IMAGINE the hell suffered by the elderly residents of an East Lancashire housing complex as youths were repeatedly running wild around their homes during the school holidays.

They had to endure them banging on their windows, pressing intercoms, kicking cars, running on roofs and damaging benches.

Nor was an isolated incident of rampage. These yobbish hooligans were repeatedly at their trouble-making around the Lingfield Court complex at Feniscowles in Blackburn every day of the week.

The louts, of course, can only be cowardly scum -- in choosing vulnerable, defenceless old folk as their targets. But disgraceful and mean though their behaviour is, it is also unpardonable because it is so dangerous -- when subjecting the elderly to fright can even be lethal.

Yet what is infuriating is that virtually all these people could do was put up with the terror -- because their calls to the police brought no action.

Indeed, more than once, when they rang to complain and to call for help, the police told them they were unable to send an officer down. And, amazingly, one resident claims that when he telephoned and received this wretched response, he was advised to ring '999' -- and when he did met with an extremely annoyed reaction.

Just what priority do the police give to old folk being terrorised by yobs day after day?

It cannot be the same as the dubious exercise they have begun in their Blackburn-based division, with patrols of mounted officers going around a housing estate to make their presence known.

Taxpayers would be grateful for a much higher-profile presence than that of negative responses at the end of a telephone line to old people being subjected daily to fear by louts who will surely regard themselves as untouchable if they can get away with such behaviour time and again.

If bobbies can be spared to ride ceremonially about the place, they can be spared also for some fast and effective front-line policing. And though, mercifully, this plague of yobbishness may subside now the school holidays are over, police must realise now that there must be no return of it when the long summer break commences -- or ever at all.