HAVING only recently questioned the power and presumption of councils to put the half-Nelson on developers by attaching absurd conditions to bids for planning consent -- such as a supermarket chain being asked to stump up the cost of a statue if they want the go-ahead for a new store.

I find a cracking piece of coercion in the town hall's small print over their permission for East Lancashire's new super hospital to be built.

It is that the likes of you and I be required to shiver at bus stops in the pouring rain.

No, I am not joking.

For out of the recent row over nurses working at Blackburn Infirmary and Queen's Park Hospital being stung for a whole 22p a week extra to park their cars at work comes the revelation that the town hall wants more of them and the rest of us to ditch our cars and go there by bus.

Unbelievably, it was a condition of the planning permission for the new £86 million super hospital that will be built by 2005 at Queen's Park that health officials introduced a 'green' travel plan to reduce the number of vehicles travelling to the site and that they place a bond of £250,000 of much-need NHS money with the town hall as part of their commitment to this.

Surely, it is the not the NHS's job to concern itself with how staff or visitors make their way to hospital, but to fix hernias, dicky tickers and wonky hip joints. And if the green, car-hating fanatics at the town hall, with their own hypocritical reserved parking places on the multi-storey, have the gall to tack such extraneous, ideological, politically-correct conditions on the building of a new hospital, then health chiefs should tell them to take a powder.

The fact is, parking at Blackburn's hospitals -- the Infirmary in particular -- is a nightmare at present and it would be madness to transfer the problem to the new hospital at Queen's Park by limiting parking spaces there to satisfy the crackpot whims of the town hall types who hate your cars but not their own.

They should be told to shove this catch-a-bus condition up their cycling shorts and laughed at if they think they can stop a super hospital - with a giant car park -- being built by making their preachy and prescriptive conditions stick.