ALTON Town Council has leaped into the breach by helping to prevent the certain closure by the end of the month of the community centre youth hub.

At an extraordinary meeting of town council’s policy and resources committee on Tuesday, councillors agreed to find the £3,895 needed to run one hub session per week with two youth workers for one year, from April, as well as additional one-to-one sessions to support young people in crisis.

The need to step in to support Alton Community Association follows the decision by Hampshire County Council to withdraw funding for the provision of youth workers for Alton for 2018/19. Councillors heard that Alton Community Association had already endured successive cuts in funding over the last few years, down from the original level of £23,000 to £5,000 for 2017/18, and now nothing.

In a report by town clerk Leah Coney, the meeting heard that at the beginning of 2017 the youth hub was supporting around 40 young people over two evenings a week, mainly aged around 11 and in transition to senior school, dropping later in the year to a core group of 16-plus young people who had specific needs such as housing, pregnancy, getting back into education or employment, anxiety or transgender issues.

The community centre also gets occasional referrals from children’s homes, social services and schools.

The report stated: “The provision of youth services has become a recognised area of devolution across the sector over recent years as many non-statutory functions are being removed by higher tiers of local government with the increased fiscal constraints and increasing cuts.”

While Alton Town Council’s corporate strategy recognises the council’s role in youth service provision as more of a facilitating one, it also accepts that, in terms of reaching out to the community, young people are one of the hardest demographics to engage.

In the short term, members were asked to consider funding the community centre “to ensure that young people still have a recognised place to go for help and advice” while in the longer term it was suggested that the withdrawal of Hampshire County Council funding may provide the town council with an opportunity to forge stronger connections with young people “by initiating a wider conversation about the provision of facilities and opportunities across the town”.

Addressing the meeting, committee chairman and town council leader Matthew Bayliss said that by stepping in at short notice to provide one-off funding to “plug the gap” and enable a level of continuation for the youth hub, it would give time to consider a longer-term solution.

According to Mrs Coney, the community centre had also been offered £1,464 of funding from Radian to support youth work from April which, together with the money from Alton Town Council, would cover the cost of the one hub session for one year, together with one-to-one sessions, and would allow the youth workers extra hours to go into school assemblies to promote the club and the services on offer.

In addition, talks were due to take place later this week concerning the possibility of Community First providing the youth workers, together with some additional youth services at Alton Community Centre.