IT has been famously said that markets cannot be bucked, but the bid by council chiefs to intervene in the one for sought-after homes in East Lancashire's high-priced Ribble Valley is one that deserves to succeed.

For they plan to ring-fence the future sale of council houses into private sector, restricting them to purchasers who must either live or work locally.

The aim is to prevent the Ribble Valley from becoming a dormitory of weekend holiday homes owned by well-off outsiders who price local people out of the community they have grown up in.

And though the scheme - believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country - is a radical interference with the free market and its principles, it is nevertheless a necessary and overdue one. For home ownership in the Ribble Valley is rapidly becoming an exclusive club from which local people are being increasingly excluded.

Young couples brought up there simply cannot afford house prices in the Ribble Valley, especially if they are on the first rungs of the career and income ladder. Fuelled by the combination of the area's high scenic beauty attracting well-off outsiders and demand from within East Lancashire for homes in the catchment areas of Clitheroe's high-reputation schools, the cost of property has rocketed.

But harsh as this is in individual cases of those excluded, it is also detrimental community-wise as villages effectively 'die' during the week when the second homes of which many are increasingly made up are unoccupied.

It is a syndrome that kills off village schools, pubs, shops, churches and all the social life that goes with them - when to truly thrive communities need the 'soul' and commitment to them that comes from people whose lives, jobs and roots lie there.

It may be that challenges lie ahead for the definitions of the residents or workers who will have the exclusive right to buy former council houses under the terms of the proposed new contracts which will force tenants who buy them to sell them on only to 'locals,' but the scheme will surely curb the unwholesome influence of weekenders from the southern counties on the Ribble Valley's character and its house prices. And it is not before time.