IT IS hard to fathom why East Lancashire's second bid for Health Action Zone status - the new multi-agency approach to improving the community's health - has been turned down by the government at the first hurdle.

For the HAZ approach is to target health blackspots and the deprivation that helps to create them. And by that yardstick East Lancashire qualifies with grim ease - as the region's level of heart disease alone testifies.

But while the Tories' funding formula for health meant that too little action was targeted at such evident blackspots. Labour seems to think they are all in the inner cities which, in both the first and, now, the second wave of the HAZs announced, are apparently being given priority.

The government should adjust its focus. For it will find plenty of "inner city" deprivation and associated bad health in East Lancashire that deserves urgent action.

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