IN RESORTING to bringing in private detectives to track down council tax dodgers who have disappeared and left the town hall with more than £3 million in debts, Blackburn with Darwen Council is right to do all it can to bring down this sapping bill.

But, at the same time, this move tellingly exposes the vexing frustration to which councils everywhere are subject when they chase after disappearing householders who leave behind a pile of debts that reduce services and push up the bills of the decent, law-abiding citizens who do pay their dues and demands on time.

For, amazingly and maddeningly, these feckless parasites are helped to cover their tracks by the law.

It used to be that information on the movement of debtors was exchanged between the public utilities - the old gas, electricity and water boards - and that local authorities seeking householders who had uprooted owing rates or rents could tap this information in order to trace them and demand the money they were owed.

But not any more.

Crazily, in the computerised era of instant information, data protection laws prevent councils from providing others with this sort of intelligence and from seeking it from organisations like the now-privatised utilities whose billing files are now inaccessible to them.

The upshot? Blackburn with Darwen is now driven to bringing in specialist sleuths full-time.

And it will not be a cheap way of reducing the debt mountain since these private investigator firms are, in effect, bounty hunters taking a slice of the money they recover for the public coffers.

Yet those of us who are bombarded with junk mail - now so fine-tuned that it can be timed to coincide with when our insurance cover for our homes, health, cars and so forth is due to expire - know full well that data about us, our circumstances and whereabouts is freely exchanged and traded in by all sorts of businesses and bodies.

If, then, we and our privacy are in so many ways unprotected - yet without any real harm to our liberty - what on earth is the point of having data protection laws and a hugely expensive bureaucracy to maintain them when they are being used to protect the privacy of people who are only too happy to avoid detection and when the public good is immensely harmed, both materially and financially?

It is high time that, looking at this instance in his own constituency, Home Secretary Jack Straw reviewed the data protection laws and ensured that they no longer benefit the dodgers.

In fact, the first question he should ask himself should be, is there any useful purpose to this act at all?

There would be no affront to individual liberty or privacy if they were made so that town halls and the gas, water and electricity undertakings were able to share the information they used to before.

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