Youth Crime and Antisocial Behaviour

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Ian Byrne

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Robertson. I thank the hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) for securing this incredibly important debate.

I start by paying tribute to constituents, families and young people in Liverpool, West Derby who are living through the real-life consequences of austerity. It has decimated the provision of youth clubs, youth workers and the services that helped to shape my life experiences, and those of so many others like me, growing up in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s. I owe such a debt of gratitude to the youth workers who guided me and so many others through such a difficult period in our city’s history. The relationships we formed with those youth workers, and their guidance and wise counsel, are the reason I can stand here today participating in this debate. It was interesting to listen to Ian Wright say something extremely similar on TV on Saturday.

That crucial safety net has now been removed, and our communities are living through the consequences. Youth provision is almost non-existent, with vulnerable children roaming the streets, getting into gangs and trouble. We have recently seen fatalities in Liverpool due to knife crime, with children killing children, devasting whole communities and families. Youth centres are shut, and sometimes the only sporting facilities available in my constituency are privatised facilities that charge £70 an hour to families struggling through austerity and now a cost-of-living crisis. Many of our children have not got a chance if opportunities and facilities are not available to all.

I place on the record my thanks to all the service staff, teachers, parents, community groups and police across West Derby, especially Anfield Sports and Community Centre, Action for Children, the Young Person’s Advisory Service and Alder Hey staff, and I acknowledge the work being done by the No More Knives and Real Men Don’t Carry Knives campaigns. These people are doing so much across our city to support young people through such difficult times.

There is a massive effort being made across Liverpool to support and nurture our young children, but we desperately need funding and policy changes from central Government. Since austerity began in 2010 under the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, Liverpool City Council has seen its funding reduced by 65%. Despite the Government declaring that the age of austerity is over, the cuts to our funding continue, and the consequences for our young people, and the youth services and facilities they need, continue to be felt.

According to research by the trade union Unison, between 2010 and 2019, youth services in the UK suffered cuts of £400 million. That will have meant the loss of 4,500 youth work jobs and the closure of more than 760 youth centres since 2012. It is shameful. According to a February 2021 survey by UK Youth on the impact of covid-19 on youth services, 66% of the 1,759 organisations surveyed said there had been an increase in demand. Despite the greater need for their services, 83% reported that their funding had decreased, while 64% said they were at risk of closure in the next 12 months. Research by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy found that 80% of young people say that their mental health has worsened during the covid-19 outbreak.

As I have said, we desperately need the funding and policies from the Government to support, nurture and invest in our young people. In her response, will the Minister commit to providing the vital funding that councils need to invest in youth services and facilities for our young people? As I have mentioned, so many facilities have been lost in the last decade, and I do not doubt the positive outcomes they would have had for so many young people had they remained open.

Will the Minister explain the Government’s strategy to support pupils and schools so that young people do not face exclusion and the lifelong damage that can cause? Will she also commit to funding young people’s mental health services, as well as early intervention mentoring programmes and specialist children’s services? This should not be a postcode lottery. We need provisions for our youth and preventive measures put in place as an investment to ensure that all our children have a level playing field and a bright future.

I hear the words “levelling up” a lot from Government Members. Let us put it into practice and restore the youth provision we have lost to all, so that the phrase actually means something to our children.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

We need to leave a couple of minutes at the end for the mover of the motion to respond. I call Sarah Jones.

Transport Connectivity: Merseyside

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Ian Byrne

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship again today, Mr Robertson. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for securing this important debate and for all the campaigning he has done on the issue. I also thank all the other MPs from Merseyside and beyond for their powerful contributions.

My hon. Friend outlined in detail the connectivity issues that we face across our transport networks in Merseyside. The environmental impact that this is having cannot be understated. The issues are intertwined. We need a change to the infrastructure if we are looking to reduce emissions, and have an impact on people’s health and wellbeing as well as to their ability to access work and services, and if we are looking to improve the digital economy experience that is vital in Liverpool.

We need long-term solutions—not pop-up cycle lanes or short-term schemes, but thought-out long-term investment infrastructure. We need real action, not soundbites about levelling up from the Government. If they are serious about the levelling-up agenda, the Government must listen, be led by what Merseyside Members, local leaders and our constituents are saying, and provide the resources and policy for the vital transport connectivity needed across our city region.

The integrated rail plan was a wonderful opportunity to revolutionise our country’s rail network, but the north has been offered a “cheap and nasty” deal, as has been much quoted today. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) made our collective thoughts clear in a letter to the Secretary of State, and there have been the comments made by Members today.

Since the reforms of the 1980s, areas such as Merseyside have been forced to contend with fragmentation, deregulation and underfunding. I thank metro Mayor Steve Rotheram and Liam Robinson for their work to reverse that awful legacy. I look forward to working with them to reintroduce the Bootle branch line. If the Bootle branch line—officially titled the Canada Dock branch—could be opened as a passenger route, it could save a host of Liverpool communities.

That line could run from Lime Street to Edge Lane, Prescot Road, West Derby Road, Townsend Lane, Walton Lane and County Road before going to Bootle. It would be a game changer for connectivity in West Derby and in the north of the city, and it is one that I know my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) wholeheartedly supports.

In my constituency, the transport connectivity was arguably better a century ago than it is now. The former station buildings remind us of the Cheshire lines that served our community from 1884 to 1960, when passenger services ceased. My constituent Stephen Guy recalled:

“I was 12 when the passenger trains stopped and I recall the ticket office with its little window to pay fares. It was a picturesque line along the West Derby section and many people were saddened by the closure. People filmed and photographed the last trains. West Derby Station was the finest on the line. The station had popular staff who tended beautiful flower beds and hanging baskets—they won awards.”

That is a wonderful memory of civic pride in a publicly-owned railway network. I ask the Minister to look at what we had in the past and to see what can be reinstated; we could connect our city using existing train lines, by bringing stations back into public use and linking them to bus routes. That would offer real solutions, and result in cleaner air and better connectivity.

I am proud to have stood in 2019 on a manifesto that would have ensured that councils could improve bus services by regulating bus networks and taking them into public ownership and have given them the resources and full legal powers to achieve that cost-effectively, thereby ending the race to the bottom in working conditions for bus workers. It would also have delivered improvements for rail passengers by bringing our railways back into public ownership, allowing us to make fares simpler and more affordable and rebuild the fragmented railways as a nationally integrated public service, cut the wastage of private profit and improve accessibility for disabled people.

It is a false economy to waste funds, time and resources on quick wins that do not last. Will the Minister commit to investing in our infrastructure and look at long-term solutions?

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Please keep to three minutes.