The Child Minder

From today, all councils across England are obliged to provide access for young people to youth clubs, sports facilities and art projects. They will also have to take account of young people's views about these 'positive activities'.

The change, proposed in the youth green paper Youth Matters and brought in under section 6 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, can only be good news for young people.

But the real challenge to local authorities now is to reach out to the "significant minority" of teenagers who currently can't, or choose not to, take part in any positive activities at all - and to ensure the extra £4.5m per year available for the next two years to fund things to do and places to go is spent on just that, and not syphoned off to fund more 'critical' services.

The National Youth Agency and children's charity 4Children have submitted a plea to the Treasury to increase the daily spend on services for teenagers to £1 per day.

They claim that increasing the average spend on statutory youth services from £98 to £350 per teenager per year would result in half the population of 13- to 19-year-olds using youth services, effectively doubling the current level of provision while also directing services to the most vulnerable.

Their plea coincides with yet more research and headlines revealing how adults are scared of teenagers who hang around on street corners. Surely Gordon Brown and his team will be able to see the potential benefits to society as a whole of such a relatively tiny up-front investment.