TODAY we see another instance - the third in two weeks reported by this newspaper - of lives being put at risk by dangerous, clapped-out buses.

And, horrifyingly, once more we find scores of schoolchildren exposed to death and injury.

In the latest swoop by police and safety experts, of 11 buses used to take East Lancashire children to school, five were so unsafe that they were ordered off the road.

One was so bad that it was only fit to be towed!

There is no excuse for this.

The consequences are unthinkable.

But there are reasons for it - none of them good.

This is all down to money - to operators cutting corners on vital vehicle maintenance to save money and stay ahead of the competition.

This is a crucial defect in the deregulation system that was introduced in 1985.

And it has to be sorted out.

For the present system of catching and then either warning, banning or prosecuting the cheapskate companies flouting the law is not good enough.

They are able to cut corners and put lives at risk until they are caught.

That is inviting disaster.

They must be stopped from doing it in the first place.

But the trouble is that de-regulation is actually an incentive for the opposite.

Last month, we saw how Ribble Motor Services, one of the North West's biggest bus operators, was caught running dozens of defective buses.

Last week, its parent company, Stagecoach, was warned over running two unsafe school buses.

Now another safety blitz uncovers more frightening, life-threatening flouting of the law.

Yet, the infuriating fact is that the profit-first ethic of de-regulation itself is actively encouraging this and the authorities themselves are passively participating in the process.

Consider the school bus service.

The contracts are awarded by the County Council.

Almost invariably they go - as the government insists - to the lowest bidder.

But in the competitive scramble for the contracts, costs are being kept down at the expense of vital safety standards being kept up.

This is money-driven madness and it must be stopped

And the government must take the de-regulation system apart to root out this flaw.

Or will it take a huge tragic accident one of these days to make them realise?

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