THERE is much for the lawyers to wrangle over as a conglomerate of local authorities, backed by Lancashire and several of our region's district councils, head for the High Court in a bid to stop water companies installing "smart card" pre-payment meters in the homes of poor people.

If those using the meters do not pay in advance, they get no water.

The councils say they force the hard-up to cut themselves off.

And they want to ban them from council houses.

But no-one is forced to have these meters.

Householders volunteer to have them installed.

There can be no dispute that people have a duty to pay their water bills.

But there is more at issue in this case than whether a particular means of payment that some people actually choose is unlawful or should be denied to them.

Nor is it simply a question of whether a landlord can prevent a tenant from having one of these meters.

At stake is a more basic moral issue.

It is that of whether a commodity as basic and vital to life as water should be rationed on wealth grounds - when, surely, health grounds should be the only yardstick.

For although people choose this system, shortage of money in a household must mean that its users are at risk of unsafely economising with the amount of water they use and even of having no water at all.

That really is not a satisfactory choice for anyone to make.

Or to have offered to them.

And for those reasons the action by the councils deserves to succeed - with the cutting off of anyone's water supply remaining a very last resort.

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