AMID concern today over the delay in the public and hospitals being alerted to the disappearance of bogus doctor Paul Bint from a Blackburn bail hostel just a month after coming out of jail, whether or not this has posed any real danger, there is another aspect raised by this case that needs to be addressed.

That is the question of how the public may be permanently protected from serial offenders like this when the law no longer requires any supervision of them.

Clearly in Bint's case, and understandably given his track record of repeatedly posing as a hospital doctor, his placement in a bail hostel suggests he was still regarded as a risk - and that view must now be strengthened by the disclosure that, since leaving prison, he had been trying to change his name.

Yet no matter how prompt or tardy has been the reaction of the police and probation officials in warning people to his disappearance, the eventuality of him one day becoming as free a person as he is now while at large is, surely, more alarming.

For what happens when he is caught?

He will be found in breach of his parole and returned to jail to serve the full term.

But then what?

The trouble is that offenders like him - those with a manifest and proven compulsion to repeat their crimes, be they bogus doctors, serial burglars or obsessive car thieves - have eventually to be released without hindrance to menace the community again and again.

If jail or bail is no real deterrent to this kind of offender, how can the public be protected?

Only belatedly, and even then with alarming gaps being exposed in the system, has this issue been addressed, but only in the case of sex offenders who must register with the police on their release into the community.

It is a measure, surely, that the Home Office must consider broadening across a much wider ranger of offenders to include the likes of Paul Bint.

It is also one which ought, perhaps, to be made far more effective by making the permanent electronic tagging of those who are acknowledged risks a firm condition of their freedom.

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