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GIVING YOUNG PEOPLE A VOICE! |
Council has a lot to answer for!
1st November 2007
The new administration has presented itself as a breath of fresh air in North Somerset after the Lib/Lab pact.
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Joshua McTaggart and Lauren Fry outside the Town Hall. |
While it has certainly introduced new policies, from a young person’s point of view it is
difficult to identify any benefits that have come with the new administration. While all the commotion over proposals to sell The Playhouse was supposedly just a suggestion by an errant councillor, in the council’s cost-cutting plans that idea definitely appears, along with the withdrawal of funding for two mixed use ball and game areas, the sort of thing that benefit young people.
While there is an undeniable need to reduce costs in the council, the cutting of provisions for young people that those involved had worked long and hard to secure is not tactful or a necessary means of doing so.
If the council wants to reduce capital
spending on projects of this nature, why doesn’t it cease in its efforts to construct a skate park, a favourite topic at John Ley-Morgan’s think tank, that young people neither want nor need, in a location agreed by most to be entirely disagreeable.
Reducing budgets to school transport, also proposed, can only result in cutting routes, leaving parents to take their children to school or making people pay for their transport.
This would be completely undesirable in any school but surely even worse for sixth formers who must already pay a hefty amount to ride on a school bus that would be taking young people to school whether they were on it or not.
The current freeze on appointment of new staff in areas other than ‘front line’ services will undoubtedly save money, but only because jobs aren’t being done.
The youth parliament, for example, has lost its youth participation officer, at a time when the Government is promising much greater involvement of young people in their communities in its 10-year plan for young people.
How are young people supposed to be prepared to be in charge of 25 per cent of the youth service budget without a member of staff to guide them in the coming years?
The scrutiny panel for children and young people, shorn of its scrutiny officers from the New Year, is sure to collapse leaving a pitiful lack of checks and balances on council policies for young people.
The imminent demise of a citizen’s right to speak about whatever issue they please at a council meeting without approval is, whilst not entirely surprising, utterly deplorable.
In the eyes of young people the most recent incarnation of the Tories in local politics have a lot to answer for.
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