COUNCILLOR Don Rishton is somewhat late in the day when he complains about his deprivation-riddled Bank Top ward being left out of the £37.5million, five-year City Challenge improvement project now coming to a close in Blackburn.

But he has always stood up for his patch.

However, he does hit on a fundamental fault in the system - that it created losers as well as winners.

It would be churlish to dismiss the benefits of City Challenge.

Certainly, much private investment might not have arrived without it and it was a huge spur for the long-overdue revamp of the central shopping precinct.

Yet an inevitable consequence of the competition element of the Government scheme was that whole towns and needy areas in them, like Bank Top, would miss out on the windfall.

But now the system is expiring, the council and the government must surely be obliged to concentrate attention and resources on the areas which were losers.

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