Youth Service Provision

Debate between Bill Esterson and Julie Hilling

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Julie Hilling]

I was going to talk about that issue, but I will pick it up now. If we look at the reports about Rotherham and Rochdale, we see it was youth workers who took the side of young people and started to raise issues. They said, “Things are not right here. These young people need to be listened to.” Indeed, they are perhaps the only professionals who come out well from those reports.

Youth work is also about challenging attitudes. It is not necessarily about taking the side of young people and deciding they are absolutely right, but about challenging their attitudes, their racism and their sexism. It is about challenging them to think about the world so that they do not just walk into the world and accept their place, but challenge the world as well. If they see injustice, they can challenge it by working together, not by rioting on the streets. Part of the legislation is that the voice of youth is central and that young people have a right to a voice.

[Bill Esterson]

I want to link what my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said with something that my hon. Friend said earlier, based on her experience. Many of the young people involved in the trafficking were in children’s homes; my hon. Friend talked about her work with looked-after children. All too sadly, many children in care will end up in prison a few years on, costing £200,000 a year each, which is an horrendous sum. Given my hon. Friend’s experience, can she say how effective youth work has been over the years in keeping some of those young people from ending up in prison?

[Julie Hilling]

That is always hard to quantify, but the issue is important. Over the past few years, people have looked for integrated services, which is the right thing to do, but they have then tried to combine them in one role. Social workers working with young people in care have a vital role, but that adult who befriends young people and works with them on their terms, and who does not have to make sure that they are home by 9 o’clock at night, they have done their homework or they have eaten their greens, is also vital.

My hon. Friend is right that the cost of young people who enter the penal system is enormous, and I will come to the figures in a moment. We are spending about £100 per year per young person on youth work, compared with the hundreds of thousands of pounds we spend to keep people in the penal system because we could not spend a pittance on them before. It is estimated that if we spent £350 per year per young person, that would fund the proper youth service we are talking about.

Another issue the Government have led us to is working just with the young people who are most in need—those who are not in education, employment or training. Of course we need to work with those people, but the more cuts we make to the service that gathers most young people, the more people will fall to the bottom of the net and need a more specialist service to get them out. The youth service is a good vehicle for enabling all young people to have that same positive relationship.

Let us talk about some of the cuts. In 2010, Sheffield had 41 youth clubs; in 2013, that was down to 23. Since 2013, of course, there have been further cuts, and those cuts are continuing. In the north-west, Manchester disestablished its youth service. It is still putting £1.3 million into the voluntary sector, but that is now up for grabs, and it is likely to disappear. Oldham is getting rid of everything apart from one myplace centre. In Trafford, all provision is on the table to go completely, although a housing association might pick some up. In St Helens, there is a 77% cut, and it now has only 28 hours of delivery at the most.

In Lancashire, half the budget has gone, and it is now looking at further cuts. In Tameside, the budget is almost gone. In Stockport, it is gone. Sefton faces huge cuts. In Liverpool, the budget is gone. Bolton faces massive cuts. Wigan now faces an 80% cut. Cheshire West now has four professional youth workers—I am sure they know individually every one of the young people they are supposed to be working with. The one little bit of success is in Knowsley, where youth workers and young people have set up a project together and are running the services.

The picture across the country is devastating. The smallest cut is 50%. A lot of areas have cuts of 75%. Now, particularly in the period going forward, a lot of areas are cutting budgets completely. These authorities have a statutory duty to provide a service, and I will come back to that in a minute.

We are losing the professional expertise and the co-ordination across the piece. Even when there is money to go into the voluntary sector, there is nobody there to co-ordinate that spend. Indeed, I was told yesterday of a local authority that is now looking to the regional youth service unit to provide it with some infrastructure, because the local authority’s infrastructure has completely disappeared.

It is now difficult to ascertain what is left of many services. Some are youth and play, while some are just youth support services. The whole designated youth service budget has gone completely. What saved the Wigan youth service in the late ’80s was the fact that the local authority had to spend a percentage of its education budget on the youth service. We had a great influx of money, and we doubled the number of youth workers. Legislation is important, and it should be implemented.

If we ask people in a neighbourhood what they want, they say they want youth centres for young people to go to. They do not want young people hanging around on street corners with nothing to do; they want them to have positive relationships. In that respect, early-day motion 488 now has more than 100 signatures, and 38 Degrees—I agree with this 38 Degrees petition—is encouraging people to sign a petition.

One of the Minister’s predecessors did a survey of local authorities’ youth service spending. As far as I am aware, it has never come to light. Can the Minister enlighten us about what happened to it, or whether it exists? Certainly, Unison did freedom of information requests on some local authorities and discovered that at least 2,000 jobs had gone. Given that there were only 7,000 in the first place, that is an enormous percentage. Some 350 youth centres closed and 41,000 youth services places were lost. As has been mentioned, a place in the criminal justice system costs £200,000 per annum.

I quote again from the Choose Youth manifesto:

“Youth work contributes significantly to early intervention and preventative services thereby reducing the incidence of young people in need of highly targeted intensive and expensive services later on.

For example, the Audit Commission report into the benefits of sport and leisure activities in preventing anti-social behaviour by young people estimates that a young person in the criminal justice system costs the taxpayer over £200,000 by the age of 16. But one who is given support to stay out costs less than £50,000. Other comparative costs include: £1,300 per person for an electronically monitored curfew order. £35,000 per year to keep one young person in a young offender institution. £9,000 for the average resettlement package per young person after custody.”

Youth work is a cheap, efficient alternative to all those other intervention measures. The National Youth Agency used to be paid to collate a survey of spending on local authorities. It can no longer do that work because it is no longer paid to do it.

The youth service profession are qualified workers, not just people who turn up on a Friday night and decide that they will play with young people. A youth work qualification is equivalent to a teaching qualification. The qualification and training are as rigorous as those for other caring professions such as social work and teaching. Youth work is now a degree profession and youth workers are highly trained and qualified. They support volunteers in their work. For every pound spent, £8 comes back in action by volunteers. The work is cost-effective in all sorts of ways, but it is about professional service. Most of us would not want an unqualified teacher to be standing in front of a class and teaching. Most of us would not want an unqualified doctor to treat us or an unqualified nurse to deal with us. Why then should we accept unqualified youth workers working with young people?

Finance Bill

Debate between Bill Esterson and Julie Hilling

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson]

I speak to people in my constituency all the time, and they tell me just how hard it is to find jobs. I have employed somebody who was on the future jobs fund, and they have been extremely successful, but people who have been out of work for more than six months, whether they have left school, college or graduated from university, find it almost impossible to get jobs.

The reality is that, in this situation, just as in previous decades under previous Conservative Governments, employers are already turning to people who have just left school or college or just graduated; they are not looking at people who have been out of work for a long period. The depressing reality is that we will see another generation of young people consigned to the scrapheap unless this Government take the action that the Labour party proposes in repeating the bankers’ bonus tax.

[Julie Hilling]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend, like me, sees a constant stream of young and older people coming to his constituency surgeries desperate for work. Does he agree that the future jobs fund provided something better than having to work in a supermarket for nothing?

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend gained vast experience of dealing with young people before coming to Parliament, and she has been a strong advocate for them ever since. Her experience is very similar to mine. It is absolutely disgraceful that we have Ministers sitting there laughing at what is happening to young people up and down this country, who cannot get jobs because we have a Government who entered office when the economy was growing strongly—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”]—despite a global economic downturn and a global economic and financial crisis caused by the friends of people like the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham).

Education Bill

Debate between Bill Esterson and Julie Hilling

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the Department for Education and Skills survey of 5,000 young people, which found that 90% were satisfied with Connexions, and that Ofsted reported the qualitatively positive impact of the service on the careers and other choices of young people?

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend makes the case very well for the success of the existing careers service and the importance of a professional careers service. The Government need to take account of that evidence base, but so far they have been in such a rush to push through these proposals, I fear that in their planning they have missed such evidence.

We are short of time, so I will make some brief comments about the education maintenance allowance. There have been some well-made points, but I want to mention Hugh Baird college and Southport college, which students from my constituency attend. Up to 90% of the learners at those colleges receive the EMA, and listening to Government Members, who now seem to recognise the importance of linking attendance and attainment to the payment of its replacement, I wonder why we are getting rid of it. As my hon. Friend the shadow Minister said, if only 12,000 people receive the replacement, the number really will be a drop in the ocean. We have already seen one step in the right direction, with the U-turn on providing an allowance to existing learners, but I hope that the Government will go much further on the subject of EMA’s replacement.

My evidence from the colleges that I have mentioned is that students who receive EMA have considerably higher attendance and attainment than those who do not. They are also unable to work out which students will continue to attend without receiving EMA or to determine which students are young carers and from other vulnerable groups and therefore very dependent on EMA. These issues have not been sufficiently taken on board, and that is why the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe are so important.