So many questions over Wiltshire Council youth cuts

AUNTIE Jane Scott was on her gentlest form at the cabinet meeting.
No use frightening the children. After all, instead of hanging around street corners with nothing to do they could be hanging around street corners brandishing placards and shouting: “Down with Wiltshire Council!”
But at the end of all that consultation, as they will now have realised, they haven’t brought about any meaningful change in the council’s thinking.
This is a valuable early lesson in the way our democracy works. And they’ll be none the worse off for that, even if they will be worse off without their youth workers to pat them on the shoulder (or is that forbidden these days?) and say: “Never mind, dear.”
During much of the meeting at County Hall last Thursday, almost all the cabinet members seated on the dais (Mrs Scott excepted) appeared to be paying close attention to their laptops.
The assembled young people will have had a fine view of the tops of their heads. Let’s be charitable and assume that these councillors were assiduously taking notes.
It reminded me of those times when I’m trying to prise my husband’s or son’s attention away from a mobile phone screen for long enough to ask some petty, but to my mind essential question such as what we should have for dinner of whether anyone’s seen my glasses.
Sometimes I think I might as well be on Mars. I wonder whether the kids felt the same way?
A fully-costed alternative plan that would have minimised job losses had been drawn up by a children’s committee task group but was mysteriously missing from the paperwork. Could it have been mislaid?
Absent, too, was any certainty about how many staff will be left, how much money will be available to pay them or the area boards, or any idea how the new community youth officers are going to cope with doing 26 different things at once, and all before tea.
Nobody seemed to feel that the cabinet had really grasped the difference between providing activities for young people and targeted youth work to help and guide them.
As task group chairman cllr Jon Hubbard told the cabinet:
“I really struggle to understand how stripping the county of its trained, experienced youth workers will enhance safeguarding.
“We heard time after time from young people that what they valued most about their youth workers was that having someone to talk to who would have the time to listen. Someone they could trust and have confidence in. This trust is not instant and it’s not transferrable.
“It’s a role that cannot be replaced by having a Targeted Worker available for a 30-minute appointment once every three weeks.”
Will the new set-up be up and running seamlessly by October? I don’t think so.