IN some ways, one can understand East Lancashire firms being reluctant to pay for the removal of graffiti from their premises.

After all, if anyone should pay it's the yobs who daub their buildings in the first place.

But one cannot agree with the attitude of businesses - complained about in a Blackburn with Darwen Council report into the problem - that because they've paid their town hall dues, it's the council's job to remove it. Especially when going down that road would increase the bill to council tax payers by £500,000 a year in this one borough alone.

That's on top of the £50,000 it already costs the council to clean graffiti from public buildings.

As the East Lancashire Chamber of Commerce suggests, a sense of civic pride and self-esteem is due from firms by making it their responsibility, not the council's, to remove such unsightly mess.

But is not the real answer that of making every lout convicted of such vandalism to not only pay punitive fines, but also serve community sentences that entail them having to remove the hideous daubs left by their ilk - and to be shamed by having to do it under public gaze while

wearing day-glo jackets with 'Offender' written on them in large letters?

That, I am sure, would put a quick stop to this eyesore nuisance - and do a sight more to prevent it than pandering to the yobs' anti-social instincts by providing them with so-called 'free expression' boards on which they can indulge their spray-painting urges.

The report reveals that such appeasement doesn't work - proving it's painful deterrent that these vandals need, not wheedling appeals to their non-existent better nature.