Last December, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles proclaimed his department's funding for uniformed youth groups as "the best £10m I ever spent".
Pickles made his comments at an event celebrating the achievements of charity Youth United Foundation, which by delivering 627 new uniformed youth groups in deprived areas had smashed its target of creating 400 by December 2014.
But surpassing the department's or Secretary of State's expectations for the work - known as the Supporting Inclusion Programme -was not the main measures of success for Lindsay Levkoff Lynn, the recently appointed chief executive of the foundation.
"The best day of the job so far was when we got back the data on sustainability because for me that is the key," says Levkoff Lynn, who took over the top job last November from interim chief Rosie Thomas. What that data showed was that 90 per cent of the new "units" created under the three-year programme are still running.
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