Groups slam plan to put foyer scheme on hold
The youth, who used to live in a squat, had hoped that plans for a foyer scheme in the area would provide support for his friends to kick the habit.
District councillors had been campaigning for the project which could have given emergency accommodation and help to troubled youngsters who are sleeping rough, or in squats, or sofa-surfing in friends' homes.
And on Monday, councillors Nathan Hartley (Lib Dem, Peasedown St John) and David Speirs (Lab, Paulton) took a report to Bath and North East Somerset Council's scrutiny panel on children and young people.
But the committee said no immediate action would be taken, and instead the scheme would be subsumed into a district-wide research scheme about youth homelessness which would have to wait until next year's budget-setting process.
The decision has come under fire from teenagers, youth workers and the campaigning councillors.
Jen Wilson, a youth worker with the Safe Collective organisation, has been working with Radstock teenagers addicted to ketamine.
She says that the problem of ketamine use by teenagers is "rife" in the area and believes that a foyer scheme, where aid can be given to young people drawn into addiction, could be key in turning the situation around.
She believes she has helped about 30 youngsters get clean.
She said: "Taking them all to someone who could help them understand what it was doing to their bodies was important.
"It was quite clear to me that nobody was doing this."
She told the scrutiny committee that she backed the foyer scheme as a place where young people could get help and which would provide access to life skills, training activities and support networks.
Ms Wilson has even had a letter from a teenager who had tried to work with his addicted friends, who shared a squat in Radstock's former infant school building, on a self-help scheme.
The letter said: "A group of decent, well-meaning young people, with nowhere else to go and nowhere to turn, we were taking our lives into our own hands and doing what we could to initiate our dreams into being.
"There is a real issue that needs to be addressed. Where is the external support? Why are these young people without a home? And who is there to help them?"
B&NES children's services director Ashley Ayre told the panel the cabinet's recommendations should not be viewed as "mañana".
"It is not the intention to kick it into the long grass, but it is the intention that there is a need to address mental health issues, substance issues, disruption and family issues, and to look at the number of young people in the system who may become homeless," he said.
Any projects, he said, needed to cover the whole B&NES area.
Cllr Speirs, one of the working party members responsible for the original report on youth homelessness, said it was important to recognise the need for integrated action, and it was not simply an accommodation problem.
He believed the foyer would take teenagers from villages around Norton-Radstock as well, adding: "We recognise figures are a problem, but we feel as a group that there is definitely a need."
Another working party member, Cllr Hartley, said there was disappointment at the timescale suggested by the cabinet.
"We spent three long months doing lots of research and I was up late worrying about things, and I was quite insulted that our research didn't really matter," he said.
Dr Chris Lamb, from Midsomer Norton, who brought the youth homelessness issue to his town council's attention, said before the meeting that he was deeply unhappy at the cabinet's recommendations.
He said: "If B&NES rejects the foyer option it will not only be dismissing one of the best pieces of action research on the locality it has commissioned itself, but will also be in dereliction of duty to generations of young people, and have kicked in the teeth many people who have put much commitment and work into this project."
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