I'M not saying no good will come of the fact-finding trip to Madrid at £1,900 of public expense by four women from one of East Lancashire's run-down estates to study how deprivation is dealt with by a charity there.

They could, no doubt, pick up a few tips on how to prepare tapas snacks or paella on a low-income family budget.

But why pick Madrid -- when our country already has plenty of so-called social exclusion, hard-up areas and problem communities and help agencies working in them for concerned folk to study or copy?

To me, it is the evident reluctance and apparent inability of anyone -- either from the East Blackburn Social Action Committee, which has netted the £1,900 grant for the excursion, or the council which has awarded it by remote control -- to justify the trip that suggests that a prime reason for travelling to Spain is that it would be more agreeable than going to Toxteth or Tower Hamlets, say, to swap ideas on deprivation.

After all, when this newspaper asked to be put in touch with the four unelected women heading for Madrid, the council-appointed Whitebirk Community Board, which sanctioned the spending despite it being nearly a quarter of the cash awarded to the area, passed the inquiry back to the council, which clammed up in turn.

Why so coy?

Could it be that there seems to be somewhat slack control over how these grants are awarded and used?

For citizens' right supremo Councillor Frank Connor, who oversees the grants made by the community board, admits he is not familiar with the precise details of the trip. Nor is Coun Frank Gorton who sits on the Whitebirk board. Going off the last he heard, he thought the group would be looking at schemes in this country.

And didn't furious Lib-Dem leader Coun Paul Browne make a telling point when he said that if the group wanted to find out about the Tomillo Foundation charity which has been working in Madrid's poorer districts for two decades, they could, surely, look it up on the Internet?

So they could -- this newspaper did so in just 30 seconds. And so could Whitebirk's do-gooders -- on any of the hundreds of free computers that have been showered on the community to combat its deprivation.

But, hey, that's common sense and this is spending other people's money that we're talking about.

To some tune -- and that of "Y Viva Espaa" in particular.