Youth Services

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I am glad that we have had the opportunity to debate the positive impact that youth services have on our young people. Youth centres provide young people with safe spaces in which to learn, develop trusted relationships, build friendships and develop interpersonal skills. They should be at the heart of our communities, but, sadly, after nearly a decade of austerity, many parts of our country have no recognisable youth services at all.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) for his persistence in securing this debate. He is chair of the all-party group on youth affairs, which recently conducted a parliamentary inquiry into youth services. He spoke eloquently about his areas of expertise, which are wide and varied, and I learned a lot from him. He also spoke about the importance of evidence and why he was involved in this work. I hope that the Minister responds positively to his recommendations, and I look forward to her response.

We also heard a number of very passionate speeches. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) who spoke passionately about knife crime, the impact of trauma on our communities and how youth services can help in prevention, building resilience and ensuring that our children have trusted adults to whom they can go to be connected with the relevant agencies.

We also had a passionate speech from my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George), who spoke emotively about Fairfield youth club in her constituency and about how, when she spoke to young people there, they spoke of the need for a safe space and how, sadly, this club was their only safe place and the only way to keep them out of the grips of the local gangs.

Many other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham), mentioned the importance of youth work in tackling youth violence. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves), who is my neighbour and friend, talked about the impact of losing a young person’s life—Jay Hughes—on the local community and the role that youth work can play in rebuilding that community.

My hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) also mentioned those points. The great role that NCS plays was mentioned by the Minister and the hon. Members for Crawley (Henry Smith) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden) made some positive points about the scheme but also asked some questions, which leads me on to a few issues on which I wish to touch.

Currently, 95% of all Government spending on youth services goes to the NCS, despite the fact that only one in 10 eligible young people participate in its programmes. Since it was established, the NCS has received £1.5 billion, and it spent £10 million on a brand refresh earlier this year. Let that sink in. This is alongside a landscape in which spending on youth services has fallen by 70%, 760 youth centres have closed their doors and over 14,000 youth workers have lost their jobs in the last decade. Surely, it is unsustainable to spend millions of pounds on a programme that is simply not attracting the numbers when there are hundreds of brilliant youth centres and talented youth workers crying out for funding across the country.

The hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) quoted the APPG’s report and spoke about the importance of family support into adulthood, youth work being one of the only safe spaces for young people and why we need trusted youth workers. He also pointed out that there are not enough professionals in the sector and mentioned the importance of early intervention. I agree with all those points.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South spoke about the impact of cuts to council funding and pointed out that Blackpool Council is losing £700 million. He also mentioned the overall negative impact of these cuts on all the services that interact with young people.

Labour is absolutely committed to rebuilding the youth sector to ensure that it is fit for the modern age—a youth sector that has open access, is diverse and has the interests of young people at heart. I remember chatting with the chief executive officer of UK Youth about consulting young people on the kind of programmes they wanted to see. After she had got feedback from lots of young people, UK Youth put on a course called “Money for Life”, which focused on budgeting and money management. The organisation was concerned that no one would turn up, but it was inundated with young people. That just shows how important is to have young people at the heart of designing youth work. We need to ensure that the programmes we create are relevant to them.

Labour is also committed to ensuring that our youth services respond to the unique challenges that young people face. Youth centres should be safe spaces for every young person, where they can speak to adults they trust and who have built up relationships with them over time. Trauma-informed training will be necessary to ensure that youth workers are equipped to deal with the various issues and challenges that young people face today.

Before I end my remarks, I have several questions for the Minister. Successful grantees of the Government’s youth endowment fund will need to demonstrate their plans to spend £100,000 or more by March 2020. This freezes out small charities from the outset, setting some of our brilliant grassroots organisations up for failure. Does the Minister agree? If not, can she outline exactly how the youth endowment fund will support small charities? In what ways have the Government consulted young people to ensure that the youth endowment fund is directed to the right organisations and projects? Do they have any plans for any potential underspend from successful grantees of the fund?

We all know—it has been said many times in this Chamber—that 3 to 6 pm is a particularly dangerous time for young people, so do the Government have plans to provide youth work during those hours as part of their public health strategy to tackle violence and keep young people safe? What date will the Government publish their review of the statutory youth guidance? We have talked about it many times, but there still does not seem to be a date for this. What work is the Minister doing to ensure that youth services receive adequate funding in the upcoming spending review? Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society estimate that this funding needs to be around £3 billion.

UK Youth and other leading youth bodies wrote to the new Prime Minister today asking him to make Britain the best country in the world to be young. Will the Minister call on the new Prime Minister to back the asks in that letter—in particular, to unlock the £50 million NCS underspend and deliver a 10-year spending commitment to the first ever youth charter? Our young people are fantastic, but to reach their potential, they need to be given the right opportunities. It is vital that fully funded youth services are part of that picture—services that are varied, accessible and fit for the modern age. Following his speech yesterday, if the new Prime Minister wants to be known as a dude and not a dud, he could start with our youth services, making sure that they are delivered locally with a universal offer and diverse provision and established with and for our young people. So dude, don’t under-deliver. We need action, not rhetoric.

Oral Answers to Questions

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

As the hon. Lady will be aware, the Arts Council has a formula to distribute funding across the country. We believe, like she does, that it is important that all communities in this country can have access to culture and heritage. It is for that reason and others that we funded the Great Exhibition of the North, which has been a huge success; and of course the Chancellor, in his Budget two years ago, supported the huge economic and cultural opportunity of restoring Wentworth Woodhouse, near to the hon. Lady’s constituency.

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

8. Whether he has made an assessment of the adequacy of his Department's cross-departmental guidance on the contracting out of public services as a result of recent disturbances in prisons.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss)]

Guidance on contracting out public services is set by the Cabinet Office, and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office has reviewed the guidance thoroughly.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

Appropriate transitions from prisons to the community are central in successfully reintegrating prisoners into society and bringing down reoffending rates, yet it is my understanding that some prisoners are being prevented from moving from category C to category D as they near their release date. Could the Minister confirm whether that is the case, and whether that is just another example of ineffective cost-saving measures?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary recently released a strategy about how we are going to get more offenders into employment. We have a cross-Government working group on that, to ensure that people make the appropriate transition. I suggest that the hon. Lady speak to the Justice Department to get further details.

Easter Adjournment

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Thursday 29th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who has done such fantastic work on the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. I also wish him good luck for his Adjournment debate; I am sure that he will not stop until he is successful.

Before we adjourn for the Easter recess, I want to use this opportunity to raise two interlinked issues, both of which are incredibly important and close to my heart: early years support and reducing youth violence. In Lewisham, Deptford, we have several great nursery schools providing excellent early childhood education and family services. I was recently contacted by the head of one of them, Cathryn Kinsey, who spoke to me about the challenges that the school is facing as a result of funding cuts, and her worries about the services that it can provide post 2020. Clyde Nursery School is based in one of the most deprived wards in Lewisham, where child poverty is particularly high. Despite that, Clyde’s quality of teaching is consistently rated as outstanding by Ofsted.

Clyde also offers a range of vital services to the children’s families: support to survivors of domestic violence; parenting workshops; financial advice; English language classes; employment advice; and accredited training programmes. The support on offer is truly remarkable. Clyde is an asset that the local area cannot afford to lose, but its future is uncertain. The funding formula has left the nursery struggling, and cuts of nearly 40% and a projected budget deficit of £502,000 mean that it might be forced to close by 2020. Sadly, Clyde is not alone. Some 67% of nursery schools have predicted that they will no longer be financially viable by 2020.

It would be difficult to overstate the devastating impact that those closures would have. The vast majority of nursery schools serve children in deprived areas and such schools are consistently shown to be the most effective way of improving social mobility. Study after study shows that a child’s first years are critical in shaping their future health, character, success at school and future career. Nursery schools can have a genuinely transformative effect on levelling the playing field. In those early years, every experience can have a potentially profound impact on the life course of an individual, both positively and negatively.

I chair the youth violence commission, a cross-party group of MPs that seeks evidence-based policies to tackle the root causes of youth violence—it is great to see the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), who is also a member of the commission, in the Chamber. We have been holding a series of evidence sessions as part of our research with Warwick University, and similar themes are emerging.

Over and over again, we hear about the importance of considering adverse childhood experiences or trauma in the context of youth violence. A child who grows up with four or more adverse experiences is 10 times more likely to be involved in violence by the age of 18 than a young person who has experienced none.

It is increasingly clear that early years support is just as important to tackling youth violence as it is to tackling inequality. I hope the Government have considered the importance of early intervention and early years support in their upcoming serious violence strategy, which I understand is due to be published very soon—thankfully, it has been agreed today that we will have a debate on the strategy.

We are currently at risk of seeing some of the best early years support disappear from some of our most deprived communities. The impact of that loss will be felt for years to come in a multitude of ways. If the Government are serious about reducing youth violence, and if they are serious about social mobility, their first step must be to reverse these cuts to nursery schools before it is too late.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Business of the House

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

My hon. Friend is right to stress the importance of improving disabled access to all our stations. He will be more than aware that we have an ongoing accessibility consultation, and I spent a very happy Christmas reading all the replies. I am more than aware of the interest. Access for All is an important programme, and the Government are carefully considering how best to target it. I am sure we will hear an announcement in due course on the response to the consultation.

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

Not everybody had a good new year. Another four young men were stabbed and killed on new year’s eve in London. Clearly our thoughts go out to the family and friends who are dealing with such tragic grief and loss. We need to know when the Government’s serious violence strategy will be published, and I urge them to look at the root causes of youth violence as part of that strategy.

[Paul Maynard]

I am sure we all share the hon. Lady’s shock at what occurred on new year’s eve and in the early hours of new year’s morning. I was certainly horrified when I saw the news the next day. She will be aware that a lot of work is being done by the Mayor of London, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Home Office to make sure we look carefully at how we best use stop and search powers. The hon. Lady makes an important and powerful point, and I will make sure we seek to get a suitable answer on the date of publication as soon as we can.