Youth Services

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for introducing this debate. I wish it was more populated and with a greater expression of experience and ideas. It is clear from his remarks that we shared the same innocent and golden period for work in youth clubs. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that table tennis was always a great fascination to me and the disco at the end livened me up ready for going home, so I cannot agree with him on that one.

I declare an interest as president of the Boys’ Brigade. It sounds masculine but girls are now very much a part of it. The Boys’ Brigade and Girls Association must get a snappier title now that they are together. With 45,000 children and young people in tow and 8,000 volunteer leaders, it is a great privilege to serve in this way.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I will begin with the headline in yesterday’s Times, which bears repeating. It was the main story on the front page. It said that 30,000 children in gangs were aged between 10 and 15. As he mentioned, Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, said that,

“criminals are preying on young people by taking the place of society”.

We must weigh those words. This is becoming an alternative, a parallel way of living their lives on the streets. The social structures within which too many of our children are growing up are provided by drug dealers and gangsters, who are operating in what the Children’s Commissioner described, chillingly, as,

“a systematic and well-rehearsed business model”.

What an awful thing that is to contemplate. She compared what is happening in the field she has been looking at to the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, with all its intricacies, substructures and ways of controlling young people in particular.

I mentioned that I am the president of the Boys’ Brigade and that ought to be a warning that there is a potential conflict of interest. In case anyone thinks I am about to plead my special cause—your Lordships must correct me if I do that—I mention it also for the positive reason that it gives me ample opportunity to be with young people rather a lot of the time. I listen to them carefully and I am impressed by them. The noble Baroness’s reference to our need to respect young people is predominant. They are often despised, marginalised or paternalised and it is incumbent upon us to find ways of getting alongside young people and listening to them.

As well as my work in the young people’s organisation I have mentioned, I have worked in the inner city in education for the past many years, with two schools—one in the borough of Islington and one in the borough of Tower Hamlets—in keenly disparate and mixed environments. All kinds of social problems ensue from that. On one occasion I encouraged a young man from one of those schools to write an account of his childhood life. I did that because he had been the victim of a gang attack when he was out with his best friend. The best friend was murdered on the street, in broad daylight, just 100 yards from where I was living while my young friend somehow escaped with his life. The tale he tells is horrific. This is what I asked him to write. He was in his young childhood, aged eight at the time. He and his best friend were kicking a ball around in a piece of parkland when they were surprised by two gangs that were fighting each other. They were using baseball bats and broken bottles. Then, in the little memoir that this young man wrote as part of the therapy that I thought might be useful for him as he got over his own brush with death, he said,

“myself and my friend were safely hidden in a bush afraid to come out of our enclosure. Right in front of our eyes … two teens had cornered one of the rival gang members. Surrounding him they struck him around the head with a glass bottle. He collapsed on the ground blood leaking from his head. He began foaming at the mouth. We were petrified … two days later news came that this individual had lost his life … I was eight years old and I had witnessed my first murder”.

It certainly was not the last.

These are the realities within which our children and young people too often are growing up in our cities, and, as reports remind us, in rural areas. I will echo what has been said amply by other speakers. How do we provide for our young people? I know that the Government will tell us—I can write the lines for the Minister—how much money they have committed and that it is the responsibility of local authorities to disburse that money. Quite right, yet when we look at local authorities’ spending power, as has again been said by others, we find that because local authorities have a desperate need to make provision for adult social care, homelessness prevention and so much else, within the terms of their spending power it is the youth provision that suffers the most.

If there is one thing I want to communicate in my remarks it is not so much making the case, which I think is self-evident, but trying to emphasise the need for urgency in contemplation of this whole area of our national life. Various figures have been quoted. I have seen figures both in line and at odds with ones that have been quoted. It is very hard, except that we can see in percentage terms a huge decrease in money devoted to youth services. However it is calculated and whatever the actual figures we come up with, certainly more than half and sometimes two-thirds have been cut since 2010. It is anticipated that those cuts will go on being severe for the next two years. We can understand local authorities taking money from the easy part of their budgets, but it is a counsel of despair and puts our young people in jeopardy for the rest of their lives.

We know from our newspapers that, after Mrs May’s announcement for the NHS just a few days ago, all those representing the NHS, defence, social care and education are raising their voices and demanding substantial injections of cash. The needs of our children and young people are likely to be lost in the clamour and the positioning for extra money if it can be found. We must not allow that to happen.

I will spend quite a lot of my summer break with young men and women from the Boys’ Brigade’s work in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, and the Republic of Ireland. I will be offering my thoughts about leadership to hundreds of young people gathered for training at our regional centres. The Scottish and Northern Irish devolved Governments are more than happy to inject some core funding into youth movements such as the brigade, the Scouts and others—it is not just my own interest here. They seem less inhibited about finding money from, for example, the proceeds of crime that have been recuperated and from dead bank accounts and to put that at the disposal of young people. That seems a very practical way of proceeding. I wish that we could have a similar response here in England.

I have listened to a lot of pop music in my time because my children tell me that, if I want to know what young people are thinking, that is what I have to do. It is really inimical to me. I have had a classical education, I am an innocent abroad, so I listen to grime and garage and rap and I do my best—that is all I can say. On the verge of my adult life, I felt that I could echo Van Morrison’s “Brand New Day”. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Storey, will remember that too. In my middle years I sang along with D:Ream, “Things Can Only Get Better”, which of course the Labour Party used as its song of triumph at the 1997 election. Now the notes are less positive. It is much more Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl is touring at the moment with his song “The Line”, which, as he puts it, is,

“a search for hope in this day and age where you feel as if you’re fighting for your life with every passing moment, and everything is on the line”.

I see the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, nodding. She has found a way to roll her sleeves up where she is. If she has any spare time, I will take her on to my team as well. We could do with a bit of her energy.

The important thing for me is not this statistic against that statistic. It is not this kind of a case against that one. It is just sensing the urgency of the needs of our children and young people at this time and finding the will and the resolution to do something about it.