THE bizarre spectre arises of nurses and other workers at two East Lancashire hospitals having their cars clamped by their bosses if they go ahead with a threatened boycott of parking charges, planned to rise by 17 per cent next month.

Will it come to that?

We hope not. But perhaps a sense proportion and dose of common sense might be the remedy in this dispute.

To begin with, though the increase sounds excessive, the actual amount staff at Blackburn Infirmary and Queen's Park Hospital are charged is not great.

They pay just £1.30 a week at present and the plan is to increase the fee to £2.22 by 2005. And this contrasts with staff at hospitals in neighbouring towns already paying £5 a month to park.

But if such sums can hardly be called swingeing, what of the principle of people who save lives and cure illness being, in effect, charged for doing so?

Their trade union calls it unfair taxing of staff just so they can come to work and do their jobs.

And there's more to their argument -- a resentment that some of the parking charges will end up in the pockets of shareholders in the consortium behind the Private Finance Initiative development of the new super hospital at Queen's Park that will concentrate hospital services on one site in the town.

And added to it is a dose of the green political correctness that colours transport policy -- in that, at the council's insistence, the super hospital plan entails discouraging cars coming to the site through greater use of public transport.

Meantime, hospital bosses argue that parking charges were introduced in the first place to pay for improved security and cut car crime -- and have done so.

But instead of letting the issue fester and become bogged down in all this complex altercation, why cannot bosses realise and unions accept that it boils down to a matter of just a few pence?

And that, amount, surely, could be 'absorbed' as part of the staff's wages so that people doing a vital job and coming and going to work at all hours of the day might be allowed to park for nothing.