A grieving woman has been unable to cremate her dead brother for more than a month because of a bureaucratic hold-up.

Sandra Plitt, 57 was left devastated when her younger step brother Anthony Jobateh died of pancreatic cancer in January, after being rushed to Mayday Hospital on Christmas Eve.

The 47-year-old worked in the cancer ward of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, and his unemployed sister is relying on the two year’s pay accrued in his pension scheme to pay for his cremation.

But mistakes made by Mr Jobateh as he signed the pension forms on his deathbed means he remains unburied in the mortuary of the hospice he died in.

Mrs Plitt said: “How I’m keeping my composure and temper I don’t know.

“We have literally got to wait for them to check these forms before we can cremate him – we could be waiting for weeks “He was very ill and he just put his national insurance number in the wrong place and got the date wrong.

“If he knew what was going on he would be tearing his hair out.”

Mr Jobateh’s sister has been forced to stay in her brother’s home in St Saviour’s Road while the bureaucratic nightmare is sorted out, meaning she is unable to claim jobseeker’s allowance from a job centre in Colchester.

She said: “My only concern is to get Anthony cremated, but it will have to come out of his pension as I just can’t afford it.

“You can go to the Government social fund for money, but nine times out of 10 you have to pay it back, and we don’t know if we will be able to get the money.”

Mr Jobateh was admitted to Mayday Hospital on December 24 last year, after experiencing excruciating pain in his stomach, and was diagnosed with cancer two weeks later.

Mrs Plitt said: “We thought he only had weeks to live, but it ended up being days.

“He worked with cancer all his life, so he knew what he was looking at.”

A spokesman for NHS Pensions said: “NHS Pensions has a specialist bereavement team in place which deals with cases such as this as quickly and sympathetically as possible within the overarching rules and regulations of the NHS pension scheme.”