Yate’s youth café has received planning approval after 10 years of languishing on the drawing board.
The £1.3m facility will provide an open-plan café area, activity rooms, office and meeting rooms for advice and counselling services, as well as an outdoor café garden.
It will be built on council-owned land adjacent to the town’s leisure centre and has a planned 2011 opening.
Agreed in September 2008 by South Gloucestershire Council’s Conservative administration, the authority’s new youth strategy breathed new life into the project after 10 years of being talked about.
As a result, the council is providing the majority of the project’s capital investment, which includes the land.
Conservative Cabinet member for Children and Young people, Cllr Sheila Cook welcomed the planning approval, saying:
“The Council’s youth strategy breathed new life into the stalled youth café project and has very much been the driving force behind it ever since.
We are contributing the majority of the capital resources to deliver this much-needed facility, which I think shows a commitment which hasn’t really existed at any point over the last 10 years.
Planning approval for the youth café is a major milestone and shows Yate youngsters that the curtain is well and truly coming down on a decade of dithering, which local politicians previously involved in this ongoing saga have yet to properly justify to frustrated local youngsters.”
Source: Conservative Group on South Gloucestershire Council
