General matters

Mr Speaker, welcome to the Chair. Because I believe in crawling to people in authority, may I wish you a very happy and merry Christmas and thank you for your delightful Christmas card? This is a wonderfully eclectic debate—from ponds in Devon to dictators in the Congo getting 99.8% of the vote. I want to deal, like my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), with local issues that relate to Lincolnshire. He mentioned the extraordinary railway line that connects our two constituencies, and there are only three trains a week, which all run on Saturdays. However, there is a much more important railway line that runs from Grimsby and Cleethorpes down through Market Rasen, in my constituency, to Lincoln and then on to London. We used to have a direct service and my hon. Friend referred to resurrecting this vitally important service; but I say to him that we want it to go through Market Rasen and Lincoln, and not through Doncaster. I am sure he will be agreeable to that, and I expect the Minister to make a commitment to that effect when he winds up this debate. What I really want to talk about in the remaining two minutes or so of my speech is an important project in Gainsborough that is in danger of closure but must not be closed. This is about the big society, which the Prime Minister was right to launch. He was right to change the emphasis from big government to families, individuals, neighbours and local people. In my constituency there is just such a big society project. It was founded in 2007 and is called YaSiG—Young and Safe in Gainsborough. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) talked about the power of history and the importance of history teaching, but many people fall out of our school system and YaSiG provides for them. It provides for people between the ages of 13 and 24 who have fallen out of education and it co-ordinates a number of facilities for young people. It gives them a safe place to meet and socialise. It runs, among other things, a very successful motorcycle maintenance course, which I have visited, operating outside the classroom and providing just the sort of training opportunities that many young people need. YaSiG covers subjects as varied as sports, catering and horticulture. It emphasises building social skills, and it improves confidence and the ability to work with older people. There is no doubt that this project, which operates in one of the most deprived wards in England, Gainsborough South West, is already making a big difference. The project was set up with money from the previous Government, under the community asset transfer programme, but it was not thought through. There were adequate funds for the capital injection but not for revenue maintenance, and the project simply cannot be sustained now. I urgently call—this should happen over the next 24 hours—on Lincolnshire county council, West Lindsey district council and the Government to co-ordinate their efforts to save this vital project. At the very least, West Lindsey district council should give the freehold to YaSiG, so that it can borrow against it, and should waive its indemnity of £45,000. If we really do believe in projects that further the big society and provide for the most deprived people in our community, we cannot let them go out of business. We should co-ordinate efforts to save them and to help our young people in the future.