THERE are hopeful signs that the people who hold the purse strings for both the private and public sectors are waking up to the scale of the crisis in communities caused by ever-escalating house prices and are applying their minds to some creative solutions to mitigate the impact.

Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority is to be congratulated on encouraging Skipton Building Society which has offered to fund the construction of two and three- bedroom homes on sites identified by the authority as being in particular need of affordable rented housing for key workers.

The pilot scheme, appropriately, is in the Craven area which includes Skipton, Bentham and Ingleton, but is due to be rolled out across the rest of the Dales at a total cost of £10 million.

The hope is that the key workers, including teachers and nurses, will be encouraged to stay in the Dales, or return to them.

The effects of the absence of such housing are well documented, and particularly impact on the younger, first-time buyers who are forced to make their start in life elsewhere, while in the Dales and Lakes there is an ever-aging population.

Local facilities become under-used and go to the wall, leading to an impoverished lifestyle for all of us.

If those younger people, who move away to gain academic and professional qualifications cannot afford to return to their home communities, they may be lost forever.

Therefore any move to stem this trend is to be welcome. Perhaps the Lake District National Park Authority could find its own partner to extend this scheme.

Nationally the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, has announced funding for a five-year plan to help people on low incomes climb onto the property ladder. It includes building starter homes on publicly owned land and giving housing association tenants the opportunity to buy a share of the homes they live in.

When the home is sold on, the tenant benefits from the inflation in the housing market, but the share is bought back by the housing association to invest back into affordable housing.

The money allocated at present, £65 million, will not go far in correcting the imbalances that exist in the market, and there is no indication yet whether the investment will benefit the Lake District, where house prices have been particularly distorted by second and retirement homes.

However, some action is better than no action. It remains to be seen whether this is a cynical pre-election ploy by a Government that has discerned that this issue is a potential vote-loser, or whether a long-awaited assault on housing shortages, particularly in attractive, rural areas, will be sustained.

Ban fiasco unfolds THE closer the country gets to a complete ban on fox-hunting, subject to legal niceties being ruled upon by the High Court today, the more of a fiasco seems likely over its implementation.

Shooting foxes so their carcasses can be dragged around the countryside with hounds and huntsmen and women in pursuit cannot be what the supporters of the ban envisaged. Nor can the thought of giant birds of prey swooping on the exhausted quarry.

Hunts throughout the Lakes are planning to defy the ban, if it comes in next month, anyway. And what will the police do about these new law-breakers? Not much it seems, with officers being far too busy dealing with violence and drugs. What a farce.