Youth Services

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and perhaps I may focus on one thing that he mentioned. He described the importance of boxing to excluded young people. A care-experienced adult approached me a while ago. He had grown up in a very abusive children’s home. There are some excellent children’s homes but his was very abusive. When he was in his mid-20s he was approached by a police officer and was told that all the other residents there had died or were drug addicts or in prison, and he was the only one who had made his way through. The reason was that he had got involved with his local boxing club, where there were men who set him a good example. He had difficulties. He was in prison for a while and became a bouncer for a while, but later he learned how to read and write, and eventually he wrote the story of his life. He has been a successful author and a successful personal trainer, but it was boxing that really helped to change his life. Building on what works is such an important message.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving me the opportunity to speak to him before this debate. What he said was somewhat comforting and I look forward to hearing more along the same lines today. I am also most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for introducing this important and very timely debate.

The summary of the conclusion of the YMCA report given by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, contained a lot of what I would like to say. To my mind, it is very important thing to ensure that a strong youth work profession with great integrity is sustained over time. It is important that youth workers stay in their practice, gain experience over the years and pass on that experience to the next generation. We should have a very sound youth work culture in this country that informs policy—I see that as a very important way forward.

I would like to impress on the Minister the need to see youth work as a profession, in parallel with the teaching profession. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, would like to see an all-qualified youth work profession with a strong institutional base, and so would I. We heard about the National Youth Agency and another agency. I wonder how well they are funded and whether there needs to be an institution run by youth workers that sets guidelines for youth workers in general. How can the institutional base of youth work be strengthened, ensuring the quality of youth work? Whatever policy is developed in this area, I hope that there will be input and buy-in from all parties so that as far as possible we have a consistent policy from one Government to the next.

The current recruitment and retention crisis in the teaching profession, with no consistent policy for developing the teaching workforce, is a tragedy. It is important to develop a common policy and to stick with it. It is also important to recognise the difficulties of adolescence. Adolescence is a hugely challenging period for young people. They need guides and good exemplars to help them through that time. I urge the Minister to look at a statutory underpinning for youth services, as so many of your Lordships have said, to ensure that there is consistent funding, to get the basics right and to focus funding in particular on developing the youth workforce.

Why is there a need for youth workers? Perhaps before that, I will mention an article by the BBC questioning the value of youth work from a research base. Leon Feinstein, a well-respected academic, researched youth work a while ago and found that young people attending youth clubs were more likely to get involved in crime and other such activity than those who stayed at home—Margaret Hodge said that they would have been better staying at home—but in that particular example he said that the qualifications and the status of youth workers was unsound and doubtful. So it really hammers home that you have to have high-quality youth workers.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, was going to mention that research. The point was that bad youth services were what did the damage, not good ones.

[The Earl of Listowel]

Absolutely—that is what I was trying to communicate. It was the poor youth work in those clubs that led to the poor outcomes. Several years before that research was produced, a research report on Summer Splash activity schemes found that crime rates around the local area where there were Summer Splash activities went down during the summer because those activities were going on. So it works if it is of high quality.

When I think about the need for adolescents to have this support, I think of Anna Freud’s work. Some time ago, she wrote her paper on Adolescence as a Developmental Disturbance—the clue is in the name. She described adolescence as a period of revolt, when teenagers are trying to break out and rebel against their parents, and their peers become much more important. They undergo many sexual changes, which makes them ripe for exploitation by others but also can cause them to exploit others sexually. They are finding their identity. If you think again about the needs of these young people, many of them are growing up without a father in the home—one in five children in this country is growing up without a father in the home. Visiting young offender institutions over many years now, so often I hear from prison officers that they are the first father figure in this young person’s life.

Visiting Rochester young offender institution a while ago, where there was a programme called Lions into Foxes, I found a 30 year-old BME man talking to a group of young BME lads about how to turn from lions into foxes—how to move from being impulsive and strong to becoming wily and thoughtful before acting. I visited a young offender institution recently where there had been a serious attack on one of the prison officers overnight. I visited one area of a prison and talked to two prison officers, who said that they had not had any serious incidents for the whole year. This was what was called a PIPE—a psychologically informed planned environment—where special attention is paid to the importance of relationships with the young people. Each young person has a key person relating to them, and with those relationships comes the ability to manage their behaviour, so that they do not act in destructive ways.

In conclusion, when we intervene late with young people, the costs can be huge. Last week I was talking to a provider of residential care for young people. A place in his children’s home, if you like, costs £250,000 a year—that is on the hard end, but they have many settings across the country—so if we do not get this right, the cost is huge. There is also, of course, human misery and human loss. So we need to get this right. Again, I emphasise those key issues to the Minister. I urge him to do what is necessary to make youth work an attractive profession; to ensure that there is a strong and well-funded institutional base for youth work; to try, if possible, to get buy-in from all parties in whatever strategy the Government are producing, so that there is consistency from one Government to the next; to look at the statutory underpinning for youth services; and to recognise that adolescence is a very difficult period, which was the point that Anna Freud was trying to make.

We ask far too much of teenagers, and we ask more and more of them as they deal with various things—social media and so on. We should provide them with guides and exemplars, men who they can see as good examples. As for me, if I want to think about how to behave towards women or about how to act towards work, I think back to what my father did and that gives me the guidance that I need. These young people need that kind of guide. I look forward to the Minister’s response.