“Two men carrying umbrellas walked past and glanced at him disapprovingly. They probably thought he was up to no good. The way he was sitting — hunched forward with his knees apart — made him look older than 14 and somehow dangerous ... ”

Matt (that’s what he calls himself — he’s been walked over all his life) is definitely no role model when we meet him. Having fallen under the malign influence of an older boy, he is failing at school, playing truant and drifting into petty crime. By the end of the first chapter, he has been accused of breaking into a warehouse to steal a load of DVDs and is an unwitting accessory in the assault of an elderly security guard. Matt is arrested, interrogated and locked up. He is, it must be said, not a very easy child to like.

Matt finds himself acting as a guinea pig on a new government programme. This involves him being sent to live in Yorkshire — good, clean country air — with a foster mother called Jayne Deverill. Unfortunately, it turns out that Mrs Deverill is a witch, the villagers all belong to her coven, and they’re looking for a teenager with blood sacrifice in mind. An ASBO would have been an easier option.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my work that Matt will end up saving humanity from the evil forces ranged against it. But that is what all my books, and perhaps every children’s book ever written, have been about. The adults, mainly the politicians, screw up the world. It’s up to the children, the next generation, to sort it all out.

I believe in the innate goodness of young people. I see more of them than most people, not only as the father of two teenage boys, but because I travel the country, talking to them in primary and secondary schools, state and private, inner city and leafy suburb. I’m always pleasantly surprised how communicative and intelligent most young people are — if you’re willing to meet them on their own level.

Just one example: I was talking in a particularly challenging inner-city school, describing the plot of one of my books and the murder of a multimillionaire that would take place in the first chapter. This would involve a lift made out of paper. He would step into it on the 27th floor, go straight through it and plunge to his death below. A very large boy in the front row had been listening to all this with, I thought, complete lack of interest. He was a skinhead. I had been warned that he was one of the most disruptive boys in the school. But suddenly he put up his hand and, when I nodded at him, he said: “It ought to be a hologram.”

It was an extraordinary lesson for me. First, it give me a jolting reminder of the generation gap of which I am now on the wrong side. I’m from the Blue Peter scissors-glue-and- paper generation. Of course, I should have been thinking holograms (and that’s exactly the device that is used in the book, Point Blanc). But it also told me never to judge young people by their appearance or reputation. There’s a streak of good a mile long in each and every one of them. All that has to be done is to find it. And children’s books have a way of doing precisely that.

Again, ask any children’s writer who “does the rounds”. A school that has a thriving library and a student body that is used to reading is obviously different from one that does not.

Has anyone yet, I wonder, drawn a line be-tween the number of ASBOs that the Government feels the need to dish out, the general picture that’s being painted of today’s youth, and the way reading for pleasure has been almost entirely squeezed out of the national curriculum? Is nobody concerned that one 11-year-old in five has failed to reach acceptable standards of literacy, according to a Commons Education Select Committee report of last April, and might this not have a bearing on social behaviour? The strange thing is, that at the same time as our leaders traduce our teenagers, still they want to flirt with them. The Prime Minister has appeared at least twice on MTV and who can forget that nauseating moment in the general election when he was spotted with a white elastic band around his wrist? Had he been talking to the same adviser who put William Hague in a baseball cap? Politicians don’t talk about children any more. They talk about kids. As old and fat and white as most of them are, they still dream of being streetwise.

Raven’s Gate comes out at a time when politicians have never been more mistrusted or reviled. I am writing this a week after the London bombings on July 7 when we realise just what a catastrophic state we’ve managed to get ourselves in. Ever more restrictive and draconian laws are being brought in to combat terrorism while the situation in Iraq gets worse. And let’s not even talk about global warming, not when we have a US President — the most powerful man in the world — who doesn’t believe in it.

No wonder we need someone like Matt Freeman to save the world. If our children can’t sort out this mess, who will?

Raven’s Gate (Walker Books,£6.99) is available from Times Books First at £6.64 (p&p is free). Call 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy