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.
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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]