National Youth Strategy

Lauren Sullivan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Lauren Sullivan (Gravesham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) on securing this really cool debate, and I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

In Gravesham, we have a good track record of listening to and working with our young people. Gravesham Youth Council is about to celebrate its 26th anniversary. The current chair of the council is work shadowing with me this week, and I am married to the first chair of the council, who was activated to enter politics because his youth club was closed by the then Conservative-run Kent county council. How things have changed—or not changed.

Under the last Conservative Government, that trend continued. Kent County Council used to have 36 youth centres; the number went down to 12, and now the youth centres are family hubs. There is limited open-access provision, as family hubs are not available exclusively to young people. Indeed, a young person needs a referral or targeted youth support to gain access to those services, rather than there being predominantly open-access youth services.

The national youth strategy aims to reverse that decline and to enhance youth services, which I really welcome. Last week, I attended an event hosted by Gifted Young Gravesham and organised by the charity The Grand, and there were representatives from nearly every local secondary school on the day, which was a very hot one. When I spoke to school councillors during a consultation on growing up in the online world, I heard many of the same themes: social media disrupts sleep patterns, but also young people are struggling inside and need somebody to talk to. They want somewhere to go, but where can they go?

That is the digital isolation paradox, which is evident across the UK. One young person at that event said:

“Social media is so extremely flawed - but it’s all we have. If we had more places to go outside of social media, we’d be happy. But adults build these toxic platforms, and then got angry when they hurt us. They destroyed the places where we would connect and got angry when we stayed home.”

That is the paradox, and that is where the national youth strategy is coming with more youth centres.

We are grateful to have been able to receive a youth hub, working with the Department for Work and Pensions in Gravesham and with the Gravesham Youth Council. I am fulfilling a promise by directly reporting back to the Minister, the Members and all the decision makers who are here today, to show that we are listening to and hearing young people.

I have to agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon East (Natasha Irons) about how we can help to structure young people’s voices. Young people’s voices need support around them, and we have heard some really amazing testimony today from my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean) about the impact of youth work. Youth workers are professionals who need to be protected by statutory requirements for local authorities to fund this quality and professional service. That can be done. Indeed, it has been done in Scotland with the Community Learning and Development Standards Council, and I urge the Minister to look into that.

I will end with a quote: “Young people are not a problem to be solved. They are potential to be unlocked.”