Services for Young People

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As long as there is accountability and people are driven by delivering the outcomes at the end, they should have discretion over how they use their budget. There could be investment in the Friday evening group I mentioned if there was confidence that it was helping to meet our overall goals for delivering change in the local community.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

May I help my hon. Friend on this subject? Social impact bonds and payment by results are an important subject. I will give him two examples. The City Year London scheme is being piloted in many London schools, with the help of the Mayor’s Fund and Private Equity Foundation money. It can show, very clearly, a return on capital in terms of the kids catching up. The Private Equity Foundation has been funding literacy schemes, in partnership with local authorities and other public providers, that clearly show a benefit for those children in social outcomes, which are so important, and can be linked back to a return on capital. There are great possibilities for the youth service, too.

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.

[Mr Stuart]

I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.

[Tim Loughton]

At the risk of holding a third-party debate through the Chair of the Select Committee, may I say that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) makes an interesting point? In the borough next to her own, Hammersmith and Fulham has pooled budgets between the youth service and the youth justice system, and there is a clear imperative to incentivise local youth services to work with legal services, to keep young people out of youth offender institutions and the youth justice system. If we are to hold local authorities to account for doing good stuff, positive stuff, proactive stuff and preventive stuff with young people, we want to penalise them if they do not do so—the result is that children end up in young offenders institutions—but reward them when they keep young people away from offending behaviour.

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Can we keep interventions to intervention length, rather than speech length?

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[Mr Stuart]

Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.

It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.

[Tim Loughton]

By the Committee Chair’s own token, does he therefore think that it was helpful, in trying to create a positive account of young people, that about three quarters of the press release accompanying his report—it is a good report and I will comment on it—about activities for young people, aged between 13 and 25, beyond the school or college day concentrated purely on the national citizen service, which deals only with young people aged 16?

[Mr Stuart]

Mr Robertson will recognise, even if the Minister does not, that it is relevant to mention that a proposal from the highest levels of the Government might, if scaled up to a 50% take-up, lead to spending greater than the entirety of spending on young people outside the classroom, as stated in Government figures. It is in the nature of issuing a press release that 29 points are not included if one wants it to become part of the press story. Although the Minister was upset that a project with such laudable aims was the subject of criticism, he has not been a Minister that long and will doubtless become thicker skinned and will get used to the fact that a more independent Select Committee system than we have had before and a more assertive legislature will be prepared to criticise even the most favoured schemes of the most powerful in the land, because it is our job to do so. If we emphasised that in our press releases, rather than all the other issues, I am sorry that it caused such upset and sorry that the hurt to the Minister continues to this day.

On a positive note, I welcome the commitment to publish annually national measures relating to young people’s positive outcomes, with an audit at the end of 2012 of overall progress towards creating a society that is more positive for youth. That is as a result of the work carried out by the Minister, which I am happy to celebrate and emphasise, even if it does not occupy more than three quarters of my speech. I am also pleased to see the Government emphasis on involving young people in developing policy and monitoring progress—for instance, the pledge of £850,000 to the British Youth Council for 2011 to 2013, to set up a new national scrutiny group of representative young people to advise Ministers on how policies affect young people and their families.

I pay tribute to the Minister for regularly meeting young people in care, to ensure that his understanding of the care system is not only theoretical but a personal, direct, linked understanding from young people affected by the policies that he and the rest of us make in Parliament. That, too, is a good thing—as well as having young people in the Public Gallery listening to me going on at such length today.

Positive for Youth does not fully address three outstanding areas, which the Committee was concerned about. First, we welcome the Government’s commitment to retain the statutory duty on councils to secure young people’s access to sufficient activities and services, including their duty to take account of young people’s views in decisions about such activities, which was a key recommendation of our report. We also welcome the commitment to intervene in response to

“well-founded concerns about long-standing failure to improve outcomes and services for young people”—

again, a key Committee recommendation.

Our second report, however, called on the Government to specify their minimum expectation for adequate provision of youth services. We asked how communities could know the grounds on which Ministers might be expected to intervene if they did not know what “adequate” looked like. Positive for Youth and the draft statutory guidance currently out for consultation decline to do that, instead stating that a local authority’s efforts to secure a sufficient local offer will be judged by whether it has considered guidance and by its relative performance in improving outcomes for young people. Although we agree that outcomes for young people, rather than inputs, are the right thing to measure, some consideration of what services, if any, are being provided locally must surely form part of the assessment. The duty calls on local authorities to secure

“so far as is reasonably practicable, a local offer”.

I am interested to hear why that caveat was considered necessary and how well received the draft guidance has been in the consultation responses so far.

Secondly, as I have already mentioned, we highlighted confusion about public spending on youth services that the Government have yet adequately to address. The Government continue to dismiss our estimate for public spending on youth services of £350 million a year, which was based on their own figures. When asked repeatedly for their own estimate, they did not provide one, instead challenging the spending figures that the Government have been using for years in answering questions on youth services spending.

I would be grateful to the Minister if he clarified today whether the Government intend to stop using the accounting line on youth service spend and, if so, what alternative instructions his Department has given to local authorities about collecting and reporting data on youth service provision. For instance, if reporting is to change under the early intervention grant, perhaps he can clarify how the Government intend to measure national spend on youth services in future under that grant.

Thirdly, the Committee felt that the Government remained vague about how the national citizen service was to be funded after the 2011 and 2012 pilots. Their response to our report remained ambiguous on that point, stating that they had

“no plans to cease funding for National Citizen Service beyond the pilot years”,

but that

“the Government does not expect to fund the full cost of delivering the programme”

in the long term. Perhaps the Minister could update us on the Government’s latest thinking with regard to what proportion they do expect to fund beyond 2012.

There is much to be welcomed in the Positive for Youth strategy, but significant anxiety clearly remains in the sector about the hard reality of funding on the ground locally. Even organisations that are signed up to the Government’s approach of restructuring services to deliver them for less are worried about the extent of cuts. The NCVYS, the Government’s newly appointed strategic partner, said in response to the consultation on Positive for Youth that

“the papers made little reference of how services would be funded to deliver support to young people. This is especially concerning given the implicit assumption that voluntary and community organisations will be expected to fill in gaps left by retreating services.”

Regular reports of the closures of local youth services bear out that fear.

If we are to provide adequately for the 80% of young people’s time spent outside school, we must retain the best youth services—in particular, those whose effectiveness has the confidence of local commissioners. The Government must be prepared to intervene when those are threatened, and they need to clarify precisely the grounds on which they will do so.

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[Tim Loughton]

I am rather curious about what the hon. Lady says. She says that only a third of the participants in the NCS—it is national citizen, not citizenship, service—are on free school meals, but that is three times the proportion in the general population, so we are doing rather well. I wonder how many of the young people who went on the scheme in her Westminster constituency she has met, and what their testimonials were of the value of the scheme.

[Ms Buck]

I think that the Minister misses my point. I do not dispute that the scheme has the potential to be a good one. My argument is that in the four wards of my local authority that are in the highest two deciles of deprivation in the country, there are 6,000 teenagers, so, on the face of it, a scheme that concentrates, as it did last year, on just 60 of those young people, only a third of whom are on free school dinners, does not represent good value for money. He is absolutely right that the number of children on free school dinners is above the national average, but it is not above the average for Westminster. We have a great number of schools and a very deprived school population, and the last time I checked we had the ninth highest proportion of children on free school dinners in the country. As my hon. Friends have drawn out in the debate, we need to be alert to that issue—not because of the principle of the programme, but because we need to question whether, at this moment, it is the right one.

We have heard a number of important points about not just the amount of money, but how we get it to work effectively, the relationship between the statutory agencies and that between them and charities, including small ones, and the number of funding sources that some youth centres have to draw in to make the centres sustainable. A particular concern of mine is that we have seen in the youth service a reliance on short-term funding. Again, that did not start in 2010, but there is patchwork funding, with very short-term funding streams, which are around for a year or six months and then disappear.

A critical word that I do not think we heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee, or from anyone this afternoon, and which is absolutely at the heart of youth service delivery, is “relationships”. Young people, particularly those from the most challenged environments, value their relationships with statutory youth workers and others who work in the youth service. It is important to reflect on the fact that when such relationships are vulnerable and are disrupted, perhaps because there is high turnover, the impact disproportionately damages young people’s lives.

The cuts in the youth service will not be cost-free. We know that diversion and prevention is a central role of the youth service, and we all agree that we need to do better at building the data to demonstrate that. Where youth services are not available to provide the right range of activities, it is likely that at least some young people will find themselves caught up in antisocial, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.

We heard, importantly, about early intervention, and the hon. Member for Wells made a point about mental health and the worryingly high and increasing level of poor mental health among many young people. I think that we all agree that early intervention should not be something we discuss just in the context of the under-fives. It is a moving concept, and the changeover from primary to secondary school and into adolescence is a critical time for us to focus on early intervention. The youth service can, of course, contribute much to the enrichment and support of learning, and we need to do better at demonstrating that.

What should the Government do? We need them to do better at supporting the sector through change, and ensuring that when youth services draw, as they sometimes should, on private and voluntary funding, it is not necessarily a time of massive disruption and short-term funding. We need to hear young people’s voices, as the Select Committee did, and reflect those voices in policy, and we need greater honesty about what is happening out there and about the criteria for intervention. I hope that the Minister will respond on that point. He has been honest in telling the National Youth Agency that youth service cuts have been disproportionate compared to those to the total funding for local government, and he has promised us guidance on what the intervention would be when the cuts were disproportionate.

We have some figures, and I have a freedom of information request out at the moment and am looking forward to the reply. We understand what is going on out there, and we now need to know when the Minister will intervene, what his definition of disproportionate cuts is and how he will stop local authorities that are effectively withdrawing, or doing devastating damage to, their youth service.

The Children’s Society report on the riots, which has wider application, states that

“those in the transition to adulthood stage said that more government support is needed—two thirds (67%) of 17 year olds and six out of ten (60%) of young adults... This mirrors the response of young people in the focus groups, with… participants saying that more activities and support are needed to ‘occupy young people with something constructive’.”

Without such support, we are likely to face genuine costs in the failure to meet needs, particularly those of our most deprived young people. It is to its considerable credit that the Select Committee understands that, but the reality on the ground indicates that the Government do not yet do so.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

We have had an interesting and, indeed, rather different debate this afternoon, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on ensuring that we have had time to debate youth issues. We do not do that enough in the House, and I absolutely welcome anything that Parliament—Select Committees, Ministers, Opposition Members and Back Benchers—can produce to highlight the panoply of issues and challenges that young people face. Young people and children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future, and they need to feel that their concerns are taken more seriously. This debate is just one opportunity to flag up a whole lot of issues that affect young people at the moment.

At times, I thought that I had strayed into the wrong debate. This is a debate about the youth service report, which covers 13 to 25-year-olds, but somehow we got on to the education maintenance allowance, the English baccalaureate and various other things. I thought that the Chairman of the Select Committee was restrained in not upbraiding his hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), as I gather he was previously at pains to point out that, because of his own educational experience, he would have failed the E-bac. However, we did at times get on to the Select Committee report.

I have a speech, but I want to discard it and try to address some of the issues that have come up. Then at the end, if we have time, I will perhaps give the Chairman of the Select Committee a right of reply, as is traditional. I will perhaps also come on to some of the things that I had planned to say.

I think that we all share the same aims. I do not think that there is any difference between us in that we all feel a need to get a better deal for young people. There might be some concerns about the national citizen service, but I think that its aims are absolutely shared and that we all appreciate that everyone getting those sorts of life-changing experiences would be a good thing.

I absolutely welcome the fact that the Select Committee undertook the study and produced its report, but I have been critical of how the report was produced, because it dwelled disproportionately on the national citizen service, which covers only a small part of the age group that the Committee considered. I also have the criticism that, although the Committee was concerned to flag up some inadequacies of the national citizen service, it did not interview any young people who had been on national citizen service. There are many willing volunteers who would have given their testimonies.

It seems slightly odd that, in its critique of national citizen service, the Committee went to Germany to try to make a comparison with the Zivildienst scheme, which was the alternative to military service in that country, where, at the age of 19, young people could either do 11 months’ military service or 13 months’ civilian service. When compulsory military service was suspended in 2011, the Zivildienst was also suspended.

There are big differences between that scheme and national citizen service. Young people tended to volunteer in old people’s homes, hospitals or churches, for example. They would get a small salary for doing so and the organisation hosting the young person contributed to the cost. So it was a completely different sort of scheme that was born out of completely different circumstances with completely different funding arrangements. That is why I am concerned that the Committee appears to have been initiating criticisms about national citizen service based on something that happened in a different country.

Although I was very glad that many young people contributed online and in the discussion forums, which is absolutely right and is something I strongly encourage, I was concerned that few young people were called as witnesses in front of the Committee. I am also not aware that any young people worked on the report with the Committee’s special advisers and Clerks.

When we produced Positive for Youth, of which I am very proud—it was a long-standing piece of work that absolutely rightly took a while to produce—young people were involved at every stage. They were given drafts and various policy proposals to tear to bits and asked to come back with their responses. In considering one of the later drafts, 150 young people assembled at the O2 arena. They pulled various parts of the report apart and came back with their suggestions.

We had a big event at the Queen Elizabeth II centre that involved more than 300 people. More than 50 young people were there and, at every stage, they had their input and felt ownership of Positive for Youth. Whether or not someone agrees with the document’s contents, I do not think that many people are arguing about the fact that we exhaustively consulted a load of people in the youth sector, particularly young people themselves.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister is spending a disproportionately inordinate amount of time on something that is not central to the issue, but I would like to correct him. The process was that we took evidence from young people on panels in multiple oral evidence sessions, and we also conducted the student forum. As we are a parliamentary Committee, young people cannot form part of the team that puts the report together, but we had massive engagement with young people throughout the whole process—for example, by using the student forum and so on. I thought that I had written to the Minister to set him right on that issue because he was clearly so misinformed. If I failed to do so, I apologise for allowing him to continue in such a position of ignorance.

[Tim Loughton]

My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.

The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.

I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.

[Ms Buck]

I do not want to enter too much into a private quarrel, but surely the fact is that Positive for Youth is in most respects a perfectly good strategic document. The Select Committee report is extremely good in its analysis of some of the weaknesses of the Government’s approach to youth services, but the point is that wherever young people are brought together, the single message they give is: “We are not overly bothered about the reports you produce. We are bothered about the actual youth work that is available and the activities that are accessible to us in our communities.” That is what they tell us, and it is what they tell virtually every MP who is faced with closures and cuts in their youth services.

[Tim Loughton]

Young people would tell the hon. Lady—she did not answer my earlier question about whether she had met any young people from her constituency who had been on national citizen service—that they value being involved and having their views taken on board. Absolutely, they value having their questions and concerns answered. Whether or not young people get the answers that they want, they need to be taken seriously. Absolutely, we have tried to take on board young people’s views and give them ownership of this youth policy.

Positive for Youth is not a finished document that, as with so many other past Government reports, will go on a shelf and gather dust. It is an evolving, organic and living document that I want every young person in the country to wave in the face of the leader of their local council and the mayor at their town hall and say, “This is what Positive for Youth says should happen. We want it to happen here. How can we make it happen here? Why isn’t it happening here?” That is why a lot of things will evolve from it and why, in a year’s time, I will come back to Positive for Youth and do an audit of what has and has not been achieved. I will go back to those areas of weakness, and I will also flag up areas of strength where we can learn from best practice, which we are particularly bad at doing.

[Lisa Nandy]

Although the Minister is absolutely right not to be complacent about young people’s involvement, the Committee was very keen to ensure that we listened to young people, but that we did not take the young people to whom we spoke as necessarily representing others. They were representing themselves, and we found that incredibly valuable. If he is so keen to listen to young people, will he listen to the overwhelming anger and frustration that the abolition of education maintenance allowance caused and reinstate it with immediate effect?

[Tim Loughton]

We could have a debate about EMA—indeed, I have been part of such debates—but it is not part of the youth report. If the hon. Lady would like to talk about EMA, I will mention that, last night, I was with a group of young people who are in the care system and who have benefited disproportionately from the alternative to EMA—the higher education bursary. They will gain more under that bursary than they did under EMA. We could have that completely different argument, but I think you would rule us out of order, Mr Betts.

I want to try to address some of the points that the Select Committee Chairman raised, particularly the one about the statutory duty. We have published the consultation on what we will do about the statutory duty, and I have sent out very strong, clear signals regarding some of the disproportionate cuts that we have seen. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) acknowledged, I have absolutely admitted that, in certain parts of the country, some councils are being short-sighted in treating youth services as soft targets. They are not taking a long-term view about the implications of such an approach.

We are consulting on what, practically, the statutory duty should mean. We have had it since 1996, but it has never been used. If we are to have such a duty, it must be meaningful and something that people will appreciate. However, a very important point comes out of Positive for Youth in relation to the fact that local authorities and others are part of the youth offer. To believe that youth services are provided by local authorities alone is a mistake. The youth offer includes, as several hon. Members have mentioned, a load of different organisations that involve local authorities, social enterprises, voluntary organisations, charities and private companies, yet we focus disproportionately on how much money local authorities invest in certain youth-orientated services. The bigger picture shows that the offer is much more mixed.

The best judges of whether or not young people get a good deal in their local area must surely be young people themselves. That is why a key part of the Positive for Youth strategy is the need for an effective and loud youth voice. I have asked every local authority in the country to identify a group of young people locally. They may be youth mayors, members of the UK Youth Parliament, youth cabinet members, none of those or even a combination of them. Such groups could be legitimately said to represent the voices and concerns of young people in their communities. They would be able to conduct an audit of the youth offer in their area and have it taken seriously, published on the local authority’s website or presented to a council meeting. We will collate those findings and flag up where certain local areas are doing well and where others are not. Surely, that is the best way to find out whether or not young people are getting a good deal and to do something about areas with a weakness.

The Committee Chairman also mentioned the outcomes framework. The further response that we gave to the Committee—we have done this in the past few months—stated that my Department is funding the Catalyst consortium

“to develop its outcomes framework with the ambition that it will become an ‘industry standard’ common language with which to measure and demonstrate the impact of provision.”

We have also been working with the Young Foundation, which is part of the Catalyst consortium, to develop the outcomes framework, which is a matrix of tools that will help youth organisations to demonstrate their impact on outcomes for young people.

The interesting problem with this work is how to prove a negative. This is something else that goes to the heart of what Positive for Youth is all about—it says it on the tin. Too often in the past, we have judged whether or not we are doing well for young people in terms of preventatives and negatives. We ask questions such as “How many young people have we prevented from going to youth offender institutions? How many teenage pregnancies have we prevented? How many young people are not in the youth justice system?” Those questions are all based on negatives and preventatives, so it is not surprising that they exacerbate the negative images of young people that the media too often present. I want to achieve—this is why we have asked the Catalyst consortium to consider the issue—an aspirational, positive measure of outcomes that assesses what we are doing for young people on the basis of what they achieve, their educational success and a version of the Prime Minister’s well-being index.

It is hugely difficult to put together something that is meaningful, measureable and practical, but I am determined to do that and to replace the negatives with something positive and aspirational. It will take a while to come up with something that does not just consist of words that are relatively meaningless.

The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) made a number of points on a wide range of issues. It is a shame that she was not present when I gave evidence to the Committee on the national citizen service and on Positive for Youth. Had she been present, she would have received answers to some of the questions that she has asked today.

The hon. Lady was right to say that part of the problem with youth work is that there is no real job description for it. I know that one of the Committee’s frustrations was the failure of often well-established youth organisations to make a positive, strong case for what constitutes good youth work and a good youth worker. The sector does not do itself any favours. I have seen some fantastic youth workers making a huge difference to young people—often from disadvantaged backgrounds—throughout the country. I wish that we could bottle that work, define it and replicate it more.

That is why Positive for Youth is littered with case studies of youth organisations, local authorities and young people themselves doing some really good stuff in different parts of the country. I want to disseminate best practice and we also need to find a way to disseminate good youth work. I know that the Select Committee Chairman is as frustrated as I am that the Committee’s report did not suggest a blueprint for how to promote good youth work practice. The sector has received that message, which is why Fiona Blacke and the National Youth Agency are working on whether we should have a professional body of youth workers and on how we can increase the standing, gravitas and perceptions of youth workers.

The hon. Lady mentioned reliance on different sources of funding. During my evidence to the Committee—she was not present—I referred to a heavy reliance on “slugs of public money”. My point was not that there is too much or too little public money going to youth services, but that those services have relied disproportionately on public money in the past. A degree of reform in a range of other public services has resulted in a mixed economy of provision based on different revenue sources, but youth services are too often heavily reliant on money from local government, whether it comes via central Government or elsewhere. There is a whole range of other providers, but there is still a heavy reliance on public money, so when public finances are tight, youth services get hit disproportionately. Frankly, the situation has not changed dramatically since the Albemarle report 50 years ago, which effectively established youth services.

The hon. Lady gave a good example from her own constituency of the upcoming Wigan youth zone and the contribution of Martin Ainscough, whom I have met several times. He is a fantastic philanthropist and has put together a fantastic case, as have other members of the OnSide charity, which is responsible for four Myplace centres in the north-west. The charity’s genesis was in the Bolton lads and girls club, which is one of the best—if not the best—youth centres in the country, if not the world. Martin works with Dave Whelan, who is another benefactor of the project. It did not qualify for Myplace funding, because it submitted its bid after the funding round had finished, unlike the other four Myplace centres, most of which have opened—I opened one in Carlisle—and are doing some fantastic work. The Wigan example did not, therefore, get any national public money, but it is going ahead because of some contribution from the local authority and generous contributions from Martin Ainscough, Dave Whelan and other businesses.

Martin runs a private business, which, as the hon. Lady knows, is a big employer in Wigan and has been there for many years. He rightly sees himself as part of the local community and as having a corporate, social responsibility to it. He has identified a mutual benefit of a Myplace-style youth centre—I am hugely supportive of such centres and will come on to them in a moment—whereby his employees spend time volunteering to help out there. His employees’ sons and daughters will benefit from the centre’s facilities, and he may well end up employing some of them. He will help to provide training facilities. It is not just a place for youth leisure activities, but a meeting place for training and education, personal and social development, and all sorts of other things. That is being achieved regardless of the availability of a big pot of money from central Government funds. The model is hugely successful. The Myplace centres—which are based on the OnSide model—that will thrive most of all are those that become self-sustaining and encourage a host of other providers that use social enterprises, businesses and the voluntary sector to become self-sustaining, too. Wigan is a fantastic example of where it can work.

I am particularly keen on other forms of funding for youth organisations—I have been encouraged and we have some brokerage work to help with this—through the social investment bank. We have put some money into a consortium led by NCB and Business in the Community to act as a brokerage to encourage new sources of funding for youth organisations that are looking to promote such projects.

The hon. Lady also mentioned the problem of having 27 different sources of funding and having to account for them all, which is, of course, complete nonsense. That needs to be streamlined and we are streamlining the accountability frameworks. However, those 27 sources of funding may be, as with many projects I have visited, all from different public sources of finance—Department of Health, Home Office or Department for Education projects. Even if they were 100% funded, they would not be from one pot of money that requires one report, one accountability framework and one inspection a year, but 27 funds with potentially 27 reports. That is nonsense that we need to streamline, but it happens in the public sector just as much as it will happen if we have multiple sources of funding from private voluntary and social enterprise sectors, too.

[Mr Stuart]

Will the Minister tell us how he would streamline that, because I am sure that if we talked to Ministers 10 years ago they would have said the same thing, and five years ago they would have said the same thing? Whoever was in government, they would have said the same thing. We need practical ways of making it happen. For example, will he speak to his colleagues in the Cabinet Office to try to ensure that we get streamlining?

[Tim Loughton]

The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who has responsibility for civil society, has been working with many voluntary organisations, charities and others to reduce bureaucracy. I have been working with the inspectorates. Many organisations in the youth and education sector in relation to children’s social care will be inspected by as many as six inspectorates. That is clearly nonsense, clearly overlapping, and clearly causes huge amounts of chaos for the outfit being inspected. I spent a morning with children’s services in Birmingham, which were about to have another inspection.

We are now making good progress. Indeed, the Chair of the Select Committee may wish to call me to give evidence on joint inspections in one of his inquiries. For the first time—I have had them all around the table in my office—we are making some real progress. That must be the way to go. We need to ensure that organisations that do good stuff for young people and children are able to get on with the job of providing those activities, rather than having to spend every other day being beholden to inspectors in a very bureaucratic manner.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful for that answer, which addressed inspection, but perhaps not accountability. I know that the Cabinet Office has considered how we can use digital platforms to deliver Government for less and more effectively. I wonder whether small charities and youth services could have one website where everyone comes together to say what they want—or at least are able to go to one place—which provides one set of accounting for themselves in a way that answers the questions that are collectively required by all those who fund them.

[Tim Loughton]

I think that the sum of the bureaucracy around small charities in particular is already being addressed. I just referenced the work that we are doing with Business in the Community, NCB and that consortium to provide a portal for organisations that need funding, advice on how to get leverage on the funds and resources available, and on how to partner up different organisations. That is what we are trying to create in that brokerage, and I think that that addresses the concern.

There have been quite a lot of myths about national citizen service. It has been covered disproportionately, at least in the press releases relating to the Committee’s report. I would be more than happy if the Committee produced a discrete report on national citizen service that was based on the evidence that we are amassing from people who have already been on it, and based on actually going on the projects and seeing the young people and the providers. The Chair of the Select Committee has met some of his local providers, and I think he was impressed by what he saw.

Let me first say what national citizen service is not. It is not just some six week summer camp—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about. National citizen service is about a life-changing experience that starts with a two-and-a-half week window, mostly over the summer, with young people going on an outward bound type course and being thrown in at the deep end—quite literally in many cases. It gets people together from different sides of the tracks socially and ethnically—kids who have been in the youth justice system, kids from independent schools, kids with disabilities. It mixes them all up and they have to rely on each other and understand each other. It is about a rite of passage as well. Anybody who has been through the national citizen service course and graduated—it is not a walk in the park; it needs to be stretching and it needs to be challenging—has earned the right to be treated more as an adult. It is about engaging those young people with society in the longer term. It is about getting them embarked on volunteering activities. It is about getting them to develop their social action project, which they start up as part of the summer experience, and which will hopefully run for months, if not years, after that, in collaboration with other local youth organisations, the local council and local businesses.

I want thousands of signs around the country that read, “National citizen service project initiated by, run by, managed by, inspired by young people”, so that even some of the most cynical people in our society, who think that every teenager is a potential hoodie-wearing mugger, will have to say, “Wow, there is some really good stuff going on in my town, my village, my community, my city, and it is being led by young people.” That is what national citizen service is all about.

I do not recognise some of the figures in the report that have been attached to national citizen service, simply because they are not figures that we have calculated ourselves. We are in the middle of a pilot. We are evolving the scheme. We have made a number of changes since we started the pilots. We will be rolling out 30,000 places this summer, and there will be some variations. Some will be run over a series of extended weekends for those who cannot commit for the summer. There will be some pilots in Northern Ireland, because this will be a UK-wide exercise.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for resiling from his earlier remarks about the disproportionate attention the report paid to the NCS, because in six chapters I think that half a chapter deals with it. It is also worth noting that, at the time, it was the only youth policy the Government had, but none the less we looked more widely. The Minister says that he does not recognise the figures in our report—a statement consistently made by the Government about our figures. However, the Government have not provided us with their own. Will he please do so now?

[Tim Loughton]

We could not possibly come out with a total figure for complete roll-out because we have not remotely reached total roll-out. We are getting economies of scale. We spent approximately £13.5 million. In addition, some philanthropic and other money came in. We are being approached by people who want to add money, on top of the Government money. We are considering converting it into a contractual scheme. We will then start to have some long-term estimates of the amount of money involved. Simply to do an extrapolation of the costs in the first year, which are likely to be the highest and will gradually come down, and come up with a figure of 50%, and then come up with this figure is, I have to say, disingenuous. It is also slightly disingenuous and unfair of the Chair to say that I am dwelling disproportionately on NCS. The point I made earlier was that his press release, the headline, how this report, which contains some really good stuff, was launched, was all about NCS affecting one year out of the 13 to 25-year-old cohort.

It is also not fair to say that, at the time my hon. Friend mentioned, the Government had no other youth policies. Let me remind him that in the teeth of the toughest spending round that we have had, we secured for the Department for Education £141 million of capital to fund the remainder of the 63 Myplace projects, which is an excellent scheme started by the previous Government. We ensured that the outstanding projects had financial sustainability, which some earlier ones did not have. That important youth policy, again, did not feature greatly in the report, which is a shame, because it is doing some fantastic stuff.

Last week I was in Lincoln, speaking at the Myplace network conference, seeing some fantastic examples of how Myplace centres are being used as hubs of youth activity in local communities and, particularly, focusing on how we deal with what are commonly called NEETs, which is a derogatory term. I prefer the term GREETs: getting ready for education, employment and training. Those will be centres for the youth contract, for organisations to come in and do their training, and where we can get some of the more difficult-to-reach young people into some form of employment, education and training.

Myplace centres are key to the Government’s youth—and Positive for Youth—policy. I should have liked them to feature in this report. If the Chairman of the Select Committee would like to rectify that by doing a study into Myplace centres, I should be more than happy to co-operate and give him all the resources he needs.

[Pat Glass]

I am sure that the Minister would like to see those things, but he is misrepresenting the purpose of the Select Committee. I understand that its purpose is to scrutinise Government business, not publicise the things that the Government want us to publicise or even to report on things that the Minister would like us to.

[Tim Loughton]

I have said that I respect the Select Committee and that I encourage it to study youth services and anything to do with young people. In my opening remarks I said that, whatever I may like, or not, in the Committee’s report, I welcome it. However, the report was about out-of-school activities for 13 to 25-year-olds. Myplace centres cater for out-of-school activities for that cohort and more; they were in place in part under the previous Government and money was secured for their expansion under this Government when the report was being prepared. Why did they not feature in the report? That is my point. Whether the Committee wanted to criticise them or be positive about them, they should have featured as another example of what the Government are trying to do, then the Committee could have said whether the Government needed to do better or to do it differently. Are we wasting £141 million? Why just talk about wasting £13.5 million on the national citizen service when we are wasting more than 10 times that—if that is the Committee’s view—on Myplace?

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister is wrestling with his understanding of what the Select Committee is for. The purpose of the inquiry was to focus on youth services. Perhaps we could address what the report contains. Can the Minister share with hon. Members the numbers, which we know are far from definitive, on the national citizen service? This Government are committed to transparency and openness, not least on public expenditure. Could we have some of that today on the NCS as it stands to date—and the Minister’s best understanding?

[Tim Loughton]

The Committee conducted an inquiry into the provision of services beyond the school/college day for young people, primarily those aged 13 to 25. That takes in a whole host of things, of which I mentioned Myplace, which cost £141 million—substantially more than the amount that has been spent, or will be spent for some years, on the NCS. I have told my hon. Friend that last year it cost some £13.5 million. The budget for this year, if we provide 30,000 places as we are looking to do, will be roughly triple that, but hopefully it will a bit less because we will get some economies of scale.

Depending on how we evolve the pilot—we are genuinely learning from it and adapting it by reference to all our partners with expertise in this regard—it may become a shorter experience in the summer, which would reduce the costs, or there may be different ways of doing it. To say that it will cost £300 million, or whatever, in a few years is entirely illusory, because I do not know how many people will be doing it.

There is a fundamental misconception here. The money is not coming from the Department for Education or from a youth budget and would not otherwise be going into youth services. The money for the national citizen service is going into youth services. This money is not being used to fund some army of central Government people; it is being provided by a host of youth organisations—the Prince’s Trust, the Football League Trust, Catch22, Groundwork and the National Youth Agency—doing youth work now. If that money were not going into the NCS through a direct funding stream from the Treasury, it would not be going into youth work. That is why I cannot understand why the Committee is not welcoming these growing resources going into a youth activity. One only has to speak to the people who have done such activity, read the surveys that we have conducted, and look at the serious work that is being done, to see its efficacy and that it is having a positive impact.

[Lisa Nandy]

The list of names that the Minister read sounded strangely familiar, because those organisations gave evidence to the Committee for our report, saying that the network of support for young people, which already exists and is so highly valued, is disintegrating in front of our eyes. I have to say that the Minister is starting to sound somewhat delusional, because we were overwhelmed with evidence from those organisations and young people, saying that they are losing much valued, highly regarded services now. In the time that he has left, out of respect to the young people who use those services, will the Minister tell us what he is going to do to stop that happening?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady ignores the fact that a host of youth organisations has come forward to provide national citizen service places, because they think it is a good thing to do and think that they have the expertise. In particular, we are using a host of smaller providers with real expertise in engaging with more difficult-to-engage young people, including young people who have been in the youth justice system and young people from various black and minority ethnic communities, who are not necessarily easy to engage in some youth services. Those people value it.

I do not know whether the hon. Lady went to the NCS providers in her locality, but I ask her to speak to some of those young people and to come to some presentations, such as the ones we have done with them, and see the value that they place on it.

I cannot give hon. Members a figure for what NCS will ultimately cost when we go to full roll-out, and I do not know how soon roll-out will be or what it will be, but we will not compromise the quality of this service. An absolutely key point in that regard is the fact that it is a high-quality service that is, for the young people who go on it, a life-changing experience about personal and social development.

[Mr Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Tim Loughton]

I will, but my hon. Friend is eating into his time for a right of reply, and I have not even started my speech yet.

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister is generous in giving way, but I am still at a slight loss as to why he is so hostile. Our job is to probe this. We did not say it would cost that much. We said that, if it was scaled up at the current cost, it would cost the amount we stated, and we did so precisely to invite—we hoped—a polite, respectful response from the Ministry about what it thought it might move towards.

Derek Twine, chief executive of the Scout Association, noted that

“for the same cost per head that the NCS is anticipating spending in the first tranche of pilots we could provide two or three years’ worth of the experience, week by week, for young people in the same age range”.

Evidence of that sort led us to probe the matter, hoping that we would get a proper, civil response from the Government in due course.

[Tim Loughton]

That is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Scout Association to say, because it relies on no public money at all, so why is he saying that he could use that money for something else? The Scout Association is completely different.

We want NCS to be the recruiting sergeant for the Scouts, the Air Training Corps, the Army cadets and all sorts of youth organisations. They are not there to recruit people for NCS; they are recruiting people for community-minded organisations that are doing great stuff in their local communities—and the Scouts and Guides just happen to be two such organisations.

I am not sure what to do, because I have not actually started the speech before me. I will try, however, to deal with some of the points made by members of the Select Committee. I ought to give my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) a look-in, because she has had the courtesy to stay throughout the proceedings. She made a number of points, in particular about transport and its availability to convey young people to certain facilities, notably in rural areas. That is exactly why I welcome the work of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which we are now helping to fund, in setting up a select committee on transport, this year’s favoured UKYP campaign. I have hosted some round-table meetings, one involving the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), on transport to schools and other educational facilities and on transport for young people. I am particularly sympathetic when 16-year-olds complain, quite rightly, that they have to pay adult fares on buses and public transport. I want to find solutions to ensure that we are not laying on facilities that the very people whom we want to access them are prevented from doing so because of transport logistics.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wells also mentioned social mobility and mental disorders. Having seen some good examples, I can recognise a good youth organisation —a feeling of belonging, I think she said—which can give people confidence that they have a place in society, helping their health, and not least their mental health. The problem has been under-appreciated, with one school-age child in 10 suffering from some form of mental illness, so I welcome the Government’s paper “No health without mental health”, which has, for the first time, placed mental health on a level playing field with physical health. We need to ensure that they are getting the right interventions—early and appropriate—which in too many cases they are not. That is an important part of youth engagement as well.

[Tessa Munt]

Is the Minister also cognisant of the fact that people who have mental health problems when they are very young almost invariably go on to have significant mental health problems later on in life? That is at enormous cost to society and, eventually, to the state through the health services and every other way.

[Tim Loughton]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s point.

I had better quickly mention the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who made some good and legitimate points, although she also said that she was present to “verbally duff up” the Minister. I am not entirely sure that that is why we hold our debates. We are having a full and frank exchange of views, and a constructive engagement on an important subject.

The hon. Lady mentioned the real problem of young people not in education, employment or training. Ensuring that our young people are engaged in some way is probably the single biggest challenge that we face as a society, which is why the youth contract—that £1 billion investment—is so important. An extra £123 million has been earmarked for 16 and 17-year-olds, for the 55,000 of that age group who do not have good GCSEs. They will now be engaged through that part of the youth contract that is about to be tendered.

Initial expressions of interest—by a whole range of voluntary organisations and others, in particular those with expertise in young people—have been exceedingly encouraging. It is not only, “Here’s a young person, get them into a job,” but getting a young person to know what a job is all about—giving help with, for example, personal presentation, writing a CV, doing interviews or turning up at 9 o’clock for the training exercise or whatever is required. That is why it is so important to use those organisations with expertise in dealing with young people, from whatever sector—using Myplace centres and other facilities—to ensure that we try to give those 16 and 17-year-olds a decent chance to go back into education properly, if they have dropped out earlier; get on a meaningful training scheme, or apprenticeship; or get into some sustainable employment. The organisations will be paid for that on a payment-by-results basis, so this is not just a short-term displacement scheme; it is about sustainability.

I will deal with one last point made by the hon. Lady before I sit down to give a right of response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, the Chairman of the Select Committee. Some of the payment for the national citizen service was mentioned in the report, and that is a legitimate area of debate, because fewer than half of the providers last year levied a charge, and half of those in turn made it a refundable charge when the young person turned up. What we have said, and what is part of the tendering process for those who come forward to offer such places, is that charging should be done in such a way that no young person is deterred from an NCS course by financial considerations. The course needs to have a value, however, and what some of the research shows is that for those providers that levied a charge, in particular if refundable, people turned up and valued the course more. That is purely about ensuring that people do not feel, “Oh, I can sign up, it doesn’t cost me anything,” and that they need not bother to turn up—so they turn up and value it, making the most of the experience. If it turns out that that is discouraging people, we have pilots to inform how we roll out NCS in future.

We could have discussed a range of issues and a range of related things that I hope the Select Committee will return to on youth services and youth affairs generally. They are among the most important things that we deal with in Parliament, because they are one of the best investments that we can make. Therefore, I have unashamedly named and shamed local authorities, and will continue to do so, if they are being short-sighted, cutting disproportionately or not seeing the bigger picture on youth services. Positive for Youth is about ensuring that young people are empowered to have a strong voice to point that out. They are the most important customers of youth services and they must have the loudest voice about where we are doing well and where we are not.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

With the leave of the House, it is a pleasure to serve—if one serves in this Chamber—and to debate under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am grateful to all those who have participated in the debate. More than half the members of the Select Committee were present today, and we had excellent speeches from the hon. Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), from my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) and for Wells (Tessa Munt) and from the Minister himself.

We have repeatedly put one question, so although the Minister might be breathing a sigh of relief on ending his speech, I ask him, if possible, to respond now or to write to me about how much is being spent on youth services. There was a line in the Government books that they used for years to say how much they were spending on youth services, but when we quoted it the Government and the Minister said, “That number is completely wrong.” What is the right number? Where do we look to find it?

[Tim Loughton]

Under the local authority returns, to which my hon. Friend is privy and which I thought he had used, the spending on combined youth services for 2009-10 came to a total of £1.104 billion—spent on services to young people, such as positive activities, information, advice and guidance, teen pregnancies, substance misuse and specific youth work.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister. The figure that we used was provided by Select Committee staff from Government figures, which I understand had been used for many years. That sounds like a different figure. Is that because of the early intervention grant, and pooling it? Can the Minister throw any other light on the matter, because it does not seem to fit with our understanding?

[Tim Loughton]

I have quoted the figure for 2009-10, which was before the early intervention grant existed.

[Mr Stuart]

The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.

The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.

Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—