Junior football club claims Council has 'pulled plug' on plan to erect fence to protect pitches from joy riding

Sunderland Echo

Sunderland RCA Youth Football Club chairman John Kilner is angry that the Council is no longer able to proceed with building a perimeter fence to prevent anti-social behaviour.

Transcript

00:00 Okay, John, why don't you start by asking me what had been happening with the club's

00:03 pitches?

00:04 Yeah, obviously we were utilising the pitches of the club and obviously it just took a couple

00:10 of joyriders and a couple of vandals to come and burn out my car or joyride on the pitch

00:15 and it was just tearing up the whole pitch and it was making it unusable for the full

00:19 season so it was making those things difficult to fill fixtures so we had to look for an

00:24 alternative venue.

00:25 So I understand that you were in a process over a three year period with the council

00:30 about applying to get a perimeter fence built, is that correct?

00:32 Yeah, we'd had a lot of meetings, we'd been to the Fields Trust, we'd got everything

00:35 approved and everything was ready to go and signed off and my understanding was from the

00:40 emails that there was, in the process of ordering materials to actually construct the fence

00:44 and it went quiet for a couple of months, we chased this up and the next thing we know

00:47 was that the project had been pulled.

00:50 Did they give any reasons as to why?

00:53 Obviously saying that they couldn't justify spending that money on a fence in the current

00:58 climate but obviously I said well where have you reallocated the funds which I wanted to

01:05 know as to what have you spent the money on sort of thing and they couldn't really give

01:08 us a straight answer.

01:09 I mean obviously the club provides a facility for hundreds of kids as you were saying so

01:13 I mean just how do you feel about the fact that it appears to be being pulled on you?

01:17 Yeah I'm just more disappointed because at the end of the day it's a couple of hundred

01:20 kids that's losing out and that's the saddest part, it's the kids that are losing out.

01:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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