WE would normally urge the press to be cautious about adopting a campaigning role in public affairs.

The spectrum of opinion in opposition to the Lancashire County Council proposal to close 35 residential homes for the elderly is, however, so wide that the Lancashire Evening Telegraph's active support can only be seen as welcome.

Clearly, though, there are wider issues at stake here than the policy of one local authority. So far as residential care for the elderly is concerned, the lessons must be that there has been a consistent failure to develop a fully-integrated public service and that seeking salvation in the hands of the private sector has been shown to be a fool's errand.

The Office for National Statistics has estimated that the number of places in residential and nursing homes will need to expand by around 65 per cent over the next 30 years.

Yet, the current trend in the private sector is one of contraction and closure.

Sheila Scott, Chief Executive of the National Care Homes Association, told the BBC in November last year that 15 per cent of care home beds had been lost in each of the last two years, and that she was confident that even more would prove to have been lost in 2001.

The human reality behind this trend has been the trauma of sudden evictions, as you have reported on more than one occasion.

The private sector, meanwhile, has hardly covered itself in glory so far as its employment practices have been concerned. In 1998, in a report commissioned by Lancashire UNISON, the Centre for Public Services quoted the Lancashire Care Association as admitting, prior to the introduction of the Minimum Wage and Working Time Regulations, that these would add 14.5 per cent to the private sector's payroll costs, so poor were average terms and conditions.

Two years later, the "Enterprise" Policy and Research Report on Low Pay in Lancashire showed that "Health and Social Work" remained one of the three worst sectors by proportion of low paid employees.

Rather, then, than see a further decline in public services in this area it is surely time for us to advocate the development of a fully-integrated residential and domestic public service for people whom old age makes infirm.

IAN GALLAGHER, Secretary, Blackburn and District Trades Council, Tontine Street, Blackburn.