Editorial: Grass-roots services are getting richer

Where previously youth services complained about budgets mysteriously being diverted elsewhere and not filtering through to provision for young people, budget and spending figures collated by Young People Now (see p16) suggest the climate may be changing for statutory youth service practitioners.

Of course, some services are still starved of money. But, as The National Youth Agency's chief executive, Tom Wylie, points out, this year's figures look better than last year's (see p3).

As usual, the figures contain numerous caveats and it is still difficult to identify trends because of the short time they have been calculated in the current format. Boroughs still make mistakes such as including youth offending team spending when they shouldn't, or simply miscalculating.