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Time to reverse savage cuts to youth centres
• CUTS to youth centres adversely affects whole communities.
In all the talk presently about young people, the potential of young people is being overlooked. Prevention is better than cure, as the saying goes, so helping young people gain confidence, be empowered and reach their full potential must play a key part in the current concern about knife (and other) crime.
An essential part of this process must include the role of youth centres and the programmes that they run. Well-run centres provide places for young people to go and productive activities that have a positive effect on the surrounding community that reaches far beyond the time that the centres are open.
Camden Council seems to have lost sight of this, severely cutting funding to many of the youth centres, and the programmes they run, in the last year. Examples of this include the Queen’s Crescent Community Association, which lost all funding for youth work this year. Both Castlehaven CC and Highgate Newtown CC have faced dramatic cuts, and the Samuel Lithgow Youth Centre has seen core funding cut from £45,000 in 2007/08 to £29,800 this year (over 30 per cent reduction), to name a few.
Most of the youth centres are run by the voluntary sector. This means that the council, while linking funding to various targets, is not burdened with the cost of managing the projects.
Yet the services they deliver are often mandatory, that is, the council would be obliged to deliver them if the voluntary sector was not there. We therefore present excellent value for money. Furthermore, many of the volunteers come from local communities, adding further community involvement and support.
The council has claimed both in this paper in the past, and at the Regent’s Park Area Forum on July 3, that some of this shortfall has been made up through other funding streams, such as Positive Activities for Young People (PAYP).
This claim is misleading for the following reasons, which should be understood by both the councillors and council workers who use it: Funding available through Camden Youth and Connexions (CYC) comes in two forms. Core funding is money used to employ staff, and cover the running costs of the building. Basically, it allows a youth centre to open, be cleaned, have electricity, pay for toilet rolls etc.
This is the money that CYC has cut across the sector. Other funding, through PAYP, Youth Opportunity Fund or any other stream, is tied to specific projects and activities.
This money can only be used to provide activities, trips and courses, often during the school holidays, and cannot be used to pay for core staff cost or the running costs of the centres.
It is well known by the council and throughout the voluntary sector that obtaining core funds to replace statutory funding is the hardest to get. People want to fund projects, not buildings, making these cuts even more irrational, especially in light of the fact that the council had a £10million underspend last year. Loss of core funding money for staff and buildings jeopardises the capacity of youth centres to provide good places for young people to go, and constructive activities for them to participate in.
It also jeopardises ability to raise funds for extra projects, as there is no money to pay for the staff to run them.
Councillor Chris Philp wrote a lengthy letter about the causes of youth crime (We must get to the causes of youth crime, July 3).
It is high time that he and others recognised the role of youth centres in the current climate and got involved in reversing the funding cuts that affect the whole community.
We reap what we sow, and while this applies to what our society has done for the past decades, it also applies to what Camden Council is doing with its funding of youth centres today, with its impact on the wider communities.
PETER WATTS
Chairman, Samuel Lithgow Youth Centre, Stanhope Street
Regent’s Park Estate
Resources needed now
• COUNCILLOR Chris Philp is right (We must get to the causes of youth crime, Letters July 3), but for decades sociologists and others have done just this with their learned theories.
In Camden we have a real problem here and now and, rather than theorising, what is needed is a massive programme of preventive youth work.
Ask many of the young people who are in danger of sliding into anti-social behaviour and they will point to the absence of activities for them. At the recent forum in Cllr Philp’s own Gospel Oak ward the overwhelming demand was for more universal youth work, rather than spending resources on research, particularly as many of the causes of youth crime are beyond Camden’s control.
What we need are more and better resources targeted to those areas where there are signs of growing youth crime rather than reducing the funding to them. By all means have your research but let us not kid ourselves that this will solve the problems Camden faces, particularly in the short term.
MICK FARRANT
Oak Village, Gospel Oak
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