Scrap the Bureaucracy in Youth Services

I'm fed up with seeing kids in my community fall through the cracks because of all the red tape in our youth services. I run a youth centre in Bradford and it's heartbreaking to see talented young people not get the support they need because some council officer is too busy filling out forms to actually listen to them. I've seen it time and time again, a kid comes to us with a problem and we want to help but we can't because the funding is tied up in some obscure grant scheme.

I'd change the whole system so that local organisations like mine have more control over how the money is spent. We're the ones on the ground, we know what the kids need, so why do we have to jump through hoops to get a tiny bit of funding. It's madness. We should be able to just get on with it, provide the services that we know work, without having to fill out a hundred forms and wait six months for a decision.