EAST Lancashire council house tenants are being paid thousands of pounds to quit and buy their own homes - in a scheme using government cash to encourage them to take on mortgages in the open housing market.

There is no denying the benefit of more council housing being freed for families on the waiting lists - and that of the slight stimulus this gives to a housing market in need of any boost.

However, it is hard to escape the irony and its cost to the taxpayer of the government's much-vaunted and much-subsidised right-to-buy scheme creating a shortage of council houses that now needs to be eased with still more public money.

And the taxpayers who have had to scratch and scrape to save a deposit for their first mortgages might not applaud the idea of others who already have a home being given thousands of pounds to move to another one.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.