New youth hubs to be created in Heathfield and Peacehaven

On Wednesday (June 21), Cllr Bob Bowdler, lead councillor for children and families, approved proposals to both redevelop Peacehaven Youth Centre (better known as The Joff) and rebuild Heathfield Youth Centre to create a pair of new ‘youth hub’ facilities.

Such facilities are intended to increase the availability of open access youth provision by acting as centres where a range of groups can deliver sessions and support services.

Cllr Bowdler said: “This is really great news for the council and the local communities of Peacehaven and Heathfield, and the surrounding areas. It can only be of benefit to take this project forwards, despite the challenging timescale.

“I have no hesitation in supporting the project, wishing it godspeed and delegating authority to take it to completion.”

The proposals were welcomed by a number of other councillors at the meeting, including Telscombe ward councillor Christine Robinson (Lab), who said: “I just want to say how absolutely brilliant this is it’s amazing. Thank you all of you East Sussex officers for doing this amazing piece of work and getting this funding, because it is not easy I know.

“I am just so delighted, because it is so, so needed where I am and probably, I would say, in Heathfield as well.”

The council has been provisionally awarded grant funding totalling £8,019,786 for this project. This funding is time-limited with a “demanding” financial completion deadline of 31 March 2025.

The vast majority of this one-off money (more than £7.6m) will be for the construction and redevelopment process, although a smaller chunk (just under £400k) will go towards running the youth services from an alternative location while construction takes place.

This imbalance between the revenue and capital funding prompted concerns Liberal Democrat councillor Alan Shuttleworth, who fears about the council’s long term ability to fund its youth services.

Cllr Shuttleworth said: “I’m obviously 100 per cent in favour of spending money on youth facilities and I’m very pleased for the two communities we are proposing to invest money in. Mine is a wider question about the strategy.

“We have limited resource as a county council to put towards a whole range of things. Over recent years, the amount of funding that has been available for youth development across the county as a whole has been diminishing year-on-year. That has put enormous pressure on and it has meant that we’ve had to find other ways of funding and managing youth clubs.”

He added: “I’m concerned that we have limited resource to keep youth clubs going across the county and I’m just interested in how we’ve got to this position.”

In response, officers stressed that the revenue funding included in the grant was only intended to support the service during the construction of the new youth hubs, with the replacement facilities being funded from the council’s usual budget after this point.

They also said the grant funding meant money would not have to be drawn from elsewhere in the county to support construction of the new youth hubs.

Officers also disputed Cllr Shuttleworth’s claim that youth service funding had fallen year-on-year, saying that the youth service budget had been ‘held static’ for several years.