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Other areas have lost out on funds for young people
• IT is good to see that your readers have stepped in to fund the young people’s bike project in Regent’s Park after Camden Council refused to pay for it.
Regent’s Park is, alas, not the only part of Camden suffering from lack of funding for young people.
Gospel Oak has been starved of funding for more than three years for general (universal) youth work.
The belated new funding policy allocated £495,000 for this work for the whole of Camden for the next 18 months.
While actual work with young people is vastly under-funded the council managed to find £495,000 – yes the exact same sum – to refurbish Weedington Road Play Centre in Gospel Oak.
At the very same time it produced plans as part of its property review for the area which proposed the demolition of the play centre in four or five years’ time to make way for a supermarket and private housing.
Not only is the council – it would seem – failing to fund youth work but is prepared to waste vast sums of money, on a limited life refurbishment.
Larraine Revah
Aspern Grove, NW3
Why did it happen?
• SINCERE thanks go to the youth council and the two public-spirited, anonymous, donors who kept the bike maintenance club on the Regent’s Park estate, enabling the scheme to help kids repair bikes, to raise the £5,000 it needs to stay open.
Well done too to the New Journal in picking up this campaign. But why did Camden Council let this happen?
Did their so-called “bicycling champion” get a flat tyre or are they bent on repeating the mistakes of the last two years by once again cutting popular youth projects on council estates?
Readers will remember money was no problem when, despite the pressures of recession, the Liberals paid three of their backbench councillors £5,000 each in April for their work on non-decision making jobs at the Town Hall.
You have to ask yourself, wouldn’t Liberal Democrat councillors’ extra cash (coming rather conveniently in a year when political parties are raising campaigning money for the 2010 elections) have been better spent on worthwhile activities for young people?
Cllr Theo Blackwell
Labour, Regent’s Park ward
Difficult decisions with 47 projects asking for money
• IT is genuinely heartwarming to read about the donors who are supporting the bicycle repair project proposed by the entrepreneurial young people of Euston. (Cheers! August 6).
But this case shows that it’s inevitable that when funds are limited, some people will be unsuccessful. The project applied to the Youth Opportunity Fund (YOF), a fund judged by young people themselves.
The YOF receives applications from a large number of young people and the young people on the panel have to make difficult decisions about who should receive the limited funding available.
For this first YOF round in 2009 47 projects applied, asking for £380,000, nearly three times the funding available.
The YOF panel allocated its £145,000 across 20 projects.
They include leadership and volunteering projects for girls, projects to train volunteers ready for the Olympics, support for youth aspects of the Camden Mela and specialist equipment for young people with learning difficulties.
I’m sure your readers would be interested to read about all these projects, as well as those who didn’t receive funding this year.
Finally, rest assured that the generosity of local donors won’t replace council funding.
Council tax payers regularly ask for more funding to go to youth services, which is why this year’s budget allocated an extra £1million for capital improvements to youth facilities, why more than £100,000 extra funding has gone in over the last three years, and why the Youth Council, set up by the current administration, is also funded by council resources.
Cllr Janet Grauberg
Executive Member for Children and Young People
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