can startup partition be resized?

I wish to increase the size of my startup partition as available free space is being gobbled up quicker than i had anticipated and as well, i did not make the partition large enough to begin with.

Currently i am unable to resize the startup partition. I have two data partitions sitting below the startup partition.

After reading through the various posts, am i correct to think that deleting the first partition directly below the 'statup partition' will enable me to increase the size of the 'startup partition'.

I am using OSX 10.7.5

Would appreciate some advice,

cheers