HAVING progressed from being virtually out of touch with one another, relations between Lancashire County Council and Burnley Council are said today to have improved in the past six months -- following the call by the Task Force inquiry into last summer's riots in the town for closer links to be forged between the two.

But town council leader Stuart Caddy says there is still room for improvement and wants Burnley to have greater influence on the decisions taken at County Hall which affect Burnley's people.

Yet despite the reportedly improving interchange between the two authorities, the continuing remoteness of one from the other and the lack of liaison is exampled by Burnley only finding out from this newspaper's story about a County Council bid to upgrade the town's main railway station and by Lancashire being told by Burnley of the appointment of a youth worker in the town.

East Lancashire folk, however, might find a more spectacular example of how far the decision-makers County Hall are seriously out of touch with them -- and how disdainful of them they are -- in the scandalous rejection two weeks ago of the overwhelming opposition in our region and the county as a whole to the closure of LCC-run care homes for the elderly.

If, then, the County Council cannot serve or represent East Lancashire's people as they expect on such a major issue, how far can it be trusted to do so on other issues important to them?

It is, perhaps, not greater liaison that is the answer, but our towns wresting power from far-away Preston.

And certainly the call by Burnley MP Peter Pike for Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale to be merged into a single, self-run authority to counterbalance the success of Blackburn with Darwen since its independence suggests that this is the way forward.

The writing may also be on the wall for county councils through government proposals to replace them with regional governments. And, especially after the care homes scandal, there will not be many crying in East Lancashire when it is out-of-touch County Hall's turn to be shut.