THE GOVERNMENT, the Church, everybody wants to see young people doing constructive and helpful things in the community as well as enjoying themselves — everyone, it seems, except some officials on Northamptonshire County Council.

The new church of Whitefriars in Rushden, in Peterborough diocese, which opened its doors only at the beginning of this year, receives funding from the County Council for its youth work. Recently, teenagers from Rushden College spent a day clearing the gardens of Rockingham Forest Housing Association, where most of the residents are either disabled or have no transport of their own.

Such was the enthusiasm of the young people that they made three or four trips to the municipal tip, with small vanloads of rubbish, only for the council workers there to turn them away because they regarded it as a “trade job”. They had to take the rubbish back to the gardens they had cleared it from.

Many of the teenagers, says Chad Chadwick, a youth worker, are from disadvantaged homes, and have had to overcome learning and behaviour difficulties. They were “hugely disappointed, and very angry: it felt like they had lost, even though they were doing the right thing.”

“We get told off for helping people; so why should we bother?” one of them said.

The Vicar of Whitefriars, the Revd Philip Evans, tells me that the story has had a happier ending. Although the County Council backed its workers, and repeatedly refused to accept the waste, publicity has persuaded the East Northamptonshire District Council to take it. But the damage to the teenagers’ enthusiasm has already been done.