Access to schools is made difficult by the costs and the fact that they are cordoned off. Rotherham metropolitan borough council has just agreed a massive project under the private finance initiative to rebuild a large number of schools. It is in its second phase and I hope that the architects will design them so that those parts of the school that are used for educational purposes can be secured and locked up at 4 pm while other parts are available for use. Young people need functional buildings to be available to them. Most, if not all, purpose-built youth and community buildings in my constituency are not open for young people to use on Saturday and Sunday nights.
People write about young people hanging around on the streets and so on.
I would not want to encourage them to be up at 10 pm if they have school the next morning, but Saturday night is different, and taxpayers' money has been used on buildings that are locked up. That makes no sense. Young people would love to use those buildings on a Saturday night when they have nothing else to do. Their views are often disregarded. I know that such arrangements would mean that people might have to work weekends, but people in industry have done that for years.