AGE Concern staff are pleading with vandals to stop targeting their daycare centre for the elderly.

More than 30 pensioners were forced to go without their lunch, usually cooked on-site at the centre, in Norman Road, West Malling, on Tuesday after hooligans smashed the kitchen windows with bricks.

Instead they were reduced to eating fast food purchased locally.

The manager of the Malling Age Concern centre, Lynne Patt, said: "We came in on Tuesday morning to find glass everywhere - on all the surfaces, on the floor, in the pots and pans. There was no way we could prepare lunch in there.

"We're all incredibly angry. We keep on continually fundraising and yet these people can't help ruining it for us.

"The insurance companies all have an excess which we have to pay and the money has to come from somewhere. I just wish they would please leave us alone."

This latest act of vandalism, which is thought to have been committed late on Monday night, is just one of many instances of anti-social behaviour with which Age Concern staff have to contend.

Three weeks ago, wire meshing was torn from other windows at the rear of the building, which were then smashed.

And every Monday morning staff have to tidy away hypodermic needles, beer cans, empty glue containers and cans of spray paint left behind over the weekend in an area behind the centre where the pensioners like to relax.

Each week more than 160 elderly people from 27 villages in the Malling area use the centre, which receives the majority of its funding from charitable donations.