Funding for Youth Services

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins); she made a really good speech, as did all her colleagues who followed, and she has secured a debate on this really important topic.

Funding for youth services has experienced a downward trend, and that has been the case for a couple of generations. That trend in funding is a representation of a trend in the priority and value that society gives youth services. They are Cinderella services—local authorities of all colours often think youth services are the part of the budget for young people that they can cut most easily. It is easier to cut funding for those services than, for example, cutting funding for school provision and other forms of formal education.

At central Government level, youth services are not seen as significant or important enough, but the importance of youth work cannot be overstated. They provide a vital third space between home and school where young people can feel safe and experience new things to expand their horizons. The trend in the reduction of the provision of youth services around the country matches trends of increasing criminality and mental health crises among young people. I am not saying there is an absolute direct correlation, but there are massive links between the two.

When we are looking at a mental health crisis—and I think that we are at the moment—investing in something that builds the resilience of young people so that they can deal with the stuff that life throws at us when we are young, and not so young, is of enormous value. I am sure somebody has tried, but it is hard to put a price on the financial savings for the criminal justice system when young people are led into areas that are profitable—away from a life of crime and into one where they make a useful contribution to their communities. Youth services also provide a place where people can develop role models that may not be available in the home. Over the last two generations, there has been a slow decline in youth work, largely because its importance has been belittled, but when big financial shocks come, such as the 2008 financial crisis, it is the last thing to be saved. There is a reason why: too many people at the centre of Government and local government do not value it enough. Others have alluded to this.

I chaired and helped to run a youth club in my village just before I became an MP, when I was a local councillor in the village of Milnthorpe. One thing I picked up on was that the kids who do not come are the ones who actually need it. All the stats prove that people who come from relatively comfortable and well-to-do backgrounds have a much greater chance of attending some kind of youth organisation, whether to do sports or music club or whether that is one of the uniformed organisations. That is great; it is fantastic to have parents who have the time and the resource to encourage kids to do that and it is fantastic to be in social circles where that is the norm. The reality is that youth work fills the gap for so many people who do not have those opportunities. When youth work is in decline, those who miss out are the young people from the poorest backgrounds—always, always, always. The value that we can provide for younger people who come from more difficult backgrounds by providing decent youth work in those communities is absolutely enormous.

A couple of things occurred to me when we put together the Milnthorpe youth group 20-odd years ago. This was a setting where there was not a lot of public intervention; this was the early noughties, so there was probably more than there is now but certainly less than there had been previously. One of the issues we found was that we needed to be realistic in our ambition. To raise the money for a new youth centre, lots of kit and lots of staff would have held us up and taken us months, if not years, to achieve. We had low ambition and that allowed us to get good outcomes quite quickly.

We brought in a team of 20 volunteers and then tapped into organisations that already existed. Back then, the organisation we tapped into was Crusaders, now known as Urban Saints, which is the Church of England’s youth wing. It was absolutely invaluable to us. That it is a reminder that, today, after a period of cutbacks over many years, so much provision comes through faith groups of different kinds around the country. That is partly out of necessity because of the way in which the state has withdrawn to a large degree from this area, and partly because those people are motivated to provide that provision because of their faith. I hope that one thing we have learned from how much we relied on faith provision during the pandemic, not just for youth work, is that local authorities, health commissioners and central Government should be less sniffy about youth provision and be celebrating those people who, because of what they believe, work so hard at providing for those in their communities, including young people.

There are people who have spoken in this debate who represent areas far more deprived than mine, but one of the challenges that we face in our communities is rurality and the dispersed nature of populations. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. That is kind of difficult if the village has been hollowed out and is full of second homes, and there is not that much community left to support young people. There is then the issue of the distance people need to travel to get from where they live to where their nearest youth provision is.

The lack of genuinely affordable housing and investment in social housing is a major problem in an area such as ours and around other parts of the country as well, as is public transport. I give absolute credit to the Government for the £2 bus fare—but a fat lot of good that is if there is no bus to spend it on. We need to make sure that we are investing in public transport and new routes in communities to connect young people to the provision nearest to them.

Housing and the cost of living is an extra burden for us in Westmorland, because trying to recruit youth workers to a place where the average house price is 11 or 12 times the average salary will not attract people. Westmorland and Furness Council does a brilliant job in offering fantastic free youth worker training, which helps to upskill people and bring them into the sector, but if people cannot afford to live in these communities they simply will not take up those jobs and provide the support that we desperately need.

What funding there is—this issue is mentioned by lots of youth providers around my constituency, both voluntary and full-time providers—is so often short-term. Youth providers can spend all their time applying for funds. For example, talk to the people who run Kirkby Stephen Youth Centre, which is absolutely amazing. So much of their time is spent chasing the next round of funding, the next short-term bid, rather than being able to rely on core funding that would enable them to serve the young people in their care. If every pot that people bid for is only for three years at most, there is a constant worry. Providers might build up relationships, as colleagues have already mentioned, and do wonderful work, but then it ends, just because that pot has dried up and funding has moved on to the next thing. And that is the situation at best.

I chair the steering group of the Kendal Youth Matters project, which came about because two or three years ago the police approached me as they were deeply concerned about young people in the town of Kendal, the largest town in our area, who were at risk of becoming involved with criminality and were not in training, education or work; indeed, some of them were too young to be in a position to make choices about those things. The police asked what could be done to reach out to those young people, on the understanding that very often the kids who do not go to youth provision are the ones who desperately need it the most.

I say a massive thank you to everybody who has been involved in the Kendal Youth Matters project, including different organisations, businesses, charities and youth workers, and in particular Brathay, which runs the outdoor education centre based near Ambleside. Its staff do a wonderful job in their day jobs, so to speak, by providing outdoor education provision for young people from the most difficult parts of the UK, giving them outstanding—indeed, life-changing—experiences in the heart of the Lake district. And their doing that work now for kids in Kendal has been an enormous blessing and an enormous advantage for us.

What we have been able to do through the Youth Matters project is to provide a regular base for young people in the centre of town, in order to bring forward existing and bespoke youth provision: ski club, climbing wall and uniformed groups. Some of these things already existed; other things were specifically created. The funding has mostly gone on detached youth workers to get out there and proactively find the kids who would benefit the most. If we just open the doors, frankly, only the middle-class kids will turn up. We need to go out and look for the kids who would benefit the most. So I say an enormous thank you to Brathay and everybody involved with it.

There are so many other groups as well in Kendal: Kendal Youth Zone, Kendal Lads and Lasses Club and all the other outfits that offer wonderful provision in Kendal. I have mentioned the Kirkby Stephen Youth Centre and there are things going on in the Kent estuary as well. However, places such as Windermere, Appleby and Ambleside lack such provision. It is because we rely so much on the voluntary sector that we depend on having people in the right place.

There is undoubtedly a mental health crisis. During my time in Parliament, the thing that I have noticed the most is the spiralling numbers of young people suffering from tragic mental health crises. The impact on them and their families is literally heartbreaking. I want us to provide support through child and adolescent mental health services that we are not able to provide at the moment; the investment in CAMHS is woeful. Why are we not spending more money and focusing more on investing earlier, so that we build the resilience of young people in ways that mean when a crisis comes, they are much more able to sustain themselves? We put effort into stopping people smoking and getting people to do physical exercise, so that they remain physically well, so why are we not investing in the same way in the things that we know will keep people mentally well throughout their lives, which undoubtedly start with youth work?

Before I come to a conclusion—I promise—I will say another quick word. I take advantage of the fact that I am among colleagues from the Labour party and a Minister from the Conservative party by making a plea—both in this place and, using colleagues’ contacts and colleagues, in the Senedd in Wales and in the Scottish Parliament. Sam Rowlands, a Member of the Welsh Senedd, and Liz Smith, a Member of the Scottish Parliament—they are both Conservatives as it happens, but please don’t hold that against them—and I are all presenting private Members’ Bills that seek to make outdoor education residential trips a guaranteed and funded opportunity for young people at primary and secondary schools. In that way, we could connect people with the outdoors, build their resilience and do those things for them that we know outdoor education does so well for everybody, and not just for those schools and kids who can afford it. I encourage Members here to encourage their comrades in both the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament to back those Bills, and I encourage the Minister to back my Bill in this place.

Finally, I have been involved in youth work in a voluntary capacity for a couple of decades or more now. I know that one of the dangers—probably second only to the lack of funding—is patronising people. We end up with people in their fifties designing youth programmes. It is so important that young people co-design new youth facilities. We should let them choose and let them come up with answers so that the provision meets their needs. A lot of what we are doing in the Youth Matters project is about connecting people to training and work so that there is real hope for the future.

Youth work is an investment. It is always seen, as I say, as the least important thing—the thing that gets cut first—yet the value to our society, the individuals, their families and our wider community is immense. Let us reprioritise youth work. It will pay us back in droves.