Sport and Youth Crime

Mark Field Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. Today’s debate on the effects of sport on youth crime falls, in some ways, in the shadow of last summer’s riots, and from his appearance yesterday on “Newsnight”, I know that the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice is up to speed with the subject. This debate is set against a longer-term concern about the rising problem of disengaged youth, which has disturbed Governments of all persuasions for decades, and a belief by many in the sporting community that sport can and does play a positive role in re-engaging young people and refocusing their lives.

Nelson Mandela has said:

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire… It speaks to youth in a language they understand. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down social barriers”,

and I want to use this debate not just to say that sport is good for its own sake, although many people believe that numerous benefits come with it. Studies of the benefits of youth participation in sport suggest that sport in and of itself is not enough to refocus or turn around the lives of disadvantaged young people and that what is required is a structured programme of support alongside the sporting activities. It is not simply a case of putting on ad hoc sporting events or creating new sporting facilities, but about how programmes are managed.

This is not simply a way of saying that Government intervention is necessarily a bad thing, or that Government agencies and public bodies are unable to deliver programmes that successfully intervene in young people’s lives. Support, including financial support, from the Government and their agencies is incredibly important to the success of such projects, but a good deal of new evidence suggests that sporting organisations and brands that have credibility in the eyes and lives of young people are often more successful in achieving the breakthrough that we all seek.

There has been a debate among people with an interest in sporting interventions in the lives of young people. People instinctively feel that such interventions are the right thing to do, and they have anecdotal evidence that they make a positive difference, but if there is any criticism, it is that there is perhaps a lack of robust data about exactly how they reduce criminal behaviour. I want to highlight some case studies that show the positive impact of such interventions on reducing crime and on antisocial behaviour and in improving the general well-being and educational performance of young people. The studies, of necessity in some ways, focus on relatively small numbers of people in relatively small geographical areas, and I would like the Government to consider some broader research that would seek to demonstrate the value for money and the performance of sporting interventions with young people.

I want to thank a number of sporting and other young people’s organisations that run such programmes and have provided information about them for the debate today—in particular, the Premier League, with its Kickz programme; the Manchester United Foundation; Charlton Athletic Community Trust; the Rugby Football Union; Sky Sports; the Sport and Recreation Alliance; First Light, which works in the arts; and Catch22. Their formal programmes are largely delivered by volunteers from the communities that they serve, and so I also want to thank the many volunteers who make them a success and the hundreds and thousands of people who work every day to deliver youth sporting projects, not just for disadvantaged young people but for all young people across the country. Their work is incredibly valuable and important to us all.

I want to look at four important areas that are of relevance to the debate: sporting programme interventions that help to reduce crime and antisocial behaviour; interventions that engage young offenders, both in young offenders institutions and after release; programmes for improving school attendance and attainment; and initiatives that help to rebuild young people’s self-worth.

We must consider costs; none of these programmes is delivered for free, although many are delivered with the support of the private and charitable sectors. We must also consider the costs of doing nothing, of maintaining the status quo. Based on 2010 figures, the National Audit Office has calculated that more than 200,000 criminal offences a year are committed by people aged between 10 and 17 at an annual cost to the country of up to £11 billion. It costs up to £100,000 a year to keep someone in a young offenders institution, and the number of 15 to 17-year-olds in prison has doubled over the past 10 years. During the five days of riots in August, 26% of the rioters were under 17, and 74% were under 24. There is not a male bias in the programmes and activities—they are open to boys and girls—but it is worth noting that 90% of the rioters were male.

First, on reducing crime and antisocial behaviour, one of the longest running and most successful projects is Kickz. It has been run by the Premier League for five years, has involved contact with more than 50,000 young people across 113 projects in some of the UK’s most deprived areas and has been supported by 43 professional football clubs. Kickz targets 12 to 18-year-olds, and its projects are football-led but include other sports and programmes designed to encourage young people’s awareness of health issues. The schemes typically take place three nights a week throughout the year, which is important in that they are frequent and have a very fixed structure. Kickz and the Premier League believe that one in 10 of the young people who initially attend the programmes as participants go on to volunteer, delivering the programmes for other young people, and they say that 398 people have gained full-time employment in some of the professional football clubs that have run the projects.

A report published last year by the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and New Philanthropy Capital, entitled “Teenage Kicks”, looked at a project run with Arsenal football club in Elthorne park in London and discovered that the investment in the project potentially created £7 of value for every £1 spent, with the savings coming from the reduced costs to the state of the reduction in criminal behaviour, with less police and court time needed to put people in detention. One participant said that he thought that 25% of the kids on the estate would be in jail without the programme, and he highlighted the nature of the problems that many young people face. He was someone who came home from school to find not a fridge full of food and people waiting for him, but nothing for him at all and an empty time in his day.

Interestingly, the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation also commissioned a report looking at the role of sport in gang culture. Young people involved in the research gave reasons why they might get involved in activities that would keep them out of trouble, and the top reason was that the activities would simply give them something to do. We should not underestimate the importance of that.

Returning to the study of the Elthorne park Kickz project delivered by Arsenal, it suggested that there had been a 66% reduction in youth crime within a one-mile radius of the project. Even taking into account other interventions—through community policing, for example —and after looking at national youth crime reduction trends for that period, the study’s authors thought it reasonable to suggest that at least 20% of that reduction was directly related to the project.

The Manchester United Foundation has delivered similar projects, with its star footballers working with youth workers and volunteers to deliver football-based recreational projects for young people in Manchester. Some of its research suggests a similar pattern of behaviour to that found in other research. It believes that in its Salford project there was a 28.4% reduction in antisocial behaviour during the session times when the foundation was working, and a 16.3% reduction in Trafford.

There are other smaller projects that in some ways work with people with more challenging needs, and I want to highlight—this has been highlighted in the Laureus report and by other people—the work of the Tottenham boxing academy. Members who know more about boxing than I do might take part in this debate, so I will not dwell too much on this. The project was designed for 14 to 16-year-olds. Physical impact sports—boxing and rugby—seem to be particularly effective when working with people from troubled backgrounds and certainly with those who have been involved criminal activity. There were 17 people on that project. Eight of them were known to have been offenders in the past, and based on normal intervention programmes, two thirds of those young people would normally be expected to reoffend within a year. However, in that instance, only two did. It is a small project, but it suggests that sporting projects help to re-engage people. They engage young people through a sport and then allow the youth workers delivering the project to engage with them about the other issues that they might have.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He has spoken a bit about curing those who have committed youth crime. Does he accept that prevention is also an issue with youngsters who might otherwise be attracted into criminality?

May I make a quick plug for the club that is probably nearest to where we are sitting now? About 300 yards away is St Andrew’s club at Old Pye street. The club has been around for 130 years, runs 12 football teams on a weekly basis and has an indoor gym. It works well with Westminster school, which has put a lot of money into ensuring that the gym is up to the highest standards, and it makes an impact in the vicinity. St Andrew’s club operates not too far away from what would otherwise be a quite troubled area of social housing.

[Damian Collins]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. St Andrew’s club is indeed a great success. I know that it has his support as well as that of previous lord mayors of Westminster, who have made it their annual mayoral charity. Its work is greatly appreciated by people in central London.

The project Hitz is delivered by the Rugby Football Union, the premiership rugby clubs and the police across 10 London boroughs, and has 750 participants. Again, the sessions are led by youth workers and run frequently, twice a week for 50 weeks of the year. In the Haggerston park area of Hackney, where the project was delivered, the fall in antisocial behaviour calls was calculated at 39% during the project.

Such projects often encourage people not just to take part in the project itself, but to take their interest into a more structured environment and perhaps into full-time participation in the sport. The Hackney Bulls rugby club recruited six new players from people involved in Hitz, and overall, the programme has taken 41 young people into full-time participation in rugby.

In my area, Kent, the Charlton Athletic Community Trust has done excellent work with young people over a number of years. Certain projects that have sought to re-engage young people and refocus their lives have caused similar falls in antisocial behaviour, including a fall of 35% in Aylesham and 59% in Buckland. The trust also does good work on alternative curriculum provision to re-engage young people with their studies, and I will come to that in a moment.

Good work can be done in the community to help direct young people away from the path of criminality, as my hon. Friend highlighted. There is also some evidence on work being done to engage young people in the prison environment, often at low cost, as many prisons and young offender institutions have good sporting facilities, and it is a question of bringing in the right people to engage young offenders. Those programmes use sport to help bridge the gap between life inside an institution to life outside it afterwards.

A project called 2nd Chance has worked in the Ashfield young offenders institution. Drawing on professional sports clubs around Bristol, such as Bristol Rovers and Bristol rugby club, it has worked with 400 offenders a year and is a low-cost provision. It has been calculated that, if just one offender with whom the programme works is kept out of prison, that will pay for the delivery of the entire programme for a year. When we consider that the current reoffending rate for young offenders in Ashfield is 76%, it seems a risk worth taking.

As part of the study of its work, 2nd Chance has asked that it and groups like it have access to information about reoffending rates for people who have engaged in such programmes, to demonstrate whether they offer a value for money return. At the moment, it is difficult for those groups to access that information, as all sorts of data protection issues rightly surround information that can be traced to individual offenders. However, could general information be given to make that link and demonstrate the payback of such projects? The project within Ashfield was delivered for less than £80,000 in a year of operation and worked with more than 400 young people.

The Rugby Football Union has a programme called Try for Life that has worked with young offenders in numerous institutions, and a programme called Prison to Pitch that trains young people in prison to play rugby and then helps them gain placements with rugby clubs outside prison. As with the programmes run by the Premier League, individuals who do not go on to work within the sport go on to volunteer to help deliver programmes for other young people.

School attendance and attainment is particularly relevant to a case from my own constituency that I want to cite: the work of the Charlton Athletic Community Trust in New Romney. It is worth noting in the data from the riots that 30% of rioters were persistently absent from school. In New Romney, the Charlton Athletic Community Trust has taken over alternative curriculum provision, a mainstream piece of provision offered across the country. Charlton Athletic won the contract to deliver it. It uses its role as a football and sport club to re-engage young people, but it also delivers studies in maths and English, as well as a broader basic curriculum.

The project opened in New Romney in September. I attended, along with my hon. Friend the Minister for Sport and the Olympics. During the two or three months since it started, the rate of attendance of the young people involved has improved significantly. The project gave me statistics. The attendance rate of one of those young people went from 1% at their previous institution to 55% now. Another student’s attendance rate went from 26% at their previous institution to 100% now.

Such projects help to reduce antisocial behaviour, as some statistics demonstrate, and a broader, fuller study by the Government would be welcome. I have cited examples showing how they can intervene successfully in the lives of young people in prison and re-engage those who have had trouble at school with their studies. There is also much to be said about the projects’ ability to help rebuild young people’s sense of self-worth and make them feel happier in their working and school environments.

The charity Greenhouse does a lot of work across London. It was supported by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their wedding guest list and by The Times’s Christmas appeal. In the research based on its 41 full-time sports and performing arts projects across London, some things that stand out strongly are improved school attendance, improved timeliness for the projects and increased happiness in school. An evaluation commissioned by Greenhouse from external valuers showed that 87% of the young people with whom the charity worked reported being happy at school as a result of the new programmes in which they were taking part, compared with just 52% before the start of the programme. Those might be softer measures of improvement, but they are important when we consider that we are dealing with people who are, on the whole, quite disengaged from their environment and from formal learning areas and practices.

The Manchester United Foundation calculated that its project had worked with 500 young people. Of those 500, seven got jobs with Manchester United, 14 were recruited as volunteers, 30 gained accreditation in music and IT production projects, eight completed football level 1 and 2 qualifications, 12 won boxing tutor awards and 30 became junior football organisers. That is not a bad rate of return for engagement with 500 young people, and the project was delivered at relatively low cost, for less than £50,000 a year.

In conclusion, I ask the Government to consider the issues raised by my remarks and the case studies that I have mentioned. The Government should shift their priorities generally—they have already signalled a shift—so that they do not just increase participation in sport for good but consider how targeted intervention by sporting projects can help change the lives of some of the most hard-to-reach young people. They should consider how to create a unified approach to delivery across Departments. The work touches on the role of the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Education and the Department for Communities and Local Government, all of which have some interest in the delivery of such projects. A unified approach is needed, probably with a lead Minister to take responsibility for and an interest in how those projects are delivered.

There should be a review of some of the rules and regulations about the delivery of sporting projects on the ground. Many sporting clubs cite problems with Criminal Records Bureau checks and other forms of bureaucracy that make their work more difficult. We should certainly look at that. All the national sporting bodies should prioritise the development of coaching qualifications and the training of people to help deliver projects.

To return to what I said at the beginning of the debate, a good starting point would be to build on the work that is being done by many sporting and charitable organisations, take up the research that they have done, complete a fuller study and analysis of the benefits and the rate of return from this type of intervention, and then consider the potential basis of further Government support via Government agencies, local government and the police—through crime prevention strategies—to make this a fuller programme for the country. The need to re-engage with young people is strong and evident, and the riots over the summer demonstrated that clearly to us all. Through the fog of this despair, there is evidence of some incredible and successful interventions that are turning around the lives of young people. We should draw from that and build for the future.