Many are left on the street, sleeping rough.The Children Act imposed upon councils a statutory duty to house homeless 16- and 17-year-olds. In spite of this, a report published last month by Char, the national homelessness charity, claims that councils say the homeless must have “additional problems:” to qualify for help. About 25 per cent fail to assess the young homeless people who approach them, while almost half offer no housing to those with drug or alcohol problems. Dear heavens, what more problems than homelessness and addiction does anyone need to qualify for help in this ruthless country that the Tories have built for us?If the homeless are under 18, they do not qualify for Income Support, either Let me spell out what this means. A 16- or 17-year-old who has left home, or been living in “care”, has two choices: sell his or her body, or beg.People are fond of saying, “Have they no self-respect? I would have died rather than beg for money!” But how are these supposedly feckless, idle, shiftless, unself-respecting young people supposed to find work, when they have no home, no money, not muchto eat, and few facilities for washing either themselves or their clothes?”Let them work on a building site .. in Woolworth’s … anything!” you say? Talk to building firms, and they will tell you that they have little enough work for their present employees, and no facilities for training new apprentices, let alone the younghomeless. It is pie in the sky to believe that work is available if only they would get off their butts, stop cluttering up the streets, and go out and look for it.

Work is hard to come by, especially for an unhappy, unqualified 17-year-old. V a cancies favour the well-qualified, well-washed and well-dressed.New Horizon, founded by Lord Longford in 1967, is one of the oldest charities helping the young homeless. Yesterday, Bob Hoskins opened its new centre, strategically placed between Euston and Kings Cross stations, where so many arrive from the Midlands and north of England, naive, incorrigibly optimistic, and pitifully vulnerable.In his pithy speech, Lord Longford pointed out that when figures were compiled in 1970, 43 per cent of the young people using the facilities of New Horizon had been “in care” (that grim euphemism) In 1994, that figure is 44 per cent That’s about the only figure that has remained constant. The numbers of young homeless have been rising since 1970, and are rising still.I asked New Horizon’s director, Julie Fitzgerald, what was the most serious issue to be dealt with. She said: “Some action must be taken to relieve the hopelessness in the minds of so many young people today.

They have no work and thus no income to give them choices: what to buy, what to eat, how to spend their leisure time, where to go, how to live. And people living in substandard hostels or on the street become very damaged. That presents the Government and, ultimately, the country with grave and expensive long-term problems.”I spent last weekend in Budapest. Hungary is riven by economic problems, with high unemployment and 25 per cent inflation, yet I saw no homeless young people anywhere, although I travelled throughout the city by metro. If Hungary, with all its social andeconomic problems, can take care of its troubled young, why cannot out-of-recession, onwards and upwards Tory Britain?New Horizon is at 68 Chalton Street, London NW1 1JR, 0171-388 5560.. As Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the departing director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, relaxed on her sofa yesterday, it was instructive to glance over her shoulder at the bookcase behind her. There among the tomes on art history, textiles and conservation was a book on Elton John.

A moneyspinning exhibition of the rock singer’s ties was one of the early, controversial decisions taken by Esteve-Coll to bring a new and younger public into the most famous museum of decorative arts in the world. To add to the apoplexy of the arts world, she also sanctioned a Saatchi’s advertising campaign with the slogan: “An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached.”
Yesterday, after six years in which she suffered personal abuse unprecedented in the rarefied museum world, she announced her resignation. Paradoxically, her decision to leave (she is to be vice chancellor of East Anglia University) comes at a point whenshe is secure, highly esteemed and can boast that she has increased attendances, improved the budgets and widened access.Her resignation follows the less glorious departure last month of the Barbican Centre managing director, Baroness Detta O’Cathain, now on paid leave of absence after the heads of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra, the Centr e ’s two most illustrious residents, told the City of London Corporation, which funds the Barbican, that they had lost confidence in her.The departure of the two most powerful women in the arts marks the end of a long period during which the arts world squealed as it was ordered to balance its books, make its marketing more professional, mount productions and exhibitions that were profitable and have bosses who put managerial and business skills before artistic purity.Esteve-Coll and O’Cathain are both strong and powerful women, but their cases should not be seen as synonymous for that reason. They are quite different characters from different backgrounds.