As a result, the initiative is likely to be expanded this year to cover the whole of England. This will involve spending a great deal more than the 8.8 million of Lottery money that was allocated via the New Opportunities Fund last year.
It would be churlish not to welcome it, although it must be tempting for the youth service to view schemes like Splash with some cynicism.
After all, with the results the Government was trumpeting last week, you have to ask why this kind of provision was not already being funded as a matter of course? It is hardly a eureka moment to discover that if you provide meaningful activities for young people that they want to do, free of charge, they will have less inclination to get up to mischief.
And to many in the youth service it is obvious, even though they might not say it publicly, that if youth work had not been run down during the past two decades, there might be less need for emergency crime prevention programmes of this sort.
And laying on a bunch of activities to keep kids out of trouble hardly amounts to youth work. To be fair, efforts were made to ensure a professional input to the schemes last summer. But with the best will in the world, their effectiveness will have been limited by the very short time they ran for.
The Youth Justice Board and other agencies appear to have taken some of these criticisms to heart. This summer, not only will there be more money but probably better coordination and a longer lead-time. But their purpose will still not be youth work; it will be to keep youngsters out of mischief.
That should not, however, deter people in the youth service from bidding for project funding. What heading the money is provided under does not really matter. Youth workers who get involved and make sure projects work will be in a stronger position to argue their case in the future. And whatever the motivation, Splash Extra provided many young people with opportunities they might otherwise never have been offered.
