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Members of the fledgling Youth Council |
Young people are let down by shambles over funding
• AS a new member of the board of directors of Queen’s Crescent Community Association, I have been very impressed by the wide range of high quality service provision.
In particular, our youth work programme has done much to reduce youth disorder and anti-social behaviour in Gospel Oak. QCCA and our partner Gospel Oak Action Link (GOAL) have been running a Friday night youth club which is now regularly attended by 60 to 80 young people.
However, this “universal” youth work has been turned down for funding from Camden Council for the past two years. The council have been regularly advised over the period that the allocation process was not fit for purpose and that, unless we received funding, the Friday youth work programme we have built up would have to cease, thereby letting down the local young people that it serves.
On December 18 we received a letter from the council at long last admitting that youth service funding was “not based on any strong needs assessments, lacked young people’s participation, has not been evenly distributed and [is] not based on any consistent formula, outputs or outcomes”.
I find it surprising that it has taken almost three years to reach this conclusion since a deputation to the council from QCCA in May 2006 told them just that.
While we welcome the rethink, we are extremely concerned that it will now take the council until September 2009 to develop a new allocation system and that in the meantime current allocations will be rolled forward until at least September 2009.
In other words, QCCA will not have had any universal youth work funding for three-and-a-half years.
QCCA and GOAL will now have to consider urgently if and how it can continue to support the Friday night activities. We have built up this programme of activities over many months and we fear that if it has to cease all our efforts will be lost.
The community centre and, most importantly, the young people we serve cannot afford to wait another year for the council to rectify their mistakes.
It is somewhat ironic that on the very day we received our letter about youth service funding, information on Camden Council publicity funding revealed that this year it had spent some £3,731,000 on this; an increase of almost £240,000 on last year. Camden, a relatively small local authority, was the 19th-highest spender on publicity out of 445 local authorities.
Similarly, there was also a report of a resignation of a member of the council’s much-vaunted Youth Council, citing “lack of support given to us by” council officials. A senior councillor is then quoted as saying that “there are plenty of people who want to see the Youth Council fail”.
The reality is that the council itself, officers and councillors, are the ones failing our young people as the latest twist in the funding saga shows.
Georgia Gould
Board Member
QCCA Ltd
Ashdown Crescent
NW5
Youth are our future
• I FULLY support Cllr Janet Grauberg in her determination to make the Youth Council succeed despite current problems (Youth Council rocked by resignation from key post, December 18).
The Youth Council was a great idea of the previous administration and brought into being by the present administration and it is vital that young people are encouraged to work within the community and the council itself as partners in regeneration and improvements to our borough. They could be the future of Camden.
We in St Pancras and Somers Town Ward want to work closely with the two youth councillors for our ward and they have been invited to attend our Safer Neighbourhoods Police Panels and have attended one so far and in the new year I will be arranging to meet them with Cllrs Stewart and Islam on issues affecting our ward where we can work together.
In addition, we hope they will attend meetings of our area forums and the next one on March 12, when we will be discussing, among other issues, a possible Somers Town newsletter.
I support Janet and her efforts and hard work and that of Youth Councillor Axel Landin.
Roger Robinson
Councillor for the St Pancras and Somers Town Ward
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