Young Adults: Public Service Funding

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, like many of your Lordships I have spoken in many debates involving the young, children and youth services. These have been at various times of the day and I always notice, and am always disappointed by, how very few people attend those debates. If you come to a debate on foreign affairs, defence or Brexit, the Chamber is packed but when you talk about young people, who are our future, there are empty Benches. I regret that.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for securing this debate on the funding of public services for young adults. Like her, I want to pay tribute to all those voluntary organisations which do so much for them. She said that we have to give our young people the best start in life, which I thought was a very important line.

As I have said, we have often debated the impacts of government policy on children: the impact of benefit changes on families; the effect of the two-child rule, which will further disadvantage the poorest families; the provision of 30 hours of childcare—that is not available to the most vulnerable children; and the closure of Sure Start centres. The list seems endless. We heard about the importance of nurseries from the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I agree that the most important thing for our children and young people is to get it right at an early age. As I have said on many occasions, I regret that we closed Sure Start centres; they were perhaps the first casualty of that recession, but it is young people who we must get right at an early age.

On the one hand, we have the rhetoric about the importance of early intervention, which I support, yet on the other we have the reality of more families with children shopping not at the supermarket but at the food bank. Today’s young people, who I will define as those aged between 13 and 19, have grown up in a world shaped by the unrelenting austerity programme that was rolled out. I will not dwell on whether “Austerity, austerity, austerity” was a sensible policy in how it was delivered, but its impact was certainly most severe on the most vulnerable families in our society. It is austerity that has shaped the world-view of today’s young adults.

Until recently, if a family had one member in full-time work, the parents were able to pay the rent, heat the home and put enough food on the table. This is no longer the case. A report was published last month that did not attract much media attention. The Institute for Fiscal Studies published Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2019, based on research funded by the Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council. It focused on,

“those people who are poorest in society”.

One of the three chapters looked at income poverty and concluded that:

“Absolute poverty remained virtually unchanged at 19% in 2017-18”.


But:

“Absolute child poverty rose by 1 percentage point in the latest year as working-age benefits and tax credits were reduced in generosity”.


This is the world in which today’s young people have grown up. In June 2012, the Government issued Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Well-being. It says:

“With the right supportive relationships, strong ambitions and good opportunities all young people can realise their potential and be positive and active members of society. Most get these from and through their families and friends, their school or college and their wider community enabling them to do well and to prepare for adult life. All young people benefit from additional opportunities and support, but some young people and their families, particularly the most disadvantaged and vulnerable, need specific additional and early help to address their challenges and realise their potential … It is therefore local authorities’ duty to secure, so far as is reasonably practicable, equality of access for all young people to the positive, preventative and early help they need to improve their well-being. This includes youth work and other services”.


The guidance goes on to list a comprehensive range of activities that should be on offer to young people. Anyone reading this three-page document might imagine that young people have got it made. There is a whole section on involving young people:

“Local authorities must take steps to ascertain the views of young people and to take them into account in making decisions about services and activities for them, in line with Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child”.


The key phrase in the detail of this guidance is,

“so far as is reasonably practicable”.

However, as the excellent briefing by the Library tells us, children’s services are at breaking point. As we have heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Armstrong, and from my noble friend Lady Thornhill—who has experience of this on the ground as Mayor of Watford—local authorities have to concentrate on the services they are bound to provide, which do not include youth services and other provision for young people. I am delighted that the statutory guidance says that local authorities “must take steps” to involve young people in making decisions about services. However, as services are being cut year on year, there is scant evidence that local authorities are taking these steps—and what is the point anyway, if there are no services available? For example, what value do young adults see in deciding which of their youth centres should be closed? Things are so bad that I know of one local authority that has had to cut its local youth parliament, and others are likely to do the same. I am sure this decision was not taken lightly but, as well as the loss of young people’s adult voice, it is hardly likely to encourage young adults to vote in future elections.

As we have already heard, the Local Government Association, of which I am a vice-president, has predicted a £3 billion overspend by local authorities on children’s services. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, the statutory duty to ensure the safety of children consumes most of their resources. The local authority cupboard is bare; there will be next to nothing for young adults.

I am not sure if the withdrawal of the education maintenance allowance is within the scope of this debate, but it is yet another example of public money being withdrawn from those young adults who need it most. This same group of young adults will be members of families for whom the discretionary social fund was a lifeline. In 2013, responsibility for this fund was devolved to local authorities to deliver via the local welfare assistance fund. Given what I have already said, it can be no surprise to noble Lords that there has been a 75% drop in the number receiving any assistance, with one in seven local authorities no longer having such a fund.

So far, I have dwelt, necessarily, on financial poverty. What about financial poverty that inevitably leads to poverty of hope? Barnardo’s report is aptly entitled Overcoming Poverty of Hope. Last month in this Chamber, we had a debate about knife crime. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lady Thornhill mentioned this, but what do we intend to do about this modern plague in our cities? Putting more police on the streets is one very necessary response, but we are dealing with a situation created in part by the lack of financial support for young people, the loss of the positive activities that used to be available to young adults free of charge and the disappearance of detached youth workers. If you ask a young adult what a detached youth worker is, the most likely answer is a youth with a zero-hours contract. The Barnardo’s report identifies the top four authorities for cutting youth services. In every one of them there was a steep rise in knife crime. It is not possible to prove a direct causal link between spending on services for young adults and knife crime, but the correlation seems to indicate the impact of one on the other.

In the dark days of the recession, we were told that we had to cut our financial coat according to our economic cloth. Cuts had to be made to stabilise and protect our economy—although I saw this morning that the pound has reached a new low against the dollar and the euro. The NHS budget was protected and per-pupil school funding was not cut. That was good news. However, the price had to be paid, and it was paid by cutting children and young people’s services to the bone. The children and families affected were, of course, the most vulnerable, including young adults. They suffered a double whammy. In addition to benefits disappearing, including the education maintenance allowance, local authority budgets were cut, as we have heard. The budget of my city of Liverpool was cut by 47%—yes, 47%. Having to manage on virtually half the budget, there was no alternative but to concentrate resources on statutory services.

We are, as we are told, the fifth-largest economy in the world and it should shame us that the Trussell Trust believes that, this summer, it will be doling out even more than the 87,496 summer holiday emergency food parcels handed out in 2018, a figure 20% higher than in 2017. While high-street banks are closing branches every week, the number of food banks continues to increase. The Trussell Trust supports 1,200 food banks across the UK but is still unable to meet the demand. For many children and young adults, the free lunch at school or college is their only main meal, and the summer holidays are not something they look forward to. It beggars belief that, in England, more and more working families are having to rely on free food donated by others. What will Her Majesty’s Government do to restore hope among young adults who feel their future is hopeless? Even in the darkest days, our winter fuel allowances and our bus passes kept coming and, for some noble Lords, free TV licences were renewed. Young people have had a diet of nothing but cuts.

I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, mention Gladstone. Of course, we are shortly to have a new Prime Minister. I hope things for young adults will improve under the new kipper—sorry, skipper.