come and repair her boiler on Monday because of a computer failure at Havering Council’s out-of-hours repairs service.

“I’ve got two children aged seven and three,” said the 28-year-old, “and my partner’s a bad asthmatic.

“I was in hospital with a kidney infection last week and I was told to stay indoors in the warm – but I’ve been sitting in a cold house.”

The boiler was fixed at 3pm.

A spokesperson for the council’s housing department said: “We are sorry for the problems that Ms Clark has had. There was a rare IT glitch in the out-of-hours equipment which caused this delay. This has been fixed and repair teams have now got the boiler up and working.”