Shropshire Council’s Youth Services scrutiny committee met today and I am sorry to report not much was said. The newspaper hacks sat at the back hoping that an announcement would be made on the future of youth services across the county. Alas, they slipped away without a headline.
We heard from Tim Smith who told us that 1,000 people responded to the recent consultation. Four in five of these we’re aged ten to nineteen. Although the analysis of responses is not complete, it is clear that the option to create youth boards to commission local youth services is deeply unpopular. Young people simply don’t want to be subsumed into a mesh of bureaucracy.
What is not so clear is that the council is going to drop the youth board idea, which many suspect is it’s favoured option.
The future of Shropshire Youth Association remains uncertain. It’s got funding for a year, after which it will have to bid under the new commissioning regime.
We’ll not know more until the scrutiny committee meets again on 18 June.