WHETHER or not it is an attempt to catch up with Tory leader William Hague's grab for votes by promising to lock up asylum seekers, does not the government's appointment of a special squad of immigration officers to track down the thousands of bogus refugees who have disappeared into the community look a waste of time if officials aren't told where the asylum seekers being spread around the country are?

For what are we to make of the disclosure this week that a company with a Home Office contract to house some 7,500 refugees in the North West -- one of a number of such firms making money out the government's scheme to disperse asylum seekers -- dumped 80 or more from a dozen countries in Nelson without telling the health authority or the council?

It may be disturbing to many that there are businesses making a trade and a profit out of these people with the government's blessing, but is this not compounded by the virtual stealth which with this work is done for it -- when we learn that John Kirk, director of services for Pendle Council, only found out about the arrival of these refugees when one, a teenager from the sub-Saharan state of Chad, asked for directions to a college? "The Home Office has ignored our requests for information. I don't even know how many asylum-seekers there are in Nelson," Mr Kirk said.

Added to this manifest confusion is the revelation that, two weeks ago, the council told Pendle MP Gordon Prentice that asylum seekers were "being placed in private-sector accommodation in areas where a high proportion of the properties is known to be unfit for human habitation."

Thus, it seems. we have slum landlords and the government-appointed agents sending them tenants rubbing their hands while the government is apparently washing its -- if asylum seekers are being shipped about the country without anyone telling the councils or health authorities on whose patch they end up.

As for sending snatch squads to catch the bogus ones who go missing afterwards, perhaps the Home Office in charge of this scandalous mess will tell us how they set about looking for them. By sticking a pin in the map, perhaps?