RECENT reports on local authority housing indicate Blackburn Council is floundering like a huge beached whale, with a problem of its own instigation - induced purely by mistaken socialist dogma.

After pumping untold millions of taxpayers' money into the breach, the Labour-controlled council has a crisis of unbelievable magnitude on its hands.

Labour's crusade for all people to live in council homes has now turned full circle.

It is concrete proof that politicians and public servants should have heeded the people when they demanded to be allowed to stay in their own terraced homes, where communities had developed over many generations.

The council should have ploughed the money into sustaining the old homes, thus retaining the community spirit which in many ways is worth more than bricks and mortar.

The cost of this failed social engineering in Blackburn is millions of pounds, not counting the mega sums owed by past and present tenants, plus the losses sustained on empty council houses.

It is an unmitigated disaster of gigantic proportions and no amount of public relations consultants are going to pull this one out of the hat, to save the face of this Labour council.

The answer is to get rid of these houses.

Some years back, the Government put the block on council house building and directed the job through the housing corporation to housing associations, which have proved extremely successful.

The council has failed its tenants, the residents of Blackburn, and the taxpayer most of all.

WALT MEADOWS, Whalley New Road, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.