QUITE apart from the fuel crisis, there's a depressingly familiar ring to the difficulties exercising minds across Worcestershire today, as the county struggles to deal with its social services budget overspend.

It's not our job to pre-empt the outcome of county council chief executive Rob Sykes' investigation to determine how much social services director Peter Gilbert should take the blame for the calamity.

But there's a good deal of common sense in Peter Fennell's assertion that one man alone should not be held to account for the crisis.

The Unison regional organiser is right to point out that the county's perpetually low Government settlement has played a massive part in the trouble.

The Evening News' cuttings library backs that point up to the hilt, a catalogue of concern which continues to grow almost daily, not the least of which is the so-called bed-blocking which has exacerbated Ronkswood Hospital's Accident & Emergency admissions crisis.

The list of demands on the dwindling social services budget embraces areas of life which touch on virtually everyone.

There is, as Mr Fennell says, just no more cutting to be done when you've gone through flesh and only bone remains.

That won't come as a surprise to Mr Sykes, of course. Before he took the reins as chief executive, he was social services director himself.

So this will be a familiar cry. Why should Worcestershire's young, elderly, vulnerable, disabled and disadvantaged be treated as second-class compared with counties at the top of the settlement league?

And here's another concern which has echoes across a troubling week for the Prime Minister.

This is supposed to be a Britain that's at ease with itself. For too many people, such problems as these hardly take us far down that road.