AS a waste of time and effort, is not the planned 'think tank' between Lancashire bus company chiefs, head teachers and education officials to combat the immense and worsening mayhem on school buses in the premier league of futility -- when at the root of the problem is the yob-pupils' knowing they cannot really be punished for it?

Indeed, that was as good as admitted last week after county councillors heard of rocketing instances of drivers being verbally abused, pupils fighting, missiles being thrown and even fires being lit inside buses on top of widespread general bad behaviour -- to the extent that, now a proper system of reporting incidents is in place, three-quarters as many occurrences of anti-social conduct were logged in the most recent term than in the whole of the previous year.

Yet, what can be done by those in authority -- if that is the right word?

We hear of school-bus troublemakers being excluded from school. But does not the same head teacher who resorted to this action admit to impotence when he speaks of a 'reluctance on the part of many agencies to punish children' and confesses that 'once they are beyond the school gates, they are beyond my control'?

Another head teacher talks of recently banning three misbehaving pupils from their particular school bus for a month and calling in parents to discuss such indiscipline. But does not the rising level of yobbishness show what little effect such steps have?

As for the poor drivers lumbered with this daily dose of hell on wheels, they are evidently even more powerless. "It's a no-win situation. We can't grab them and throw them off the bus like we used to be able to do," complains transport union official Roy Husband.

Why not? If youngsters insist on behaving badly, what right -- in law or plain common sense -- have they to carry on doing so aboard public transport or anywhere else? Louts should be turfed off, made to walk and banned for good, not just a few short weeks.

But is not the nub of this whole problem -- and of disruption in school also -- down to the demise of corporal punishment?

If the government had the sense and courage to scorn the do-gooders and the bleeding-heart liberals in the European Courts of Human Rights dictating lax and lily-livered standards to this country and reintroduced the cane, the problem of yob behaviour in and out of school would be literally diminished at a stroke -- or six.

And if they have not the will or pluck to do so, let them put the restoration of caning to the people in a referendum. Are they afraid of the answer?