NO doubt residents and owners of businesses will welcome the police operation launched today to stamp out prostitution and kerb-crawling in East Lancashire's notorious square-mile "red light" area.

For those living and trading in Blackburn's King Street district are having to put up with used condoms and drug-abusers' syringes being discarded around their premises. Innocent young women are being accosted by kerb-crawlers mistaking them for vice girls and prostitutes are even plying their trade in the afternoons when children are on their way home from school.

But if the need for a crackdown is evident, residents may cynically observe that this five-week police purge may be nowhere near as effective as its name -- Operation Eradicate -- optimistically suggests.

For have they not seem similar drives in the past, only for the nuisance to recur?

The problem has been going on for years in the King Street, Bank Top, Montague Street area of Blackburn.

Four years ago, fed-up residents resorted to videoing kerb-crawling cars' and compiling lists of their registration numbers in a bid to drive out the prostitutes and their customers -- provoking a police crackdown and a spate of arrests. Another purge was staged last summer, targeting kerb crawlers with warning letters and the threat of visits to their homes by police. But the red-light plague continues.

True, dealing with prostitution is no easy matter for the police -- as crackdowns in one area may only push the trade and its associated nuisance into another. The real root of the problem is not prostitution itself, but those who inspire the trade -- the clients.

It is they who should be hit hardest by the police and the law -- not by warning letters, but by being hauled into court and named and shamed. The vice trade exists because of its customers and a permanent and determined drive against them in the form of arrests and prosecution may encourage the eradication that is needed.