IMAGINE the terror of 78-year-old pensioner Winifred Preston living alone on a Blackburn housing estate - when in the middle of the night a mob of 30 louts began baying outside her flat and then her window went through.

That experience was bad enough - terrified Mrs Preston was kept up until 5am. But, though the council boarded up her window at once, shockingly, she was told it would be a week before it could be repaired.

We intervened - and, as it should have been, emergency action was taken.

But are not two things needed in cases like this - that any instance of an elderly person having a window broken is automatically treated as an emergency by the council and that the law, armed with the behave-or-else orders Home Secretary Jack Straw designed to curb nuisance neighbours and roaming young louts, puts pressure on this estate?

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