Last December, local government minister Phil Woolas told Parliament that formula spending shares such as this were being abolished, as they were "misunderstood and misused".
So the days of youth ministers standing up on public platforms and boasting of spending more than 500m a year on youth services are, consequently, also over. Ministers are much more likely to lump in lots of other services for young people and ramp the figure up to 1.6bn - but much of this could never be described as "youth work" per se.
Lewis believed the emphasis on specific funding and the spectre of sanctions for authorities that didn't spend the money properly "effectively put youth work on a statutory footing".
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