BRITAIN'S loos are shrinking! Our public facilities are going down the pan and it's starting to drive me round the U-bend.

The Women's Institute lifted the lid on ladies loos last week saying they're just too small, but, as your caring CITIZEN found out, we men have to put up with the same treatment.

Noreen Stanway of St Stephens Road, Blackburn agreed with the fact that most ladies' now have separate baby-changing facilities where there's plenty of room. In fact it was the men who seemed to have all the gripes.

Philip Staines of Birley Street said the men's toilets were the problem. "Some of them can be a bit small, it's all a bit cramped."

So I decided to hit the high street, armed with my trusty tape measure, to find out just how tiny our toilets have become.

The WI outlined their proposal for a minimum size of four feet by six feet, but even the largest of the men's was only three feet in width.

The average seemed to be around two-and-a-half by five feet, but even I found myself starting to feel claustrophobic in one supermarket cubicle. It measured just two-and-a-half by four feet, almost half the size of the minimum requirement for women!

And the Health and Safety officer for Blackburn told me there aren't any laws to protect Joe Public.

She said: "There isn't actually anything in the regulations about a minimum cubicle size, only the facilities they have to offer."

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