Last summer we heard about the sad death of Alice Knight, aged 108 - not from natural causes but from the upset of having her home shut down around her.

Her home was a care home where she had lived happily among others of her own kind, fragile and elderly but well cared for.

She could not face the trauma of being packed up like a parcel and delivered to a strange destination where she would have to restart what was left of her life all over again. She simply refused to eat in her new surroundings and died of malnutrition.

"Does it matter?" you could hear the voices of the well-fed powers-that-be in charge of such things. "She was of an age when she could not expect to have much time left." The sub-text was: "It frees up another bed and, at her age, she won't have many relatives who might kick up a fuss."

Across the country there were other such closures and, in many cases, deaths of other elderly folk within weeks of having to leave familiar surroundings.

In one home in Birmingham, there were five deaths within a month of the closure and the removal to new premises of 26 elderly residents.

Why were they being moved if it caused so much upset? The Government had spoken and the edict had to be obeyed. The homes were not up to standard.

But they had been happy and comfortable homes for many years, so why these draconian measures all of a sudden? In some cases it was because the doorways were 2cm too narrow!

Do you know what 2cm looks like? It certainly doesn't look like the face of a dying elderly lady or a frail beloved mother or father whose only sin has been to go on living too long.

But, whimpers the Government, these regulations are not scheduled to come into force until 2007. Why are you getting so worried now?

Because you are playing with the lives of people who are too frail to fight for themselves and, whatever you may say about 2007, they are being enforced now.

This column has commented before on the idiotic regulations imposed on care homes in this city, many of which are in Victorian houses which are not easily altered to make doors 2cm wider or find room for extra bathrooms at the click of a finger.

Of course it is right and proper our senior citizens should be offered the best accommodation possible in their declining years but these rules should have been applied with common sense and not a giant sledgehammer.

Now the Government has had to climb down and admit it was seriously in the wrong to apply such a cat's cradle of red tape that everyone involved in the care of the elderly was slowly being strangled.

Over the past five years, it has caused the closure of about 2,000 homes and the loss of more than 60,000 care places. It has also been responsible for the demeaning title of "bed blocking" being applied to elderly people stranded in hospital when they are fit to be discharged into residential care.

Of course it is right high standards should be applied to newly-built homes right from the planning stage and it is to be hoped local authorities will do so. But to cause the closure of less opulent homes for nit-picking reasons should be resisted.

The next thing the Government should turn its attention to are the low fees generally offered by local authorities which make it difficult to offer the proper standards of care.