Funding for Youth Services

Paula Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I place it on the record that my husband is the chair of YMCA Liverpool, which is a non-paid role. I pay tribute to all the organisations and volunteers who provide youth services in my constituency of Liverpool, Wavertree and the city of Liverpool, in particular Harthill Youth Centre, which does incredibly innovative work in my constituency.

I also pay tribute to my good friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins), who spoke eloquently about the desperate need to reinvest in youth services. I agree with her that we must nurture the confidence, skills and resilience of our young people and ensure that they get the best start in life.

Austerity has been a political con, and we live with its consequences today. We see them everywhere in our communities and in our public sector’s depleted resilience. Our children and young adults have borne the brunt more than most. The economic decisions taken post 2010, particularly between 2010 and 2015, have gutted the ability of the state to help people to help themselves. Local authorities have become beleaguered vessels of the British state: owning nothing, running nothing and commissioning everything—and very little at that. In the bonfire of austerity, young people and the services they relied on were always the most expendable for the coalition Government.

The record of the last Labour Government on children and young adults is a proud one. The likes of Sure Start and the Connexions service were truly radical ideas, which showed the value of a social democratic Government that prioritised the needs of future generations.

In the late 2000s and in government, the Conservative party droned on and on about dependency and waste in the public sector. That was rather insulting for those, like me, who worked in local government at the time. The rhetoric never matched the reality of the well-funded services that my colleagues and I worked hard to deliver. Youth services were about career advice, housing support, assistance for those with learning disabilities and so much more besides. They were about social inclusion, removing barriers, and helping young adults to get into education or training in a post-industrial society in which a job in the local factory was no longer guaranteed.

The economic vandalism of austerity was most pronounced in our cities. I suppose it was those pesky Labour funding formulas that, according to the Prime Minister, used to stuff all the money into deprived areas rather than into the likes of Royal Tunbridge Wells. According to the YMCA, the cuts have meant that Liverpool City Council has lost 86% of its youth service provision since 2010. That has brought its spending to just under £40 for each young person. In comparison, the Prime Minister’s North Yorkshire constituency can spend over double that: £89 per young person. This is not about playing one area off against another, but those numbers betray the fact that this Government have no regard for and no interest in equality of opportunity, despite all their claims to the contrary. Young people in Liverpool, and across all our cities and towns, deserve better.

Behind those numbers is an entire generation of young people who are blissfully unaware of what they have lost and what their predecessors were afforded. Whether they are gen Z or millennial—or, indeed, just under the age of 40—our people know that for 14 years they have been subject to a Government whose ability to cement intergenerational inequality has never been surpassed, with no youth clubs or youth services, violent crime up, social isolation, a lack of mental health provision, tuition fees trebled, no homes, a housing crisis, people unable to afford to buy or rent, minimum wage discrimination, no action on the gig economy, precarious work, underemployment, and a low-wage economy. The age-old offer that each generation will have it better than the last is in the dustbin, and now we have the grim spectacle of over 136,000 of our young people homeless, with nowhere else to go. There is no plan to tackle the scourge of youth homelessness that the likes of Centrepoint and the New Horizon Youth Centre in north London are calling for.

The cuts to youth services and youth provision have been the tip of the iceberg for the prevailing attitude that many politicians do not care about young people. The young people of the noughties have gone on to become the 30 and 40-year-olds waiting so very keenly to vote in this year’s election, and they, like the people in my home city of Liverpool, have exceptionally long memories. The same will no doubt be true of gen Z, who will not have any reference point for the likes of Connexions or the importance of the youth club and youth workers in their local communities, but they are angry for other reasons. Quite frankly, they have every right to be.