I have just stopped to meet with the developers who are taking over the stadium in Blunsdon to refurbish it and build some houses on the site.  Its been a long and difficult negotiation for them with the borough council. The scheme has gone back and forth and I’ve been trying to get involved to make sure that the developer brings things that I feel are desperately needed in the town. Firstly now, at last, I think after the negotiations, I’m glad the developers are going to do, there’s going to be some affordable housing on the site.  There wasn’t going to be.  I think that 10% of the plan will be affordable housing, desperately needed in the town.  We need to get around 30% of all new housing being affordable. We’re a long, long, long way off it, so this is a useful contribution but we need to do a lot more.  The other thing that is desperately needed is more facilities for young people. Now, over the last two to three years I have been holding meetings with young people, all over the borough just to find out about what they want to keep them off the streets causing, sometimes, nuisance to other people. They alo need something to do and one of the things they are quite keen to do is have an area to race quad bikes and mini moto’s safely.  So one of the things the developers has agreed to do in the new development is to have a workshop put in where young people can come and build these quad bikes themselves or repair them and then they can race them round the track. Everywhere I go this seems to be highly popular.  It does look now as if it is going to go ahead as long as the borough council give the go ahead to the development as a whole.  It will be a fantastic resource for people in the north of the town, I think it will keep young people off the streets, give young people a chance to learn new skills. And very importantly, the whole plan has been most importantly for me right from the start the young people themselves have been controlling it, with proper supervision, of course. But they will be the ones who say what goes into it. And its that sense of ownership for young people that makes for, evidence suggests, makes a successful service and facilities for young people. So, I’m just off to meet the developers now, downstairs in the coffee shop in Portcullis House in the Palace of Westminster, to discuss the next stage of this development. We’re coming pretty close to it starting. I think its going to be fantastic new resource for the people of Swindon.