EVERY so often a headline in the Evening Telegraph really lifts my spirit. There was a bonus for me on Monday as I went through last week's papers, which were waiting after my trips to Brussels. This time it was not one headline, but two which lightened my day.

First, there was the news about a real start time for the cinema and leisure complex to go on the spare land at the back of the railway station. How many times in the last 25 years have I looked across at that land while waiting for a train and wondered what could be done to it? Now we know, and it's very good news.

After decades of apparently inexorable decline, cinema attendances UK wide have been going up. But many people want a different experience in modern multiplexes, with good parking and other leisure facilities close by. They've had to travel for that in the past. Now, the experience can be enjoyed in the centre of Blackburn.

We've already got many good pubs and clubs. My hope is that off the back of this kind of development there will be a growth in the number and range of restaurants in town.

If we want, as we all do, Blackburn to compete with the likes of Preston and Bolton, it's the way we've got to go, along with the improvement in the shopping centre for which the Telegraph has so long campaigned.

The new cinema complex will also be the final piece in the jigsaw in the transformation of that part of the town centre. And what a change for the better it's been, with Fleming Square, Church Street, the new pavilions, the Boulevard, the new Railway Station and the very imaginative siting by Lancashire Police of the new Police Station in the Railway Station front building.

The other headline which made me very happy was that about John Prescott's announcement last week of more than £100 million for East Lancashire's Housing Market Initiative. I'd been worried that we might lose out unfairly to the likes of Greater Manchester and Merseyside.

Although I can - and do - really fight my corner as the town's MP, I quite properly could not be involved in the government decision because I had such a constituency interest in the outcome. But justice was done.

The responsibility is now on the East Lancashire councils to spend the cash wisely, on improving older housing where this makes sense, demolishing houses where improvement is not a serious option, and generally upgrading older or more run-down areas. As well as providing people with better housing in which to live, the aim is to get the housing market going.

House prices which are too high can exclude many people from living where they may need too, as happens in parts of the South East. But there's an opposite problem too. Have houses prices too low, and there'll be insufficient investment in the area.

People may think that the too-low prices reflect a lack of confidence; and they may be able to raise less credit to improve or extend their homes and for other large purchases.These days, a good share of many loans secured on the equity of people's houses is used on non-housing purchases.