Youth Services

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for this debate; it may be a small one, but the topic is certainly not. We see young lives being lost daily through knife and gun crime across our nation. A moral panic has begun, arousing social concern.

After the loss of my late husband, Garry Newlove, I was asked what I wanted to do. I had never been in the national spotlight, so to speak, so at that time I did not have an answer. However, I wanted to ensure that Garry would be known as a wonderful father and husband with a wicked sense of humour. The chair of the Warrington Wolves Foundation, Terry O’Neill and the CEO, Neil Kelly, kindly agreed for me to shadow their work on charities and, more importantly, to work with young people, albeit in sport. That being said, the sport was rugby, which runs through the veins of all Warringtonians. I did not take it up but watched from the sidelines.

Having wonderful support locally as well as nationally led to the girls and I creating Newlove Warrington, and I was honoured to have Peter Kay and Rick Astley as our entertainment when raising funds on the opening night. The three goals for the campaign were to inspire people to lead a purposeful life, to motivate people to enrich their lives, and to provide opportunities for positive interaction with our communities.

Alcohol- and drug-fuelled crime was rife in 2007, so I knew I also had to do my homework to understand why young people get into criminal behaviour and what they want to change. I travelled around the UK making documentaries about youth offenders, visiting youth offending teams and going into youth offender prisons. This led me to believe that 99% of our young people are good; it is only the 1% that are feral. By that, I mean that their personality and lack of respect for others will never change and, of course, there can be only one route to go down.

Just how do we move forward to change the lives of our young people? This is why this debate is very important. We have to encourage them to stop arming themselves with weapons of life destruction and instead to arm themselves with tools that will upskill their hidden talents to change their pathways to a brighter future. We need quality facilities that communities respect and own. No more street postcode barriers, but freedom to share with one another their skills to bring about change.

This brings me back to the next chapter of my journey before I was honoured to have a seat in your Lordships’ House. In 2008, I was delighted to be given a tour of a fantastic facility in Bolton, named Bolton Lads and Girls Club. This was a state-of-the-art facility. I had the pleasure of being shown around by the young people who use the facility daily—young ladies speaking about the facility in their own words, with their faces full of pride for what the building gave to them. I decided that I wanted one for Warrington. Why should the young people and communities not have such a facility on their doorstep?

While I recognise and acknowledge the funding that the Government have invested over the years, initiatives are well placed but they come and go. Now is the time to roll our sleeves up and put our money where our mouth is. There is a statutory duty on local authorities to secure, as far as is reasonably practicable, sufficient positive activities for young people. Local authorities are best placed to secure services that meet the needs of young people within the budget that is available to them. I appreciate that all areas have unique needs and there will be councils that simply do not put youth services at the top of their agenda. However, I believe that we must invest to get the best and at times we must be flexible and risk-averse to achieve that. Research in this area of providing youth services is, I am sad to say, sparse and feels out of date. Some measures do not get captured. By that, I mean the value of youth work and linking youth services to personal health, family health and well-being.

I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister: has there been any recent rigorous research to show that youth clubs effectively reduce unemployment, crime and drug use? The time has come where I believe that there is only one youth facility. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, mentioned, they are OnSide Youth Zones. As I have said, I recommend that noble Lords go and see these facilities, as did the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Seeing them is completely different from reading about them. In fact, they have even been endorsed by His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex. He was blown away by what these facilities achieve for people who have mental health problems as well as everything else.

OnSide Youth Zones are local facilities, a national network of local, independent youth charities which provide safe, affordable, warm and inspiring leisure-time facilities. They are iconic, best-in-their-class, multipurpose buildings and facilities, demonstrating the value a community places on our young people. They are community assets for the benefit of young people, local partners and residents. Most importantly, they all work with a wide range of partners including police, health, sports and disability charities, providing a platform for all. Up to 250 young people attend each session; they are open seven nights a week and have direct access youth provision. They give our young people somewhere safe and, more importantly, somewhere fun to go when they come out of school. They deliver more than a 200% return on social investment and 400% on the investment from the public purse.

Speaking in their own words, the young people say that they get better marks on their schoolwork; 72% are staying out of trouble because of attending and 80% of members are now thinking about life after school and going to college. More importantly, on the hot topic of obesity, 70% now exercise more regularly. Surely that says everything. What I really like is that it costs only 50p a visit. They get a hot meal, which some young people do not get at home; it raises their aspirations and builds their confidence.

I am also chairperson of a collaborative learning circle with Kier Group, as set out in the register of interests. We are looking to link in with OnSide Youth Zones and communities to create a fantastic facility which will enable apprenticeship opportunities. Indeed, at yesterday’s Question Time, my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking was spot on when he raised the issue of youngsters at 16 who will not be employed as apprentices by companies because at school all they are studying is a narrow, academic curriculum and all technical subjects are being squeezed out of our curriculum. The time has come to place more emphasis on technical subjects. Yes, there is a cost in creating new ideas and being risk-averse, and austerity makes people very nervous when making decisions, certainly when having to sign that cheque. However, 1 believe if you put in the hard work and give young people something brand spanking new, then they will feel that you respect them and they will respect the very environment which they designed, where they can gain practical and academic skills. More importantly, they can gain confidence to go out into that big wide world.

I have had tremendous supporters back home—Nick Hopkinson MBE and John Connell, to name two—who fight for Warrington and our young people. I can say that, after 10 years of hard work, fighting with the council and having many meetings, Warrington youth zone becomes alive in 2019. It is something I am really proud of. Speaking as a former champion for active and safer communities and in my role over the last six years as Victims’ Commissioner, speaking to children who are so vulnerable and feel at the bottom of nothing, surely it is only right and fitting that we now need to knuckle down and create a vision that is sustainable and creates better communities together, because young lives matter. A life is not a practice run. We must enrich our young ones into better pathways and not into the pathways of guns.