Grant funding is vital to youth work

It is moving towards more services being contracted out under its commissioning framework. So work is procured from across the voluntary sector that delivers against the local authority's stated priorities and helps it meet specified targets. This has advantages. It means there is more accountability: services are commissioned with a clear sense of purpose that satisfy council objectives.

However, grant funding also has a crucial role to play in the mix of services. Any decision to abandon grant funding in favour of buying youth services purely to specification is a big mistake and a retrograde step. It undermines the role of the local voluntary sector to challenge and innovate and forces them to conform to the local authority agenda. Small charities, in particular, through their closeness to communities, should be allowed to shape that agenda - not simply compelled to tailor their offer to meet the demands of the local authority. Now some smaller youth charities in our second city, many of which deliver a lifeline to disadvantaged young people, could be threatened with extinction.

Partnerships between the statutory and voluntary sector are pretty hollow unless the latter has genuine input in shaping the local agenda. Users of youth services, indeed all public services, are powerless and passive if regarded simply as "customers". Rather, service users should be viewed as "citizens" who can help construct services and evolve them to meet their needs. The best examples of this in youth work are the youth opportunity fund and youth capital fund programmes, where young people determine where spending is allocated.

Local authorities should be thinking outside the narrow realm of contracts and tenders - crucial though they are - and stay open to solutions from across the third sector via communities. This is what the Total Place "whole area" approach to public services is, after all, about.

Meanwhile, concerns are surfacing over the Conservatives' mistrust of council youth service departments, voiced by shadow children's minister Tim Loughton in a CYP Now interview last month. The Tories are right to point out that a lot of good work goes on in the voluntary sector but wrong to think we can somehow dispense with the statutory sector, which is crucial to achieve coherence at local level. These are turbulent times.

Ravi Chandiramani, editor, Children & Young People Now