Services for Young People

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I apologise for arriving late for this debate [Interruption.] It was outrageous. We should always arrive on time, but I have a very good excuse: I was meeting a contingent of young people from Stroud high school in my constituency, who are involved in fundraising, and are doing a lot of thinking about the role of Oxfam. That, ironically, is a good example of the kind of thing that young people should be involved in. I applaud the girls from the high school for doing what they have got in mind. They have been raising a huge amount of money through cake stalls, footprint contests and so forth. They are doing so because they want to be part of the community and are endeavouring to become responsible individuals, and because they think carefully about the world beyond their habitat. That is fantastic, and their example and commitment to some extent underpin what I shall be saying in my brief remarks.

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) who made a thoughtful exposition of the situation, coming from the huge experience she brings to the Education Committee. We all derive value from that, and it is great that so many members of the Committee are here. I think that half of us are present.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

More than half.

[Neil Carmichael]

More than half; that is fantastic. We work well as a team and are very effective, coming up with some useful reports. I have voted against only one report so far, which was on the English baccalaureate. We had a lengthy process to discuss whether we should support the Government’s proposals, and I disagreed with the whole thrust of the report. I noted that although the evidence we had in support of its conclusions was persuasive, we nevertheless should not stop thinking beyond its remit.

[Mr Stuart]

I just wanted to applaud my hon. Friend for his courage in acknowledging that the evidence was all one way, and his conclusion was entirely the other.

[Neil Carmichael]

I am grateful. I am not entirely sure whether I can describe that as a compliment to my position, but there is much more evidence out there that we should be mindful of. That is what I shall talk about. I referred to the E-bac report not because I wanted to ram home yet again the fact that the Government are absolutely right to introduce the E-bac—they know that, and most people are beginning to realise it—but because there is more to our thinking on youth services than is contained in our report.

My other more general point is that it is absolutely right that 80% or 90% of young people’s time is spent in activities other than schooling, but we must get our education system right. That must be the top priority, and public money must be allocated on the basis of priorities. I want to make it absolutely clear right now that my priority is to ensure that our children receive an education that will equip them to deal with the challenges facing them and the opportunities and lifestyles that they wish to pursue. That is a cornerstone of my contributions to the Education Committee.

A key theme of the evidence that the Committee received in our various meetings showed that the picture is extraordinarily mixed, and it was difficult to analyse outcomes, and to elicit clear messages. In broad terms, the range of providers, the complexity of provision, and the different priorities that many providers had, made it extraordinarily difficult to make a judgment about outcomes and processes. That must be properly understood in the context of expenditure levels and the way in which the Government have reacted to the challenge of the pressures on public expenditure.

My constituency has a huge number of youth providers, and not all of them would be recognised in the context of the Committee’s report. We must acknowledge and salute those organisations that provide a huge amount of good value for our young people, and which would not normally come within the remit of our discussion today. For example, the Door project in Stroud provides fantastic support for young people who have been let down by everyone, including in most cases their own parents. The project is supported powerfully by the local community, delivers outstanding outcomes, and is a strong and useful part of our community. It is a good example of the sort of things we need.

Nailsworth has a community workshop, which I visited not long ago, where young people can learn about crafts, and to be craftspeople. It is fantastic, and is growing up from our local community. Not far away in Nailsworth is a youth centre that is very well supported by the town mayor and many others. It has been the victim of cuts by Gloucestershire county council, but nevertheless continues to deliver fantastic services that are really worth having.

In Dursley, another key town in my constituency, the Lower King’s Hill management co-operative provides great opportunities for young people to do all sorts of things, including gardening and so on. It is also where I hold some of my surgeries, so I am connected with its work, and its aims and objectives. It is yet another example of the sort of structure that we should be supporting, but which might not be covered by our report.

With that degree of diversity, we have some great structures, and I have not even started talking about some of the others, such as Outreach, which provides support for young people in very difficult circumstances. The staff’s dedication to young people, and the opportunities that they gain because of the support, framework, comfort and succour that they receive is fantastic. I applaud that.

All the organisations that I have mentioned are well supported by local people in their local communities, because they recognise local needs and work extraordinarily hard to produce outcomes that are surprisingly easy to measure. As a Member of Parliament, I visit them all, and I see the outcomes and am impressed. What often worries me is the number of people who need those services, rather than the outcomes. We must not ignore the fact that many good things are happening in our constituencies. Mine is a good example, but I think all hon. Members can say the same.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I agree broadly with my hon. Friend, but in my constituency in rural Somerset, one difficulty is acute travel problems. The complete lack of transport services after 6 o’clock in the evening means that only children with parents who have access to a car can access youth services. Not every village has a youth service. I have 172 communities in my constituency, and there are probably youth services in nine or 10. I accept what my hon. Friend says, but it is almost intolerably difficult for young people to access services in rural communities if other services are not in place, and my county council is cutting everything.

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. She is absolutely right that people must be able to get to facilities. In constituencies such as hers and mine, where there are many villages, transport is a factor. My son is a member of Rodborough Eagles, a football team that does extraordinarily well. He is a much better footballer than I ever could have been because he is not flat-footed and is a really good defender. The key point is that he visits many different parts of my constituency, and I join him as often as I can. That football club is a youth service, and an option for him and his friends to enjoy, and is part of youth service provision. A variety of different services can be tapped into.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. It is important when considering statutory services, which have an important role to play, as I said during my speech, to remember that there is a vast range of other services, such as sports clubs—Beverley rugby club, Beverley cricket club, the Meridian gym, which my younger daughter attends, and the Eastside gym which serves more than 700 children at Hedon in my constituency. I pay tribute to people such as Andy Dickinson and Steve Crane who do such a good job of providing services on a voluntary basis.

[Neil Carmichael]

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) is wondering whether he can read out a list of places in his constituency.

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. Can we get rid of references to individual places?

[Neil Carmichael]

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) is absolutely right, and his point is central to the matter. We should not think that youth services are just about statutory provision, because they are not. They are all part of the big society, which is encouraging many villages in my constituency to start thinking about providing the services that people need, including youth services.

I think that I have made my point about the rich variety of facilities, clubs, sports clubs and so on with which young people can get involved, and about the powerful role played by charities in providing facilities.

[Damian Hinds]

Before concluding his remarks, perhaps my hon. Friend will touch on the provision made by what these days we call faith communities and in the old days used to call Churches. There is an ongoing debate about the role of Christianity and other faiths and religions in public life, and a lot of churches provide important youth facilities that often are not restricted only to members of one particular denomination. The King’s Arms in Petersfield is one such example—

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. We are talking about the Select Committee report, and although it may be nice to mention every group in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, I doubt that we have got time for them all.

[Neil Carmichael]

Thank you, Mr Robertson. Your point is absolutely right, but it shows that we can think of more examples than just the evidence provided by the Committee.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire is right about Churches. My father used to take me to Sunday school, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first bit. I have remained a member of the Church of England for some time, and I look forward to a life of such membership. My own children had a similar sort of arrangement. Church organisations play a part in providing great facilities for young people, and I have seen that in action.

We are in danger of labouring the point, although I think that it has been well made. I am therefore going to move on to the point raised by the hon. Member for Wigan about the national citizen service. As she said, we went to Germany and looked at the range of options that were available for young people. We noticed first that a huge number of young people were participating in Germany’s equivalent of our national citizen service, and that to a large extent the activities were work based. That is the essential reason why, broadly speaking, the programme costs just over £1,000 in Germany for the year, but about the same in this country for a number of weeks. That is the big difference between the German system and the fledgling system in Britain, and the German system has a number of noteworthy advantages.

First, the work-based nature of the programme chimes well with the emphasis that is put on training and education in Germany, and the relationship that has with employers and professional activities. We need to embed such an attitude to education and to what happens afterwards in our own culture. It was obvious to me that the schemes that we saw in Germany provided a strong continuity from education to employment, and we should learn from that.

The second interesting thing that I noticed in Germany was the consistency of the youth programmes. We visited a fire station just outside Berlin, and there was a continual throughput of young people. Young people had to make a choice, but they knew what those choices were before they had to make them. From that, I gleaned that young people were able to think about what they were going to be doing outside and immediately after school. I thought that that was really encouraging; the experience of working in that fire station meant being part of a large team with awards, presentations, pictures and so on. Such things demonstrated that people had been there and benefited from being there, before going on to do something else that was the right step in their career development. Those who were starting the programme could see the results and the beneficial outcomes.

Those are the differences that I saw between the German system and the national citizen service. That did not stop me, however, from writing to local secondary schools in my constituency to remind them of the value of the NCS, and to make sure that they informed their students about getting involved in the schemes provided by the NCS. I hope that students get involved in the programme, but if the NCS is to continue in the long term, we must learn one or two of the lessons that I have just mentioned. It is imperative to provide the schemes that we propose with a sense of continuity and worthiness.

Too often in this country we end up putting things into silos. We forget that most things are linked and that most policies are not dependent on the work or delivery of one Department, but that there are connections between Departments, agencies and other structures. The provision of youth services is a good example. What matters is not only the budget provided by the Department for Education, or wherever, but the overall Government approach and the links between various policies—including the Work programme, for example—as well as what we do in and expect from our schools, our objectives for social services, employment opportunities, and so forth. That is why it is dangerous to rely only on the evidence that we are given. At times, we have got to think slightly beyond that, and the provision of youth services is one such example. That is why the Government are sensible in encouraging other things to happen, rather than just the statutory provision.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pat Glass]

I agree. In my constituency at the moment, 12 young people are chasing every vacancy. However, I want to look back to what mass unemployment causes and to look at what we will face in the future. I see people in my constituency who do not work. Their parents did not work and in all probability their children will not work. They place no value on education. They see schools as convenient baby-sitting services when their children are younger, but have no interest in whether they attend school when they are older. They have no investment in the present and no hope in the future, and they certainly do not vote.

However, the situation was not always as I have described. In communities such as mine before the 1980s and the early ’90s, those people had work. They worked in steelworks, in mines and in all the industries surrounding those big beasts, but all that has gone and we have not put anything in place for them. The cycle of depression and waste is costing the country billions of pounds, and it starts with youth unemployment. Depressingly, I can see the cycle beginning again.

As a member of the Education Committee, I was therefore very keen that early on we should take a look at services for young people and particularly services targeted at vulnerable and challenging young people. As we have heard, the Select Committee examined those services, particularly in the context of rising 16-to-19 participation in education, and we found several issues that worried us greatly, not least the major cuts in youth services and careers services.

We made a number of sensible recommendations, based on the evidence that we heard. We did not think that the Government response was adequate. I hope that the Minister can make a better showing today. In response to the Government response, we highlighted our recommendations again. We are looking for an endorsement of the outcomes framework. I know how hard it is to focus Governments on outcomes. That is very difficult for Governments. I could entertain hon. Members all afternoon with accounts of the attempts that various Governments have made to focus on outcomes and that have gone wrong.

However, we think that it would be worth while for the Government to consider an endorsement of the outcomes framework. We have recommended that the Government set out the grounds on which they will judge a local authority to have failed to provide sufficient services for young people and the ways in which Ministers will act to secure improvement, so that it is clear across the piece, for local authorities and for young people, when local authorities have failed to deliver services and what Ministers will do to secure improvement.

We underlined our finding that some local authority youth services had already closed and urged Ministers to intervene before it was too late. We told the Government that it was not good enough to dismiss our estimate of public spending on youth services, which is based on their own figures, and demanded that they provide us with their own assessment of annual public spending on youth services for each of the 10 years before introduction of the early intervention grant, so that we and others can see clearly exactly what has been spent on young people’s services in the past, what is being spent now and what is being cut and where. We raised concerns—we have discussed this already—about the potential impact of charging for the national citizen service and the impact of the NCS on youth services generally.

Most of all, we highlighted the fact that services for young people—education funding, careers services, youth services and home to school and college transport services—were at risk. Indeed, some were disappearing before our eyes—some as a result of direct Government cuts and some indirectly, through cuts to local authority funding.

[Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]

Like the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) and the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), I spent six weeks serving on the Committee considering the Bill that became the Education Act 2011. In fact, I think that we spent about eight weeks together; we entertained one another for eight weeks. The hon. Gentlemen will remember, as I do, that the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning gave an undertaking when we made it clear to him that day that careers services were disappearing. He said that he would take action “imminently”. When we asked what “imminently” meant, he said that it would be when he left the room. However, despite his good intentions, what has happened on the ground is that careers services have disappeared.

I go into schools all the time. The responsibility has been transferred to schools, and when I ask schools what is happening with careers services, they tell me, “Oh, Miss So-and-so does it as part of PSHE”—personal, social, health and economic education—or that sixth formers have access to support when filling in UCAS forms. That is what careers services for young people in schools today have been reduced to. It is simply not good enough.

Youth services—both universal services and targeted services for vulnerable young people—have been cut or have disappeared. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) gave a very good description of how that is happening. There have been job losses in these services, with specialist, experienced, difficult-to-replace staff leaving. I have some experience of having to replace specialist staff after a specialist service has closed down, and it is not easy. Those people do not hang on the backs of doors; they are highly qualified, flexible and often mobile. They are hard to train and incredibly hard to replace.

Doug Nicholls, of the union Unite, has estimated that some 3,000 specialist youth service staff face losing their jobs and 20% of youth centres in England and Wales are closing down. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), when she sums up the debate, will give more details on it, but she has made this estimate:

“A massive £200 million worth of cuts will have been made to youth services by April this year hitting young people and damaging chances of getting the economy back on track.”

All that has happened not just because of the cuts in services, but because the ring fencing around these services has been removed. That has hit young people living in Tory and Liberal Democrat-run council areas the hardest. Research shows that 60% of Tory and Lib Dem councils are making significant cuts to their youth services, whereas Labour local authorities, which are often those facing the greatest cuts in their funding, are at least targeting that funding at those whom they consider most vulnerable and are seeking to protect services for young people. That means cuts to youth service centre hours and sometimes closures. Less help is being given to young people through useful activities that lead to work and training and away from negative influences leading to crime, alcohol and drug abuse and gang involvement.

In my constituency, the local YMCA in Consett, which does tremendous work, often with the least able and most challenging young people, is struggling to find funding. Billy Robson, who has run the YMCA for as long as I can remember, tells me that two years ago, he was confident that the YMCA could improve the life of even the most difficult and challenging young person. Nobody knows more about supporting young people than he does.

However, he tells me that he now feels unusually gloomy, particularly about the dwindling opportunities available to the large numbers of young people who are not in education, employment or training. There are a few jobs, but they are usually short-term and sometimes part-time factory jobs. Even then, 12 young people are queuing up for every vacancy. Billy tells me that it is soul-destroying listening to young people who cannot get work. Their sense of despondency goes deeper and deeper. He says that it is the biggest struggle that he has faced since the closure of British Steel in 1980. He wants to be upbeat for the sake of the young people, but when he has to pay off his own staff, on whom those young people depend, it is hard to be positive.

Over the past year, he has applied for about £1 million in funding from organisations such as the Northern Rock Foundation, Greggs and the National Offender Management Service, but has not been successful in any of those applications. He says that because local authority funds have been cut, charities are competing for available private sector money. The Prince’s Trust runs numerous fantastic programmes from the YMCA in Consett that support young people into training and hopefully employment, but the Prince’s Trust seems to be one of the few organisations that have any funding left.

The Government, at a sweep, abolished the education maintenance allowance, which did more to improve 16-plus participation and narrow the gap between the richest and poorest students than any other scheme that I saw in my 25 years in education. To justify abolishing EMA, the Government relied for their evidence on one report, commissioned for a different purpose by a different Government, involving a group of young people, many of whom were ineligible for EMA on the ground of age. The author of that report, who gave evidence to our Committee, was clearly angry about how the Secretary of State had manipulated his figures and his report to justify abolishing EMA.

As a result, 16-to-19 participation has fallen back to levels not seen in this country since the early 1990s. When I asked the Secretary of State about it, he told me that participation had not fallen at all colleges, only at some. It would be good to hear from the Minister exactly where participation by 16 to 19-year-olds has increased. I am not a betting person, but I am happy to bet next month’s salary that participation is up in the south and down in the north, up in the wealthy shires and down in the inner cities and up among the highest earners and down among poor people.

I turn to the Liberal Democrats’ famous flagship policy, the pupil premium. There are probably a couple of dozen education funding geeks around the country, and I am one of them. It was actually quite exciting once I got into it. I know that pupil premium money is not new; it is recycled money. For all its good intentions, it has been recycled from schools with concentrations of the poorest children and young people and siphoned off to richer parts of the country with fewer poor children.

[Neil Carmichael]

rose—

[Pat Glass]

I am happy to give way and to challenge you afterwards on whatever you have to say.

[Neil Carmichael]

I was going to say what a great speech the hon. Lady was making. I was just wondering where EMA and the pupil premium fit in the context of youth services. They are associated more with the question of getting young people into education, keeping them there and supporting the people most in need in the most appropriate way when they are in education.

[Pat Glass]

Given the speech that you just made, I find it difficult that you are asking me to justify—

--- Later in debate ---

[Pat Glass]

The beauty of the education funding formula—it is complex and if we tweak one end of it we cause a huge tsunami at the other end—is that it was locally driven. Each local authority looked at its funding formula and had the opportunity to take into account things such as small schools, rural schools and small areas of deprivation. No one, I think, would accept that it is good to take money away from schools in which more than 50% of the kids are on free school meals and share it out among schools in which only 2% or 3% of the children are on free school meals; it does not make sense and it is certainly not what was intended. The scheme was well intentioned, but it is driving money from those schools that have high concentrations of poorer children and moving it to schools with small concentrations.

Everything that is happening in youth services and careers services, and everything that has happened with EMA, young people’s funding and higher education, where participation from poorer young people from the poorest regions has collapsed in parts of the country because of the tripling of tuition fees—when the Chairman of the Select Committee gave the audience in the Guildhall in York the benefit of the Government’s policy on this, it was clear that people had glazed over and were not listening—has a cumulative effect, and it will take a generation to replace and restore services for young people.

[Neil Carmichael]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

rose—