TWO separate initiatives in East Lancashire today demonstrate how crime can be spectacularly slashed -- when such efforts are backed up by investment.

They are the revolutionary closed-circuit TV system that is stopping Blackburn's Corporation Park from being a haunt for vandals, drug-dealers and sex pests and the community wardens pioneered in Accrington to such effect that town-centre crime was halved.

But despite the remarkable success of these schemes , we find them having to go cap-in-hand-cash -- in the case of the CCTV scheme, so that there can be more of the same and, at Accrington, so that the wardens can return three years after they were axed for lack of cash.

Such has been the beneficial impact of the park cameras that the Council is considering installing similar ones in other parks, but we find that putting more of them in Corporation Park is dependent on the success of a bid for lottery funding for the park's refurbishment. And against a reported 50 per cent rise in crime since the wardens were scrapped, Hyndburn Council is now having construct a complicated plan in order to fund their return -- having earlier had its planned bid for government cash for just such schemes thwarted by the police having no money to support their comeback.

Encouragingly, these efforts are continuing in spite of the obstacles in the way of their development -- and, rightly, so. For initiatives like these that work and prove their worth are what communities want. Indeed, the community wardens scheme that Accrington originated has not only won awards, it has been coped all over the country.

It is strange, then, that crime-fighting ventures like these that succeed and are evident value-for-money cannot be sure of swift and automatic funding from public expenditure. A supposedly tough-on-crime government might be asked why not.

Let's have more of them.