The Allandale Youth Centre is in Carterton Town Centre, it is the big white building on Burford Road – it had belonged to Oxfordshire County Council up until the autumn of 2011 and it also organised clubs in Barton and Burford. But earlier this year Oxfordshire County Council announced that one of the spending cuts was to withdraw all funding for young people in Carterton.

But Carterton Town Council was not prepared to simply sit back and complain about what a terrible situation we had found ourselves in, that’s not what we do in Carterton. Carterton Town Council applied to the County Council to purchase the Allandale building and I am delighted that the application was successful.

The main reason for the Allandale having to close was the cost of operating the building which OCC simply could not afford to sustain. I won’t go into the details here but let me just say that now that we (Town Council) have the building it will be operated much more efficiently, effectively and it will be operated at a local level by people in Carterton!

So in order for us to ensure that the Allandale is deliverable, sustainable and good value for money for tax-payers in Carterton we have identified a daytime user who will lease the building for a commercial rent. The building will then be available in the evenings for youth club/youth work sessions, details to be confirmed.

In order for the Allandale building to be suitable and appropriate for our new daytime user, certain repairs and refurbishment are required and this work is already underway. It does mean that the building has needed to close for a few weeks, which is inconvenient in the short term, but in the longer term this is very good news indeed!

We anticipate that the work on the building will be completed towards the latter half of January and we hope that it will therefore be possible to re-open for youth sessions from February 2012.