THE image that Lancashire County Council has adopted to depict its new streamlined self - "better, clearer, quicker," it says (but not cheaper, mind) - is of a cheetah going flat out.

Pardon me for thinking that a different sort of cat would be more apt. A fat 'un - bloated through lapping up too much of your council tax. For the living must be really rich at County Hall if - despite past financial exigencies that have shut old folks' homes, threatened closure of fire stations and left the roads a pothole-strewn disgrace - they can afford their latest nannying extravagance.

An Internet agony aunt to coo "Diddums!" by e-mail to over-sensitive kids!

Already famed for squandering nearly a quarter of a million pounds a year of public money on an unnecessary service telling people how to draw state allowances - advice that already exists for nothing down at the Benefits Agency and plenty of other places like the Citizen's Advice Bureau and Age Concern - the County Council now comes up with cyberspace counsellors for fretful adolescents.

At how much cost? And, above all, why? Since when has it been the task of local authorities to coddle teenagers or, indeed, anyone?

But, then, if you read the glut of advertisements for such jobs in local government nowadays - for outreach workers, project co-ordinators and other sob-stuff advisers - you would realise that dreaming up and institutionalising this kind of thing has become a major function. After all, the hugely expensive business of encouraging benefit-dependency via the County Council's superfluous Welfare Rights Service has been going since 1987. And this so-called on-line WhatNow? service for teenage problems is only an extension of the existing drop-in centres and helpline already offering advice.

But says education chairman, County Councillor Hazel Harding: "This is an important service which helps young people through a challenging period in their lives."

Oh, really? And how did they manage to survive before it was set up? Besides, what are parents, GPs, teachers and big brothers and sisters supposed to be for?

And what's wrong with learning to stand on your own two feet? - as people did before society fell for the self-perpetuating social worker/counselling explosion unleashed by local authorities riddled with tender socialist values

Only last week, Blackburn vicar Brian Stevenson was telling how, in contrast to today's youngsters with too much time and money, he was thrown into the world of work at 15 - as a building trade apprentice doing a 49-hour week, three sessions a week at night school and with homework, football, church and youth club the rest of the time. That was the norm for tens of thousands of youngsters - and they neither had nor needed any council-run cossetting to cope with their problems.

And if none of these services existed now would teenagers be leaping out of windows in droves? I don't think so - but the Claire Rayner clones, now equipped with modems, might be very worried if the lucrative livelihoods they have dreamed up as modern-day necessities were thrown out by realists with a better notion of what the council should be doing.