Young Adults: Public Service Funding

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking and congratulating my noble friend Lady Massey on introducing this debate. Her commitment to this area of policy is well known and long standing. I am grateful for the opportunity it gives us to discuss what one might, without being accused of exaggeration, call a crisis. I also acknowledge the speech that the noble Baroness has just made about the impact on local authorities. They carry the burden of this and often unjustifiably get the blame; it is good to see that recognised.

I would not imagine that there is any difference of opinion, or any argument to be made, about the funding cuts in this most crucial of services. I will not rehearse the figures and statistics; I do not think there is any need to persuade Members that there is a problem with funding. However, it is interesting to note that there have been cuts to funding for universal services. I am not sure that they are exactly the same as preventive services—I think they go a bit wider than that—but they are for every child and are part of a good and strong childhood. Funding is down for schools, further education, youth work and, as my noble friend Lady Massey said, youth centres. There are then also cuts to funding for targeted services, which are aimed at those children and young people who are more vulnerable than others. Look at the high-needs block in special education needs funding. In the case of the youth offending teams, the money seems to have been halved over 10 years. It is not just in some areas; it is wherever you look. Whether they are universal, for every child and every young adult, or whether they are targeted at children with special needs and requirements —not in terms of education—there is a problem.

I was thinking about the 10 years in which we have had this policy of austerity. For children of primary age, it has been there all their life; for children of secondary age, it has been there for all their teen years. I do not agree with austerity, but those of us who can look back and remember a time when public services were well funded at least have hope that it can be better than this. We have a vision; a picture of what better-funded public services can be. I worry that a generation of children will reach adulthood having never lived in a society where public services are adequately funded. As adults, we need to question ourselves on that. Although primarily it is families who bring up children, families need the support of the wider community and the state. Some activities fall to the state to ensure that young people are protected, allowed to grow up strong and stable, and able to contribute to society as they can.

Without wanting to guess the Minister’s response, I suspect he might say that there has been protection for some services. That argument is made by his ministerial colleagues regarding schools: the school budget has been protected, while there is an acceptance that other areas of funding have been cut. I want to make the argument that there are two reasons why that is not effective. The first and very simple reason is that even the priorities, which are usually the statutory services, have been underfunded; no recognition has been made of the extra demand that has been put on those services. The irony is that, in a time of austerity, the demand for those services increases. Even if budgets are kept the same or increased for inflation, they end up being underfunded because the increased need is not taken into account.

The second reason is slightly different, and here I want to make some further points. Having been a teacher for a number of years and a politician for a number of years, my experience is that services have got to work together; that is what makes the difference. That is never more true than for those services aimed at children and young adults. Forget the point about extra demand; even if one accepts the Government’s argument that they are safeguarding the priority services, or statutory services, there are implications if that is done in an otherwise underfunded system. It is those implications, as well as the drop in funding, that are causing the problem. For instance, the figures provided by the Library show it is true that there seems to be an increase in funding for safeguarding children, in young people’s services and for looked-after children. Ministers have made the decision that, in these tough times, they will do their best to safeguard those budgets. However, if one looks at the same set of figures, one sees that there is a decrease in Sure Start, a decrease in services for children under five and a decrease in the amount of money going into youth justice. One feeds into the other: it is no good protecting services that safeguard children and young people if you then cut those things that enable professionals to do a better job with these vulnerable young people.

I see the same in schools. I suspect that a fair amount of money has been put into maths and literacy teaching in schools. The maths hubs and the maths mastery programme are really good, and they are costed. I go around schools and see good work there, but because money has gone into some things and not others, there are no art, music or citizenship classes; there are no opportunities to go away overnight or go outside for play. The overall effect is that children’s learning is not as effective as it could be. You cannot pump money into teaching children maths and English and, at the same time, deny them the rest of the curriculum and think that there will not be a consequence.

In a strange way, the notion of priorities does not work, because a consequence of those priorities is an even greater underfunding of the services that would help deliver them better. If services are not funded, often it is not that they do not get delivered but that those in the workforce, at the cutting edge, have to find a way of taking on the extra burden. This is certainly the case in schools.

It can be argued that school budgets have been protected, and I would grant that that is probably the case in primary schools. Yet when I go to primary schools, teachers are not telling me that they are ever so glad that the Government have protected their budget—no one has ever said that to me. It is not that they are bashing the Tories; it is what they feel in their everyday lives. The children who come their way are suffering from money being cut in other areas. If there is less money in family support, it is the teachers who take on the job. Mums and dads who would have gone to an advice centre for help now come to the head teacher and the child’s teacher. If children suffer mental health through difficulties at home, and money is being cut from that service, they come to schools and expect them to deal with it. If children have poor housing but the neighbourhood housing advice centre has been cut, parents end up at school saying that they have not enough money to feed the children or for school uniforms.

One of the biggest backward steps is that, because of this cut in funding, we have a situation in which teachers have had to go back to being social workers, advice workers and carers. Under the Labour Government, they were free to teach, and that is why standards increased. It is no good protecting the schools budget if teachers are telling us that they are picking up the consequences of underfunded services. There is no capacity in the system. There is no joy. There are no spare minutes in which you can make some decisions about what to do differently and what to do next. It is a pressurised system. Even areas that the Government claim to have funded end up being not as effective as they might be; the Government certainly get no credit for this.

Further—and this is the greatest evidence that this is an argument worth making—I cannot see what policy the Government have to deliver integrated services. They have given up on delivering integrated services, because they are putting money into only a few of those services. They do not claim to be delivering integrated services. The Labour Government did that through Every Child Matters and children’s centres. I do not mind if you do not want to do it that way —I am not saying that it was perfect—but it was an acknowledgement and recognition that there has to be a structure to try to deliver integrated services to children and young adults. If you do not like that one, invent another. If the Minister accepts that integrated services are key to effective service delivery, can he explain how his Government are doing that?

I will finish where we started. One of our biggest obligations—as adults, politicians and policymakers—is to do what we can to make sure that the next generation has the best possible start in life. We cannot do it by ourselves, but I tell you what: politicians are pretty demanding of other agencies and individuals about discharging their responsibilities to children and young adults. If you look at what has happened to public services for young adults, you will see that the political policies are found wanting.