Services for Young People

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While we are on this interesting issue, may I encourage the hon. Gentleman in his caution? Although the Minister made a good point about how one can hold an institution to account for services for which it is responsible, is it not the case that, for the youth service, good youth work in deprived communities is good at—we need it to be good at—helping reduce offending behaviour? Of course, offending behaviour and its impact has nothing to do with the youth service, but it will be measured by the police or the youth offending team in the local authority. Often, the youth service will be targeting those most at risk of offending behaviour anyway. Is it not the case, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, that this is very complex? It would be quite dangerous to encourage an organisation like an individual youth club to be held too much to account for an issue such as offending behaviour.

[Mr Stuart]

I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.

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[Mr Stuart]

I was reflecting on those words even as I read them, but their implications are clear. If there is no firm action plan, the criticism—to spell it out for my hon. Friend in case he, too, is missing the blindingly obvious—is that if the strategy produced by the Government after such a long period of preparation does not spell out exactly what they are going to do and how they will hold to account those responsible for delivering services, there is every danger that we will have fine words and no real delivery. That might be a statement of the obvious, but there is a serious risk, with a strategy that is light on content, in respect of whether there is confidence that it will deliver on the ground.

Positive for Youth has the right focus on fostering young people’s aspirations and on their personal and social development. It is good to hear the Government praise the potential of young people and extol the qualities and achievements of the vast majority, especially in light of the negativity towards young people generated by last summer’s riots. The Government and the Minister are right to emphasise the positive. If all we ever measure are provisions averting negative behaviour by young people, we suggest that their natural tendency is to behave negatively. In fact, the Minister wants to emphasise—the Government are right about this—that most young people are positive members of our society and that we should support and celebrate their positive behaviour.

[Ms Buck]

Mr Robertson, I wonder whether it is appropriate—I know it is not normally done—to welcome the young people who are listening to the debate, because it is to be appreciated. The message that the hon. Gentleman has just given about the majority of young people being positive and aspirational for themselves will be heard in this Chamber as well as outside it.

[Mr Stuart]

Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.

It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.

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[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Mr Betts, for calling me to speak.

I congratulate the Education Committee on its report and its Chairman, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on his opening speech. There is much that is excellent in the report, which contains a powerful critique of the Government’s approach and other points that I hope the Minister will respond to.

There have also been some excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), which were drawn from their considerable personal expertise and knowledge, both in their local communities and more widely, in the area of youth work. I also found much to agree with in the contribution that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt).

What is clear from the Education Committee’s report and from the speeches that we have heard today is that we all agree that youth services matter, and they matter most to the most vulnerable and to the most challenged communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham said, in the context of youth unemployment—with 250,000 young people who have been unemployed for more than a year and with 1.4 million under-25s who are not in education, employment or training—the value of youth services is even greater. Although it is completely correct that youth unemployment did not start in the spring of 2010, the fact that it has increased and is a major and consistent problem is all the more reason why greater care should have been taken, and should still be taken, to provide the funding and support for a youth service that is one strategy among a number of different strategies to help young people to cope with the tragic experience of unemployment.

As my hon. Friend also said, the context of youth unemployment also includes the removal of education maintenance allowance. The removal of EMA matters not only because of education—this is not a debate about EMA itself and its value—but because young people need to be able to provide for themselves. That ability means gaining access not only to education, but to enrichment and support, which includes the youth service and the valuable application of young people’s own leisure time. The fact that many young people are now being denied opportunities to attend enrichment activities in out-of-school programmes—for example, the opportunity to pay for the transport that the hon. Member for Wells referred to—is also relevant to the Select Committee’s report. Young people whom I have spoken to were furious about the removal of EMA. I would say that it was probably the one aspect of policy that they felt even more strongly about than the raising of tuition fees for higher education.

We have touched a little on the riots. It is absolutely right that we understand—we all do understand—that the riots did not occur because of cuts in youth services; no one is alleging that the riots occurred because of those cuts. However, the fact that youth services and the wide range of provision for young people have been under such pressure, particularly in some of our toughest urban communities, did not help. As two excellent reports—the London School of Economics report, “Reading the Riots”, and the Children’s Society report, “Reporting the Riots”—indicate, the riots should be a warning to us not to neglect youth services even further in our most challenged communities.

There are many important points in the Education Committee’s report that Opposition and Government Members can agree on. We can all agree that youth services, or services for young people, span a much wider range of activities than the statutory youth service framework. We have heard examples of excellent practice in a range of community, faith, sporting and, of course, privately-supported and business-supported activities, which form part of the life opportunities for many young people. Indeed, statutory youth work itself covers a variety of different activities, ranging from outreach to youth clubs and from school-based youth work to careers guidance. Of course, there is also the national citizenship service, which I will refer to later. It is right that we appreciate the range of those activities and that we look to have a different pattern of services and activities in different types of community. What will be effective in a constituency in inner London, such as my own, will not be the right mix for communities in rural areas, the north of England and so forth.

What we need to do—the Education Committee’s report certainly implies this if it does not explicitly state it—is do better at mapping the range of activities that are accessible and available to young people, so that we have a better understanding of the context within which our statutory youth services operate. That leads us to something that came out strongly in the speech by the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness—namely, that we have a real problem with the quality of data, both on inputs and outcomes. Better quality of data would enable us to make better judgments about the quality and value of youth services.

Data about inputs are of only limited value, but they are none the less important. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan made a request for a better and more consistent data set, so that we can look at what has happened to the funding of statutory youth services over a decade, and she was absolutely right to do so. Within that context, however, the absorption of so many different youth services programmes into the early intervention grant has made it even harder to get a handle on what is happening to the funding of statutory youth services. The Minister should help us to address that problem.

It is a central point of the Education Committee’s report that we lack rigour in understanding what works. That is not a new problem for this Government, but we do not have the dataset to enable us to make better judgments about what works in terms of quality and outcome. The Minister has promised that he will respond to those points, and I hope he will. He needs to convince us that the Government have a strategy to ensure that services for young people are delivering and to monitor how they are delivering, so that we can make proper judgments about what works.

What we do have a good idea about is the scale of the cuts in youth services funding over the last couple of years. We know that there has been a real-terms 20% cut in the early intervention grant and that around half of local authorities have cut their youth services in the last two years, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils making the biggest cuts overall. We also know that those cuts are disproportionate to the local government average and that about £200 million worth of cuts will have been made to youth services by April this year. In some cases, that means that centres are closing, but it also means that youth workers have lost their jobs. Around 3,000 youth workers are at risk of losing their jobs, which means that even those centres that can remain open are providing a much lower level of service.

The House of Commons Library has analysed some of this information about the cuts for me. In some cases, local authorities have cut 100% of their youth provision. For example, Kingston upon Thames has cut 100% of its youth provision; Peterborough 89%; Westminster 70%; Bracknell Forest 48%; and so forth. There is a long list of local authorities that have cut their youth provision; they are not all Conservative or Liberal Democrat-controlled authorities, but there is a strong bias in that direction.

From the evidence that was given to the Select Committee and subsequently from the publication of Positive for Youth, the Government’s youth strategy, we know that the leading national organisations in the youth service field challenge the Minister’s claim that large slugs of money have been spent on youth services, and they question what that actually means. We have had the figures that support their concern.

We have heard today, and the Select Committee report draws out, a worry that the national citizenship service, the aspirations of and principle behind which no one is challenging, potentially eats up a disproportionate volume of such scarce resources as are available. My local authority is one of the pilots, and I have found out that last year just 60 young people participated in the programme and, most worryingly for the Minister, only a third of them were on free school meals. In an ideal world we would all be happy to support the scheme, but when resources are so tightly constrained it is extremely worrying that we provide so much money for a scheme for such a small number of young people—it will be a bigger number this summer, but still tiny proportionately—such a small proportion of whom are from lower-income backgrounds.

[Tim Loughton]

I am rather curious about what the hon. Lady says. She says that only a third of the participants in the NCS—it is national citizen, not citizenship, service—are on free school meals, but that is three times the proportion in the general population, so we are doing rather well. I wonder how many of the young people who went on the scheme in her Westminster constituency she has met, and what their testimonials were of the value of the scheme.

[Ms Buck]

I think that the Minister misses my point. I do not dispute that the scheme has the potential to be a good one. My argument is that in the four wards of my local authority that are in the highest two deciles of deprivation in the country, there are 6,000 teenagers, so, on the face of it, a scheme that concentrates, as it did last year, on just 60 of those young people, only a third of whom are on free school dinners, does not represent good value for money. He is absolutely right that the number of children on free school dinners is above the national average, but it is not above the average for Westminster. We have a great number of schools and a very deprived school population, and the last time I checked we had the ninth highest proportion of children on free school dinners in the country. As my hon. Friends have drawn out in the debate, we need to be alert to that issue—not because of the principle of the programme, but because we need to question whether, at this moment, it is the right one.

We have heard a number of important points about not just the amount of money, but how we get it to work effectively, the relationship between the statutory agencies and that between them and charities, including small ones, and the number of funding sources that some youth centres have to draw in to make the centres sustainable. A particular concern of mine is that we have seen in the youth service a reliance on short-term funding. Again, that did not start in 2010, but there is patchwork funding, with very short-term funding streams, which are around for a year or six months and then disappear.

A critical word that I do not think we heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee, or from anyone this afternoon, and which is absolutely at the heart of youth service delivery, is “relationships”. Young people, particularly those from the most challenged environments, value their relationships with statutory youth workers and others who work in the youth service. It is important to reflect on the fact that when such relationships are vulnerable and are disrupted, perhaps because there is high turnover, the impact disproportionately damages young people’s lives.

The cuts in the youth service will not be cost-free. We know that diversion and prevention is a central role of the youth service, and we all agree that we need to do better at building the data to demonstrate that. Where youth services are not available to provide the right range of activities, it is likely that at least some young people will find themselves caught up in antisocial, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.

We heard, importantly, about early intervention, and the hon. Member for Wells made a point about mental health and the worryingly high and increasing level of poor mental health among many young people. I think that we all agree that early intervention should not be something we discuss just in the context of the under-fives. It is a moving concept, and the changeover from primary to secondary school and into adolescence is a critical time for us to focus on early intervention. The youth service can, of course, contribute much to the enrichment and support of learning, and we need to do better at demonstrating that.

What should the Government do? We need them to do better at supporting the sector through change, and ensuring that when youth services draw, as they sometimes should, on private and voluntary funding, it is not necessarily a time of massive disruption and short-term funding. We need to hear young people’s voices, as the Select Committee did, and reflect those voices in policy, and we need greater honesty about what is happening out there and about the criteria for intervention. I hope that the Minister will respond on that point. He has been honest in telling the National Youth Agency that youth service cuts have been disproportionate compared to those to the total funding for local government, and he has promised us guidance on what the intervention would be when the cuts were disproportionate.

We have some figures, and I have a freedom of information request out at the moment and am looking forward to the reply. We understand what is going on out there, and we now need to know when the Minister will intervene, what his definition of disproportionate cuts is and how he will stop local authorities that are effectively withdrawing, or doing devastating damage to, their youth service.

The Children’s Society report on the riots, which has wider application, states that

“those in the transition to adulthood stage said that more government support is needed—two thirds (67%) of 17 year olds and six out of ten (60%) of young adults... This mirrors the response of young people in the focus groups, with… participants saying that more activities and support are needed to ‘occupy young people with something constructive’.”

Without such support, we are likely to face genuine costs in the failure to meet needs, particularly those of our most deprived young people. It is to its considerable credit that the Select Committee understands that, but the reality on the ground indicates that the Government do not yet do so.

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[Tim Loughton]

My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.

The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.

I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.

[Ms Buck]

I do not want to enter too much into a private quarrel, but surely the fact is that Positive for Youth is in most respects a perfectly good strategic document. The Select Committee report is extremely good in its analysis of some of the weaknesses of the Government’s approach to youth services, but the point is that wherever young people are brought together, the single message they give is: “We are not overly bothered about the reports you produce. We are bothered about the actual youth work that is available and the activities that are accessible to us in our communities.” That is what they tell us, and it is what they tell virtually every MP who is faced with closures and cuts in their youth services.

[Tim Loughton]

Young people would tell the hon. Lady—she did not answer my earlier question about whether she had met any young people from her constituency who had been on national citizen service—that they value being involved and having their views taken on board. Absolutely, they value having their questions and concerns answered. Whether or not young people get the answers that they want, they need to be taken seriously. Absolutely, we have tried to take on board young people’s views and give them ownership of this youth policy.

Positive for Youth is not a finished document that, as with so many other past Government reports, will go on a shelf and gather dust. It is an evolving, organic and living document that I want every young person in the country to wave in the face of the leader of their local council and the mayor at their town hall and say, “This is what Positive for Youth says should happen. We want it to happen here. How can we make it happen here? Why isn’t it happening here?” That is why a lot of things will evolve from it and why, in a year’s time, I will come back to Positive for Youth and do an audit of what has and has not been achieved. I will go back to those areas of weakness, and I will also flag up areas of strength where we can learn from best practice, which we are particularly bad at doing.

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[Mr Stuart]

The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.

The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.

Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—

[Ms Buck]

Occasional?

[Mr Stuart]

I say “occasional”, but we are working together, and the Minister is committed. One of the best things that the Prime Minister is doing for the governance of this country is keeping Ministers in place for a decent period, at least so far. Notwithstanding the Minister’s tetchiness, I hope that Ministers remain in office for longer periods, because that will lead to better understanding of the issues with which they are wrestling. Select Committees, which probe and challenge, and write reports such as ours, do so because they care about the issues. I hope that any heat, as well as light, that we might generate will strengthen the Minister’s arm. I know that he is personally committed to the matter, and works tremendously hard to look after the interests of our young people.