AS a value-for-money exercise, the £350,000 proposal to fit alarms to protect hundreds of empty sink-estate council houses in Blackburn and Darwen takes some beating.

Though it might amount to a surrender to the thieves, vandals and arsonists preying on vacant properties in places like Blackburn's Roman Road estate it might actually be more economic to give the scum the keys to the houses instead.

For what is the point of going to such lengths and expense to prevent the wrecking of these houses if no-one wants them anyway?

However, though I do not seriously advocate such a drastic step, I still think it would be more sensible for the council -- itching in any case to dump its entire housing stock on to a private company -- to, in effect, achieve the same result as the wreckers and pull down all of its problem properties.

After all, is it not a wasteful and costly gesture to wire up hundreds of houses to a 24-hour call centre in order to keep them safe, when the fact is that they are not worth protecting because they are virtually valueless commodities? It's the same as renting a safe deposit box to put an empty wallet in it.

Surely, if Blackburn with Darwen Council has £350,000 to spare for such a spurious scheme, it would do better to add this amount of public money to its contribution to the Lancashire police budget, so that we might have a few more human 'alarms', in form of bobbies on the beat, patrolling places like Roman Road -- where from the unbridled destruction taking place, it would seem that there are far too few already despite what the recent improved crime figures suggest.