Young people targeted for £1 million cuts (Twickenham & Richmond Liberal Democrats)

Young people targeted for £1 million cuts

September 4, 2010 12:09 PM

• [Sep 03]: RICHMOND Council's Conservative Cabinet is set to approve over £1 million of cuts targeted almost exclusively at services for children and young people on Monday evening.

The Conservatives have decided to automatically cut all services that are supported by government grant when that grant is removed, irrespective of how vitally important that service might be. This means that the cuts now being implemented hit indiscriminately at some of the Council's most important services.

Amongst those services being hit are:

• Advice to schools on child health issues

• All funding for positive activities for young people projects to be removed from 1st September

• Cutting a number of youth projects, including the Outskirts magazine, the Kicks project in Ham and any educational input into the local Youth Offending Team.

• Drastic cuts to the Connexions service which provides education and careers advice to young people, reducing its opening hours from 35 hours a week to just 16 hours

• Training and support for secondary school teachers for improving standards in English and maths and in tackling poor behaviour and attendance problems.

• Training worker post for tackling teenage pregnancy to be removed.

• Work to ensure every young person between 16-19 has an opportunity to be in education, training or employment.

• Young people's substance misuse service to be cut, stopping important preventative work.

The Conservative Cabinet is also proposing to remove funding from two projects for young people started by the previous Lib Dem administration:

• Initiative to offer paid internships to local unemployed young people to help them onto the jobs ladder, due to start this September.

• Plan for a new youth centre in central Richmond

Both these projects already have specific budgets set aside to support them.

Councillor Malcolm Eady, Liberal Democrat education spokesperson said:

"These are brutal and shortsighted cuts to preventative services and support for young people. It is a policy that will not only quickly backfire and ruin the lives of many young people, but also incur extra costs for the Council in the longer term. The extremely successfully Positive Activities for young people programme, operated during holiday periods, is to cease. This programme has been shown to have drastically reduced youth crime levels in some of our key wards. These services are very important, and are one of the reasons why under the Liberal Democrats Richmond Council was in the top ten for children's services in the country. The amounts of money saved are relatively small when compared to those being spent to subsidise reduction in parking charges for large polluting cars. Again the new Conservative administration shows where its true priorities lie."

Richmond upon Thames Liberal Democrats: