THOUGH it is tempered by the announcement that East Lancashire is to have its own Small Business Service, the government's decision not to let our region have its own training and education body is a bitter disappointment - and a big mistake by a Labour government seemingly driven by dogma rather than pragmatism.

For if its shake-up of post-16 education and training is aimed at bringing improvement - by replacing the country's Training and Enterprise Councils with a smaller number of new Learning and Skills Councils covering larger areas - we fear the effect may the opposite in our region.

This is because that in the East Lancashire Training and Enterprise Council we already have the best drive and expertise in the vital task of equipping the workforce of tomorrow with the necessary skills and opportunities.

Indeed this fact was acknowledged once again only this month when, measured by the government's own conditions, it was judged to be the best in the country.

Now we are at risk of that being dissipated and depleted as ELTEC's work and role is absorbed in the new LSC that will cover the whole of Lancashire.

And shutting down ELTEC also dismantles its vital and cohesive influence in the construction of the dynamic partnership in East Lancashire that has been forged between the public and private sector business and enterprise organisations to regenerate our region and develop its economy for the future - a system that has been repeatedly held up as model for regions elsewhere. All this is being thrown into a melting pot and mixed in with the needs and influences of the rest of Lancashire when, before, the requirements that ELTEC and the East Lancashire Partnership met were the peculiar ones of East Lancashire, with its high dependence on high-tech manufacturing, its large ethnic population and skills levels that differed from those of other areas.

The danger is that this focus, and the force behind it, may be reduced in the new, enlarged body - which, against the wishes of all Lancashire's chambers of commerce, all its district councils and the existing TECs, is being set up by a centralising diktat.

To guard against that, East Lancashire must ensure it has a powerful voice and influence in the new LSC and retains all of ELTEC's enterprise expertise in the new Small Business Service it is getting as a crumb of compensation for its loss.

But if the government has refused to listen this time, it must heed the need for an early review of the performance of the new LSC for Lancashire - and measure it by the established excellence of ELTEC.

We demand nothing less than that.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.