ACCORDING to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, just about everyone in Blackburn seems to want the council services to be contracted out to a company called Capita.

All are in favour - from Mr Jack Straw MP, through the members of all three major parties, even unto the editor of the town's most esteemed newspaper.

I hear no dissent and fear that total unanimity, as so often in human affairs, will precede total disaster.

Bearing that in mind, I ask whether this Capita is the same Capita which signed a deal five years ago with Bexley to charge them £800,000 a year for ten years of services, but later came back to them to ask for an extra £658,000 a year, to avoid the collapse of the benefits scheme?

Is this Capita the firm whose services at Lambeth have earned a recommendation from consultants that council services should be brought back in house?

Is it the firm which promised Kent a £300,000 a year saving on the payroll that turned out to require an £800,000 overhaul of the council's computers?

Capita proposes to stand between the people of Blackburn and their council. In that narrow area, Capita proposes to save money for the ratepayers, pay out benefits to the people of Blackburn and Darwen, create 500 new jobs, invest £5 million in a new "business centre" and make a profit . . . but not in that order.

In exactly the opposite order, actually.

For the primary legal requirement of the directors of Capita is to make a return for their shareholders and the shareholders will have to be kept happy.

This year, despite Capita's problems in Kent, Bexley and Lambeth, operating profits are up by 50 per cent in a year, to £53 million.

Councillors of Blackburn with Darwen should remember the awful fate of the directors of Railtrack, who carried on paying out profits to shareholders and simplified their business by awarding endless track maintenance contracts to private firms, until the trains crashed off the tracks.

ANDREW ROSTHORN, Director, Sealand Boat Deliveries Ltd, Operations Office, Ivy Cottages, Tockholes, Darwen.