Devon pensioner Sylvia Hardy has been freed from prison, less than two days into a seven-day jail term, after an anonymous donor paid her £53.71 council tax arrears. But the 73-year-old, from Exeter, said she was disappointed she had not been able to serve her full sentence. "That's what I intended to do and I'm unhappy about the way this has been dealt with," the ex-social worker said. Ms Hardy, who argues the tax is unfair on retired people, was jailed on Monday and had been due to be freed on Friday. Hidden under sheet She was the first female pensioner to be jailed in England for refusing to pay a rise in her bill over the rate of inflation.  | | Ms Hardy arrives at court in Exeter. |
She told the BBC that she did not know who had paid the arrears or why. She added she did not blame the prison authorities for her release from Eastwood Park Prison, in Gloucestershire, as they had been obliged to free her once the payment had been made. "I don't know what the motives of this particular person were - he might have been a person that was against the campaign and wanted to blow it up, or he may have been a person misguided who wanted to help, or thought he was helping. "Arrangements were made for a car to pick me up, and a car came straight inside the prison and I was taken out lying on the back seat with a sheet over my body - a bit James Bondish, isn't it?" She added: "I was treated very courteously and very kindly and efficiently by the prison officers, and I was certainly treated very well by the inmates who for obvious reasons, knowing the reason why I was in there, took me to their hearts." Ms Hardy was spared jail last year when a mystery person paid her arrears and on that occasion she said she was "very angry and disappointed" at being denied her chance to protest. Albert Venison, chairman of the Devon Pensioners Action Forum, which has supported Ms Hardy's campaign, said she had been "very emphatic" to Exeter City Council that it should not accept payments on her behalf. Mr Venison added that Ms Hardy was trying "to get the message across to the people concerned, that we have had too much of having our standard of living decrease each year because of high council tax, compared with the rise in the pension each year". Supporters of Ms Hardy had been holding a vigil at Exeter Cathedral before her release on Tuesday. Magistrates on Monday said they had no choice other than to jail Ms Hardy and that she should not be seen as "a martyr". She told Exeter Magistrates' Court that she was fighting to change a law she saw as unjust, and "often the only way to do this is to break the law or ignore it and to accept the punishment". She had faced a £683 council tax bill for her two-bedroom flat. | 
