WHAT difference does it being Christmas make to any tenants' duty to pay their rent?

Apparently, Burnley MP Peter Pike thinks it provides an excuse for some to spend the money on other things.

For in response to a letter sent by Burnley and Padiham Community Housing warning those in arrears that if they don't pay up over Christmas they will be evicted, Mr Pike criticised the company's timing.

"Perhaps they could have been more sensitive sending out the letters two or three weeks earlier as perhaps people have committed their money at Christmas," he said.

On what, pray? What gives anyone the right to award themselves a rent holiday? Shouldn't keeping a roof over your head always take priority -- even at Christmas when there may be lots of extra pressures on the family budget?

And why should those who dodge this responsibility -- at the expense of other tenants who pay their rent as and when they should -- imagine they can trade on seasonal goodwill and expect their landlord to lay off and let their arrears slide?

Surely, it is not a part of an MP's jobs to encourage such a notion in the slightest. And it certainly is not in Mr Pike's neck of the woods -- when we find that the Burnley and Padiham Community Housing, which took over the running of Burnley's 5,300 former council houses this year, already has 2,300 tenants -- more than 40 per cent, by my reckoning -- in arrears owing a total of £780,000.

These horrendous numbers and the fact that the amount of unpaid rent is not going down suggests that there is enough of a culture of indifference and irresponsibility among the town's tenants as it is without anyone adding to with the tender sentiment that they should be treated nicely because it's Christmas.

It is bad enough that self-reliance is already so seriously undermined by the something-for-nothing attitude that, as was disclosed last year, so feather-bedded by benefits are Burnley's tenants that 65 per cent actually paid no rent at all.

What good, therefore, is it, then to encourage the remainder who are supposed to -- but don't by the thousand -- to imagine that because it's Christmas they should not have to worry their heads about it?

It is not Scrooge-like to hound them, but a commonsense outlook that is evidently long overdue.