NO doubt residents of the housing estates in Blackburn and Darwen that are plagued by crime, vandalism and teenage louts will welcome the disclosure today that the council is to employ security guards to patrol them.

And coupled with new anti-social behaviour orders that may be imposed on youths who continually cause nuisance, people whose lives are being made a misery by estate hooligans may have the prospect of being able to have some peace at last.

But positive and creditable as these moves may be, there is a danger that they may end up as cosmetic gestures - as the potency of the force behind them, in the form of the police service, is once again under assault in the form of swingeing cuts.

For elsewhere today we report that Lancashire Constabulary is having £15 million-worth of cuts thrust upon it.

And though Chief Constable Pauline Clare pledges that it is "not likely" that front-line policing will be affected by the cutbacks, there is bound to be concern that policing levels will be threatened.

For just as is indicated by this move by Blackburn With Darwen Council to introduce security patrols to trouble-hit housing estates, the fact is that they are being brought in because the police cannot at present sustain an adequate presence on them. Indeed, it was only last week that Rossendale and Darwen MP complained that police were failing to tackle the problems on an estate in Darwen.

Residents living there felt let down by the police and their complaints have helped to generate the council's response of security patrols.

In short, then, these security guards are acting as substitutes in a role that ought primarily to be that of the police.

They may not even be enough to quell the problems on the estates when all they can really do is report them and wait for a response from a police force that is, in the lifetime of a government pledging to be tough on crime, being hit by budget cuts by the self-same government.

And even Home Secretary Jack Straw's new nuisance orders may end up as paper solutions if the police have not the resources to enforce them.

These new tactics to beat the estate hooligans have much to commend them, but are they a proper substitute for proper policing by a police force with the resources to do its job properly?

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